Gerald of Wales
Gerald of Wales (c. 1146 – c. 1223), also known as Gerallt Gymro in Welsh or Giraldus Cambrensis in Latin, archdeacon of Brecon, was a medieval clergyman and chronicler of his times. Born around 1146 at Manorbier Castle in Pembrokeshire, Wales, he was of mixed Norman and Welsh blood, his name being Gerald de Barri.
Gerald's writings in good quality Latin, based on a thorough knowledge of Classical authors, reflect experiences gained on his travels as well as his great knowledge of the standard authorities and he was highly respected as a scholar in his time and afterwards. The noted scholar Edward Augustus Freeman said he was "the father of comparative philology," and in the preface to the last volume of Gerald's works in the Rolls Series, h
If you like author Gerald of Wales here is the list of authors you may also like
Buy books on AmazonTotal similar authors (26)
-
Ahmad ibn Fadlān
هو أحمد بن العباس بن راشد بن حماد البغدادي، عالم إسلامي من القرن العاشر الميلادي . كتب وصف رحلته كعضو في سفارة الخليفة العباسي إلى ملك الصقالبة (بلغار الفولجا)سنة 921 م.
Buy books on Amazon
Ahmad ibn Fadlān ibn al-Abbās ibn Rāšid ibn Hammād (Arabic: أحمد بن فضلان بن العباس بن راشد بن حماد) was a 10th-century Arab traveler, famous for his account of his travels as a member of an embassy of the Abbasid Caliph of Baghdad to the king of the Volga Bulgars. His account is most known for providing a description of the Volga Vikings, including an eyewitness account of a ship burial. He provided descriptions for various other peoples, most notably Turkic peoples such as the Oghuzes, Pechenegs, Bashkirs, and Khazars. -
James Stephens
James Stephens was an Irish novelist and poet. James' mother worked in the home of the Collins family of Dublin and was adopted by them. He attended school with his adopted brothers Thomas and Richard (Tom and Dick) before graduating as a solicitor's clerk. They competed and won several athletic competitions despite James' slight stature (he stood 4'10" in his socks). He was known affectionately as 'Tiny Tim'. He was much enthralled by tales of military valour of his adoptive family and would have been a soldier except for his height. By the early 1900s James was increasingly inclined to socialism and the Irish language (he could speak and write Irish) and by 1912 was a dedicated Irish Republican. He was a close friend of the 1916 leader Th
Buy books on Amazon -
John Davies
John Davies (1938-2015) was a Welsh historian and a television and radio broadcaster. After teaching Welsh history at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, he retired to Cardiff and appeared frequently as a presenter and contributor to history programmes on television and radio.
Buy books on Amazon
In the mid-eighties, Davies was commissioned to write a concise history of Wales by Penguin Books to add to its Pelican series of the histories of nations. The decision by Penguin to commission the volume in Welsh was "unexpected and highly commendable," wrote Davies. "I seized the opportunity to write of Wales and the Welsh. When I had finished, I had a typescript which was almost three times larger than the original commission," wrote Davies. The original voluminou -
Herodotus
Herodotus (Greek: Ηρόδοτος) (c. 484 – c. 425 BC) was a Greek historian and geographer from the Greek city of Halicarnassus, part of the Persian Empire (now Bodrum, Turkey) and a later citizen of Thurii in modern Calabria, Italy. He is known for having written the Histories – a detailed account of the Greco-Persian Wars. Herodotus was the first writer to perform systematic investigation of historical events. He has been described as "The Father of History", a title conferred on him by the ancient Roman orator Marcus Tullius Cicero.
Buy books on Amazon
The Histories primarily cover the lives of prominent kings and famous battles such as Marathon, Thermopylae, Artemisium, Salamis, Plataea, and Mycale. His work deviates from the main topics to provide a cultural, -
Jeanette Winterson
Novelist Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester, England in 1959. She was adopted and brought up in Accrington, Lancashire, in the north of England. Her strict Pentecostal Evangelist upbringing provides the background to her acclaimed first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, published in 1985. She graduated from St Catherine's College, Oxford, and moved to London where she worked as an assistant editor at Pandora Press.
Buy books on Amazon
One of the most original voices in British fiction to emerge during the 1980s, Winterson was named as one of the 20 "Best of Young British Writers" in a promotion run jointly between the literary magazine Granta and the Book Marketing Council.
