Medieval England

1075 and Dowager Queen Edith has died. Her niece Gunnhild longs to leave Wilton Abbey, but is her suitor, Breton knight Count Alain of Richmond, interested in her inheritance as the daughter of King Harold and Edith Swan-Neck, or does he love her for herself? Is her own love for Count Alain an enduring love, or has she made a terrible mistake? The Swan Daughter is woven around a true 11th-century tale of elopement, love and courage.

Cassandra stands silent upon a ravaged battlefield, watching as the druids prepare the dead for the pyres, embers drifting up into the still winter darkness. She can barely breathe through the agony of her grief, but she cannot waste another second on tears. Because Londinium, the Caesar, the empire…all of it is still out there. The empire whose code she had followed, whose prince she had promised to marry, whose schemes she had been swept up in since birth. They tried to use her magic against her. To silence her. So she will use her magic against them. To silence them. Forever.

What is sex exactly? Does everyone agree on a definition? And does that definition hold when considering literary production in other times and places? We cannot simply transfer our contemporary notions of what constitutes a sex act into the past and expect them to be true for the people who were then reading literature and watching plays.

In 1144 the mutilated body of William of Norwich, a young apprentice leatherworker, was found abandoned outside the city's walls. The boy bore disturbing signs of torture, and a story spread that it was a ritual murder, performed by Jews, in imitation of the Crucifixion as a mockery of Christianity. The outline of William's tale eventually gained currency far beyond Norwich, and the idea that Jews engaged in ritual murder became firmly rooted in the European imagination.

Today, "the Anarchy" is used to describe the period in English history from the death of Henry I in 1135 to the Treaty of Winchester signed by King Stephen and his successor Henry II in 1153. Despite the name, it was an episode of civil war rather than of lawlessness and is interesting for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it was the first time in English history that a woman claimed the throne of England in her own right.

In the mid-15th century, a new “febrile” disease of an entirely unknown cause struck again in Britain in a series of erratically paced and lethal outbreaks between 1485 and 1551. Confined almost entirely to England, the new and unfamiliar wave of illness paled before the statistical destruction caused by the Black Death. However, what came to be known as the “English sweating sickness” reappeared through the decades in a stunning display of unpredictable timing and terrifying symptoms.

Throughout history, both ancient and near modern, the lack of an heir and the sudden death of a beloved monarch always meant trouble. In the history of Medieval England, such episodes were many. Usurpers who oust kings and heirs, pretenders with long-forgotten dynastic claims—many once fought for the lucrative throne of the English Kingdom. However, by far the most important of all these historic episodes lasted from 1455 to 1487—32 long years of struggle and bloodshed in England. And that episode was known as the Wars of the Roses.