Using Hisortical Novels to Teach History

A few years ago I returned to reading fiction on a regular basis.  Since my interest is history I chose historical novels and jumped back in with Con Iggulden's book War of the Roses: Stormbird.  I found the book for a mere dollar at a local store and took it to the deer stand.  I was hooked!  So I checked out the the remaining books in the series and enjoyed every one of them.  What a great way to learn history, I thought, as I kept referring to other sources to fill in my gaps of knowledge.  After Iggulden I turned to Ken Follet's book The Pillar of the Earth, which I had found at a Good Will store and worked my way through that series as well with World Without End and Column of Fire, which took me on a tour de force from 1123 to 1606. I especially like medieval history so this was a real treat.  Follet is an engaging novelist so it was not at all hard to work my way through his tomes (which often reach 900 to 1000 pages each!).

I switched to a somewhat earlier period with Follet's stand alone work A Place Called Freedom, which is dated from the later 1700s.  Then recently, desperate for another novel set in the Middle Ages I found yet one more book for dollar called John the Pupil by David Flusfeder, a different kind of approach where the book is structured like a travelogue by a young apprentice working his way through England and Europe to deliver the Opus Majus of Roger Bacon to Pope Clement IV in 1267.


One more book came to my attention a year or more ago that deserves some mention.  Entitled The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century, this fascinating book by Ian Mortimer approaches medieval England through social history by describing the times and places as they would be experienced if you were traveling through them in the 1300s.  If you like medieval history and England, this is a must.  I am still working my way through it.

All told I began to realize that these are the books we should use to teach history.  Many of us remember the drudgery of wading through endless lists of kings and dates, memorizing facts disconnected with anything meaningful to us. So we begrudgingly worked our way through the compulsory courses and left history in the waste bin of our memories. Yet history can come alive and be useful.  The problem is the way it is taught.  Other than being a parish pastor I am also an online instructor for a seminary.  I will hopefully be teaching online at the university where I graduated 30+ years ago.  However, my specialty in teaching is theology.  I work with history, but not as a separate discipline.  Instead I look at it from an interdisciplinary perspective.  That said, I would love to teach history as a stand alone subject, and if I did I would employ books such as I outlined here.  I want students to go back to the Middle Ages and feel the grit, hear the noise of the market place, experience the chaos of battle, endure the cold unheated castles, and know as well the deep spirituality that informed the way they saw their world.  Students need to live 'in' this world, not just look at it from the outside.

One caveat: Some of the novels listed above would not be entirely appropriate for ages below college due to, as we say, their "mature content."  Yet I'm sure there are good novels of this time period that would be appropriate for them. 

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