Tea at Trianon: The Best Medieval Crime Novels

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, October 16, 2024

The Best Medieval Crime Novels

Mine is not included although it should be since they made a movie out of it. From CrimeReads:

“Books give delight to the very marrow of one’s bones,” said Petrarch. For me, that goes double for any novel set in the Middle Ages, those liminal centuries when ancient magic mixed with new religion, when love and war, feast and famine, walked hand in hand. This contradictory and chaotic period provides fertile ground for tales of crime.
Before toxicology reports or formal forensic analysis, and in the midst of omnipresent superstition, medieval detectives crack the case with the power of their own original logic. The stakes are always high; those in power kill quickly and with immunity, church law criminalizes autopsy, and individuals deemed “too clever” may find themselves accused of witchcraft.

Despite all this, the medieval detective is not grim and stoic: the so-called Dark Ages were also full of love and laughter. We see this in the bawdy writings of Chaucer and Boccaccio, in the Limbourg brothers’ delicate illumination of the month of August, where peasants swim as nobles in absolutely fabulous hats trot by on their tasseled ponies. Thus, when faced with Death, our detective greets him with an excellent joke. (Read more.)