Castle and the Cross: A New Historical Fiction Series in Progress

A look at the world, themes, and research behind my medieval France project

Certain periods in history feel both distant and uncomfortably familiar: medieval France is one of them. It is a world of stone walls and wide rivers, saints and soldiers, oaths and betrayals, where power is a daily struggle for domination and wealth. The castle stands witness to it all.

Stories about power, faith, and survival

The title Castle and the Cross points to two realities that structured medieval life. The castle represents authority: protection, coercion, obligation, and the constant negotiation between those who ruled and those who endured rule. The cross represents belief: sincere faith, institutional power, fear of damnation, hope for meaning, and the ways religion shaped both daily habits and major decisions.

In the world of this series, neither force operates in the abstract. We begin with Foulque Nerra, count of Anjou, the first to build castles in a vast network across his beloved Loire Valley. Most of what we know about Foulque (970-1040) comes from the manuscripts of monks, and they had nothing nice to say about him. He did have his first wife burned at the stake, but then traveled on pilgrimage to Jerusalem three times to seek forgiveness at God's door. In the end, salvation for Foulque lay in the arms of his second wife, Hildegarde. A Watch in the Night builds fictional motivation and interpretation to the facts of his singular life.

Why medieval France

France has more castles than any other nation. More than 6,500 castles are registered as national historical sites, and of those, 5,000 are in private hands. Some of them have been owned by the same family for more than 500 years. These castles have seen the ravages of war, the evolution of industry, the transformation of society. They have stood silently through the centuries as history unfolded around them.  

Yet their stories have remained largely untold. Castles inhabit a landscape rich in conflict and full of human stakes: family duties, personal reputation, obligations to a king, the pull of a city, the protection offered by a monastery, the dangers of the road. From Anjou, we go to Champagne in the early 12th century, and then to Occitania, where Cathar castles still hover over the hilltops.

What to expect from the series

Castle and the Cross will be character-driven historical fiction, placing readers inside a world that operates on different assumptions, and then lets the characters navigate it with believable motives and constraints. I am currently seeking representation for publication.

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