teacher. He travelled whenever he was able, visiting more than eighty countries and seven continents, and tried his hands at learning a number of languages from Spanish and Italian to Japanese, Albanian, Romanian and Amharic Ethiopian. He has written a volume of themed short stories and five novels, including English Passengers, which was a finalist for the Booker Prize and won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award. His recent books include Rome: a History in Seven Sackings and Pilgrims.At the Guardian, Kneale tagged ten "outstanding history books and novels exploring era-defining decisions made under pressure," including:
The Humiliation of Sinners: Public Penance in Thirteenth Century France by Mary C MansfieldRead about the other entries on the list.
Pilgrims was partly inspired by this work by a great scholar, who died sadly young and never lived to see it published. Mansfield reveals France at this time (and England wasn’t too different) as a land of hyper morality. Married couples feared for their souls if they’d had sex on the wrong day of the week. Clerics faced down troublesome non-churchmen by forcing them to publicly confess their sins before their whole community, to pray all night in church in their underclothes – and sometimes to go on pilgrimages.
--Marshal Zeringue
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