by Adam Gidwitz
Peter Abelard is one of the most famous and most important theologians of the Middle Ages. While he’s likely best known today for his chaste love affair with Héloïse (and the unmentionable thing her father did to Abelard that made it chaste), we now tend to ignore what medieval scholars never ignored: Abelard was brilliant. This book, independently published, allows someone who isn’t well versed in medieval Latin to glimpse Abelard’s revolutionary technique. In Sic et Non, Abelard asks a series of incredibly difficult questions (“God is the cause and producer of evil . . . or not”; “God does not have free will . . . or He does”) and, instead of making arguments one way or another, presents evidence from the Bible and other authorities so that the readers (at the time, students and scholars at the new University of Paris, and elsewhere) could come to their own conclusions.
Baldwin, John W. Paris, 1200. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2010.
This is a wonderfully rich scholarly portrait of Paris at the beginning of the thirteenth century. It covers the monarchy under Louis’s grandfather Philip Augustus; the founding of the university in Paris; trades and guilds; the physical growth of the city; personal life in the city; and much more. Just as Judith Bennet’s A Medieval Life will make you feel like an expert on peasants, this book—perhaps more so—will make you feel like an expert on Paris at a critical juncture in its history.
Chazan, Robert. The Jews of Medieval Western Christendom 1000–1500. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Among the most respected scholarly overviews of various communities and events in the Jewish diaspora during the High and Late Middle Ages.
Ferrante, Joan M. (trans. and ed.). Guillaume D’Orange: Four Twelfth Century Epics. New York: Columbia University Press, 1974.
This is the scholarly source for the legends about Guilhem, or Guillaume, D’Orange. The stories are as cool as you think they are.
Gerald of Wales. The Journey Through Wales / The Description of Wales. Ed. and trans. Lewis Thorpe. London: Penguin Books, 1978.
My character Gerald of Aberdeen was inspired by this Gerald, who writes a charming account of traveling through Wales. There may be no better way to understand the cultural assumptions of a different age than to hear a chronicler write about a strange place he’s visiting.
Jones, Colin. Paris: Biography of a City. London: Penguin Books, 2004.
A fun and readable history of Paris, from its inception to . . . well, who am I kidding? I didn’t read past the section on the Middle Ages. But everything through then was entertaining and informative!
Joinville and Villehardouin. Chronicles of the Crusades. M.R.B. Shaw (ed.). London: Penguin Books, 1963.
Yes, Jean de Joinville was real, and much of what we know of King Louis comes from the biography/hagiography he wrote soon after Louis’s death, when the canonization process had begun. Joinville would be a successful writer even today—he is humorous and quick-witted, and has a wonderful eye for visual detail. In a passage quoted by LeGoff (see below), he comments that when he first met Louis, “the king was wearing a blue satin tunic and an overcoat and a cloak of vermilion satin trimmed with ermine, and on his head a cotton hat that suited him poorly because he was still a young man.” (LeGoff, 92)
Jordan, William Chester. The French Monarchy and the Jews: From Philip Augustus to the Last Capetians. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989.
Jordan is one of the preeminent experts on France under Saint Louis, and perhaps the preeminent expert on Jewish-royal relations during that period.
LeGoff, Jacques. Saint Louis. Gareth Evan Gollrad (trans.). Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009.
This is an 800-page biography of King Louis IX, and it is as well-written, interesting, empathic, and as thoughtful as it is informative. An incredible portrait of a human and his time.
Lipton, Sarah. Dark Mirror: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Jewish Iconography. New York: Henry Holt, 2014.
Lipton tells the story of the “steadily intensifying anti-Judaism of medieval Christianity” as it reveals itself in the art of the period. A guide both to history and to art, the book indeed serves as a dark mirror on our current dark times. Lipton has also written powerfully on our current society, and the way the resurgence of hate speech today echoes the rise of hate imagery in medieval Europe. See her wonderful Op-Ed in the New York Times, “The Words That Killed Medieval Jews,” Dec. 13, 2015.
Schmitt, Jean-Claude. The Holy Greyhound: Guinefort, Healer of Children Since the Thirteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
Schmitt’s book is part readable account of the real Saint Guinefort, and part highly scholarly investigation of the tale and its analogues in Western myth.
de Voragine, Jacobus. The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints. William Granger Ryan (trans.). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.
This is one of the great medieval sources for saints’ lives. Enormous, and sometimes slow going, gems will pop out of nowhere, like the detail about Saint Margaret and the farting dragon.
