[Trilogy progress report: I finished the draft of Book Three recently, and now I’m working on substantive revisions and polishing edits. At this point, I anticipate a publishing date sometime in December, as originally planned.]

I’m indulging myself with a mental breather on this post, before starting my next round of research-oriented posts.

For a fiction writer trying to use or create a medievalist setting, I find the popular histories as well as the specialized academic monographs to be useful. But for realism in my scene construction and plot lines, a subgenre of social history is extraordinarily valuable.

Many medieval records are fragmentary or incomplete, so the painstaking work of authors to pull together their daily-life portraits saves writers like me an enormous amount of time.

My sense is that these day-in-the-life chronicles have become more common in recent decades, but perhaps I am merely noticing them or finding them more frequently.

Take my current read as a wonderful example of the genre. For breadth, illustrations, and data, you will struggle to find a more useful book than Daily Life in Chaucer’s England (1995), by Jeffrey L. Singman and Will McLean.

The book that first brought the genre to my serious attention probably is much harder to find nowadays. But Life on a Medieval Barony: A Picture of a Typical Feudal Community in the Thirteenth Century (1923), by William Stearns Davis, is a fun read.

But many other good daily-living books are patiently awaiting readers, and they need your help to avoid the dreaded fate of being culled from the shelves.

I’ll end this post with a short list of six other recommended books:

1. Everyday Life in the Viking Age, Jacqueline Simpson
2. How to Live Like a Monk: Medieval Wisdom for Modern Life, Danièle Cybulskie
3. The Medieval Underworld, Andrew McCall
4. Life in a Medieval Village, Frances and Joseph Gies
5. The Ties That Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England, Barbara A. Hanawalt
6. The Time Traveler’s Guide to Medieval England, Ian Mortimer