My Ranking: Medieval Gothic Classical Romanticism Renaissance/Early Modern Victorian Modernism Contemporary Post-modernism Realism Naturalism Enlightenment/Neoclassicism

Top Spot: 🐴 Medieval Lit Call it a childhood’s love. Do you remember that children’s nonfiction book series called something like Eyewitness? They were large white hardcover books with a range of topics from Knights to Pirates to Ancient Civilization etc. And I ate up the medieval period books.

Of course, that in itself isn’t Medieval Literature. That came later… like only a few years ago. But the love began with those nonfiction works and then to epic fantasy with stories of empires, knights, and magic. I think it’s from that that I cultivated a desire to see what the people from that time period actually believed. And while I don’t subscribe necessarily to all the tenets of medieval life like “the great chain of being,” Christian belief, or traditional gender roles (and more), I love the beauty, sincerity, and sense of truth that works from this (long) time period. Their appreciation for nature, story, and symbolism cannot be outmatched—even by the Romantics or their Gothic rebels.

One of the things I think draws me so strongly to literature from before Freud is its relationship with symbolism. I sometimes feel that modern interpretations of literature have become too eager to explain symbols psychologically—to reduce the forest, the storm, the darkness, the seasons, or the natural world into representations of something happening within the individual mind. I also rankle with the Enlightenment’s sense of trying to prove exactly why everything works the way it does—thank the gods for the Romantics and their middle fingers.

I prefer when symbolism is allowed to remain mysterious. Nature can be beautiful, terrifying, sacred, or sublime without needing to be translated entirely into psychology. There is something wonderfully sincere about literature in which the natural world, stories, symbols, and the unseen can possess meaning beyond the self.

Perhaps that’s part of what I love about medieval literature in particular. Its symbols often feel as though they belong to a much larger order of existence rather than merely to the individual. I don’t necessarily share the medieval worldview or its beliefs, but I find that sense of a meaningful, symbol-filled universe gorgeous.

There is also something about the structure of medieval life that I find strangely appealing, particularly the centrality of the church within a town or village. Not simply as a place of worship, but as a physical and social center around which community life revolved. The rhythms of the seasons, agriculture, festivals, stories, traditions, and religious calendar all seem to have been woven together into a shared way of life. That shared space is something missing in the contemporary world—at least on the grand scale—and I find that terribly sad.

Alongside medieval religious life, I’m also interested in how earlier seasonal and pagan rhythms influenced later traditions. Even when Christianity became dominant, many older customs were not simply erased. They were sometimes adapted, reinterpreted, or woven into new forms of ritual and storytelling. That layered mix of beliefs and calendars is part of why the period’s symbolism can feel so rich and mult-layered to me.

Perhaps my favorites of medieval literature are:

• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
• One Thousand and One Nights
• The Poetic Edda
• The Canterbury Tales

And some works that I want to read soon:

• Völsunga Saga
• The Song of Roland
• The Lais (Marie de France)
• Romance of the Three Kingdoms
• The Tale of Genji

Want to read more of: Modernism. I feel like there’s a ton here that I’m missing, and one author that I’ve completely ignored to a fault is Virginia Woolf. Every February I saw I’m going to start my journey with A Room of One’s Own and then go through her fiction after that. Orlando and The Waves seem especially juicy to me.

Ignoring: Naturalism. I don’t know… I’m just not sure where to start or how to get into it. I liked Jack London’s works but mostly I prefer to be in nature itself or experience it through the lens of a __R__omantic wordsmith.