Woolgar, C. M. The Great Household in Late Medieval England. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.
A fascinating deep dive into the traditions, practices, and microeconomics of noble households. It was here that I learned a feast often consisted of three courses: boiled meats, roasted meats, and fried meats. And that’s just scratching the surface!
Acknowledgments
“When you think about it, each book is a lot of lives. Dozens and dozens of them.” William is right, of course. Any book takes a whole battalion of supporters and sources, editors and interlocutors, to complete. This book, because of its subject matter, took an especially large and especially committed battalion.
My director of research was Lauren Mancia, professor of history at Brooklyn College, a specialist in medieval monasticism, and also, thankfully, my wife. Besides curating and procuring my reading list, and acting as my sounding board and first reader, she also connected me with some brilliant medievalists who read the manuscript and kept me from going too far astray, historically speaking: Sara Lipton, professor of history at Stony Brook University and a specialist in medieval religion, Jewish-Christian relations, and anti-Jewish iconography; Karl Steel, professor of English at Brooklyn College and a specialist in animals, race, and the boundaries of humanity in the Middle Ages; Robert Harris, professor of Bible and Ancient Semitic Languages at The Jewish Theological Seminary and a specialist in medieval Biblical exegesis. A number of conversations guided me to the most amazing sources of the Middle Ages. I want to thank Sarah Novacich, professor of English at Rutgers; Markus Cruse, professor of French at Arizona State University; medieval art historian Elizabeth Monti; and rare book specialist Rabbi Jerry Schwarzbard. I am also deeply grateful to Nancy Wu, Emma Wegner, and the education department of The Met Cloisters for introducing me to Guilhem D’Orange and inviting me to share a very early version of the golden belt chapter at their family day in 2011.
Despite all the advice, and the many corrections, provided by these illustrious scholars, I am certain that I managed to slip a number of mistakes past them, because I am tricky like that; my apologies—those mistakes are my fault entirely.
The brilliant authors Laura Amy Schlitz and Justin Kramon read the earliest version of this manuscript and provided support and guidance that substantially shaped the project. Ryan Downer and Sparkle Sooknanan took a careful look at race and racial dynamics in the text. Carmela Iaria, of Penguin Young Readers Group, gave me important feedback before the final rewrite, and her enthusiasm powered me over that last, high hill. For the last half decade I have relied for spiritual guidance on Rabbi Dan Ain and his wife, Alana Joblin Ain; their wisdom runs throughout this text. M. T. Anderson lent a sympathetic ear and an expert’s insight when I was struggling with the technical requirements of the book’s conclusion. I want to thank John Pierpont and Raque
l Otheguy, and Julia Kelly and Phil Coakley, for exploring the landscapes of this book with me, and listening to me prattle on about the plot incessantly.
One episode in this book comes not from the Middle Ages, but from the twentieth century: The examination of the little boy with the long eyelashes is based on a story told to me by my friend Tony Capra, about his father, Robert Capra.
I am deeply grateful to Hatem Aly for illuminating this manuscript—in every sense of the word.
The team at Penguin Young Readers Group has done an incredible job with my books for years now, and they have gone above and beyond on this one: Melissa Faulner, Rosanne Lauer, Kristin Smith, Natalie Vielkind, Lauren Donovan, Shanta Newlin and her team, Emily Romero and hers, Felicia Frazier and the best sales team in the world; and finally, the one who rules them all, Jen Loja. Also Don Weisberg, whom we still miss.
Sarah Burnes is the most wonderful agent on the planet. I have thanked her again and again for my career, but it never feels like enough.
I could not ask for a smarter, tougher, more critical, or more supportive editor than Julie Strauss-Gabel. This was our most intense and tempestuous editing process yet—and for that, I think it was the deepest and the best. This book is hers, and also Lauren’s, as much as it is mine.
© Lauren Mancia
Adam Gidwitz is the author of the critically acclaimed, New York Times bestselling Grimm trilogy. He spent six years researching The Inquisitor’s Tale, including a year living in Europe. Adam lives with his family in Brooklyn, NY. Find Adam online at adamgidwitz.com or @AdamGidwitz.
© Michelle Pinet
Hatem Aly is an Egyptian-born illustrator whose work has been featured on television and in multiple publications worldwide. He currently lives in New Brunswick, Canada, with his wife, son, and more pets than people. Find him online at metahatem.com.