This morning, while browsing Susan Wise Bauer's blog, I found the perfect reading challenge: A Tournament of Reading. Since I'd already made up my mind to spend much of the year reading about the Middle Ages, this will be a piece of cake. My goal is to reach the "King" level, which means I'll need to read nine books, at least two books in each category (history, medieval literature and historic fiction).

Last summer I put together the following Medieval book list for myself; the Medieval Europe group at LibraryThing always has excellent recommendations as well. Here are the titles that have captured my interest thus far:

*Historic fiction is denoted by italics; titles read in 2009 are in navy.

• Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset


• At Day's Close: Night in Times Past by A. Roger Ekirch


• A History of the Church in the Middle Ages by F. Donald Logan


• Life in the Medieval Cloister by Julie Kerr


• The Age of the Cloister: The Story of Monastic Life in the Middle Ages by Christopher Nugent Lawrence Brooke


• Charlemagne by Derek Wilson


• Daily Life in the World of Charlemagne by Pierre Riche


• The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman by Nancy Marie Brown


• Mysteries of the Middle Ages And the Beginning of the Modern World by Thomas Cahill
• A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance: Portrait of an Age by William Manchester


• King Arthur: Myth Making and History by Nicholas Higham


• Malory: The Knight Who Became King Arthur's Chronicler by Christina Hardyment


• The Medieval Calendar Year by Briget Ann Henisch


• A Medieval Book of Seasons by Marie Collins


• Lost Country Life by Dorothy Hartley


• The Ties That Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England by Barbara A. Hanawalt


• The Good Wife's Guide (Le Menagier de Paris): A Medieval Household Book by Gina L. Greco & Christine Rose


• Medieval Children by Mr. Nicholas Orme


• Growing Up in Medieval London: The Experience of Childhood in History by Barbara A. Hanawalt


• A History of Private Life, Volume II, Revelations of the Medieval World by Phillippe Ariès


• Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women by Caroline Walker Bynum


• Down the Common: A Year in the Life of a Medieval Woman by Ann Baer


• The Book of Margery Kempe by Margery Kempe


• Robin Hood by James Clarke Holt


• Imagining Robin Hood: The Late Medieval Stories in Historical Context by A.J. Pollard


• The Last Apocalypse: Europe at the Year 1,000 A.D. by James Reston


• The Year 1,000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millenium by Robert Lacey


• The Needle in the Blood by Sarah Bower


• A Needle in the Right Hand of God: The Norman Conquest of 1066 and the Making and Meaning of the Bayeux Tapestry by R. Howard Bloch


• The First Crusade: A New History: The Roots of Conflict Between Christianity and Islam by Thomas Asbridge


• God's Battalions: The Case for the Crusades by Rodney Stark


• The Book of Saladin: A Novel by Tariq Ali


• The Knight in History by Frances Gies


• Hildegard of Bingen: The Woman of Her Age by Fiona Maddocks
• Eleanor of Aquitaine: A Life by Alison Weir


• Power of a Woman: Memoirs of a Turbulent Life [Eleanor of Aquitane] by Robert Fripp


• Eleanor of Aquitane: Queen of the Troubadours by Jean Markdale


• The Troubadour's Song: The Capture and Ransom of Richard the Lionheart by David Boyle


• Thomas Becket by Frank Barlow


• Four Queens: The Provencal Sisters Who Ruled Europe by Nancy Goldstone


• Lark in the Morning: The Verses of the Troubadours by Robert Kehew


• The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time by John Kelly


• Reluctant Saint: The Life of Saint Francis of Assisi by Donald Spoto


• Spiritual Franciscans: From Protest to Persecution in the Century After Saint Francis by David Burr


• Katherine by Anya Seton


• Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World by Donald R. Howard


• Joan of Arc: Her Story by Régine Pernoud


• The Friar and the Cipher: Roger Bacon and the Unsolved Mystery of the Most Unusual Manuscript in the World by Lawrence Goldstone


• Out of the Flames: The Remarkable Story of a Fearless Scholar, a Fatal Heresy, and One of the Rarest Books in the World by Lawrence Goldstone


• The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages:Their Religious, Institutional and Intellectual Contexts by Edward Grant


• Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice by Nancy G. Siraisi


• The Beginnings of Western Science by David C. Lindberg


• Magic in the Middle Ages by Richard Kieckhefer


• Strange Histories: The Trial of the Pig, the Walking Dead, and other Matters of Fact from the Medieval and Renaissance Worlds by D.J. Oldridge


• The Medieval Flower Book by Celia Fisher


• Marking the Hours: English People and Their Prayers, 1240-1570 by Dr. Eamon Duffy


• The Medieval Garden by Sylvia Landsberg


• Sweet Herbs and Sundry Flowers: Medieval Gardens and the Gardens of the Cloisters by Tania Bayard


• Hildegard's Healing Plants: From Her Medieval Classic Physica by Hildegard Von Bingen


• Monastic Gardens by Mick Hales


• Brother Cadfael's Herb Garden: An Illustrated Companion to Medieval Plants and Their Uses by Robin Whiteman


• A Tale of Two Monasteries: Westminster and Saint-Denis in the Thirteenth Century by William J. Chester


• The Age of Pilgrimage: The Medieval Journey to God by Jonathan Sumption


• A Stolen Tongue by Sheri Holman


• The Last Divine Office: Henry VIII and the Dissolution of the Monasteries by Geoffrey Moorhouse