She adapted Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit for BBC television in 1990 and al -
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston in 1803. Educated at Harvard and the Cambridge Divinity School, he became a Unitarian minister in 1826 at the Second Church Unitarian. The congregation, with Christian overtones, issued communion, something Emerson refused to do. "Really, it is beyond my comprehension," Emerson once said, when asked by a seminary professor whether he believed in God. (Quoted in 2,000 Years of Freethought edited by Jim Haught.) By 1832, after the untimely death of his first wife, Emerson cut loose from Unitarianism. During a year-long trip to Europe, Emerson became acquainted with such intelligentsia as British writer Thomas Carlyle, and poets Wordsworth and Coleridge. He returned to the United States in 1833, to a life
Buy books on Amazon -
Shirley Jackson
Shirley Jackson was an influential American author. A popular writer in her time, her work has received increasing attention from literary critics in recent years. She has influenced such writers as Stephen King, Nigel Kneale, and Richard Matheson.
Buy books on Amazon
She is best known for her dystopian short story, "The Lottery" (1948), which suggests there is a deeply unsettling underside to bucolic, smalltown America. In her critical biography of Shirley Jackson, Lenemaja Friedman notes that when Shirley Jackson's story "The Lottery" was published in the June 28, 1948, issue of The New Yorker, it received a response that "no New Yorker story had ever received." Hundreds of letters poured in that were characterized by, as Jackson put it, "bewilderment, specul -
T.S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns Eliot was a poet, dramatist and literary critic. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948 "for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry." He wrote the poems The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land, The Hollow Men, Ash Wednesday, and Four Quartets; the plays Murder in the Cathedral and The Cocktail Party; and the essay Tradition and the Individual Talent. Eliot was born an American, moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 (at the age of 25), and became a British subject in 1927 at the age of 39.
Buy books on Amazon
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T.S._Eliot -
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Great political influence of Uncle Tom's Cabin , novel against slavery of 1852 of Harriet Elizabeth Beecher Stowe, American writer, advanced the cause of abolition.
Buy books on Amazon
Lyman Beecher fathered Catharine Esther Beecher, Edward Beecher, Henry Ward Beecher, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, another child.
Harriet Elizabeth Beecher Stowe, an author, attacked the cruelty, and reached millions of persons as a play even in Britain. She made the tangible issues of the 1850s to millions and energized forces in the north. She angered and embittered the south. A commonly quoted statement, apocryphally attributed to Abraham Lincoln, sums up the effect. He met Stowe and then said, "So you're the little woman that started this great war!" or so people say.
AKA:
Χ -
Robert Aickman
Author of: close to 50 "strange stories" in the weird-tale and ghost-story traditions, two novels (The Late Breakfasters and The Model), two volumes of memoir (The Attempted Rescue and The River Runs Uphill), and two books on the canals of England (Know Your Waterways and The Story of Our Inland Waterways).
Buy books on Amazon
Co-founder and longtime president of the Inland Waterways Association, an organization that in the middle of the 20th century restored a great part of England's deteriorating system of canals, now a major draw for recreation nationally and for tourism internationally.
Grandson of author Richard Marsh. -
Ahmad ibn Fadlān
هو أحمد بن العباس بن راشد بن حماد البغدادي، عالم إسلامي من القرن العاشر الميلادي . كتب وصف رحلته كعضو في سفارة الخليفة العباسي إلى ملك الصقالبة (بلغار الفولجا)سنة 921 م.
Buy books on Amazon
Ahmad ibn Fadlān ibn al-Abbās ibn Rāšid ibn Hammād (Arabic: أحمد بن فضلان بن العباس بن راشد بن حماد) was a 10th-century Arab traveler, famous for his account of his travels as a member of an embassy of the Abbasid Caliph of Baghdad to the king of the Volga Bulgars. His account is most known for providing a description of the Volga Vikings, including an eyewitness account of a ship burial. He provided descriptions for various other peoples, most notably Turkic peoples such as the Oghuzes, Pechenegs, Bashkirs, and Khazars. -
Tom Holland
Tom Holland is an English historian and author. He has written many books, both fiction and non-fiction, on many subjects from vampires to history.
Buy books on Amazon
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Holland was born near Oxford and brought up in the village of Broadchalke near Salisbury, England. He obtained a double first in English and Latin at Queens' College, Cambridge, and afterwards studied shortly for a PhD at Oxford, taking Lord Byron as his subject, before interrupting the post graduate studies and moving to London.
He has adapted Herodotus, Homer, Thucydides and Virgil for BBC Radio 4. His novels, including Attis and Deliver Us From Evil, mostly have a supernatural and horror element as well as b -
Dylan Thomas
Dylan Marlais Thomas (1914-1953) was a Welsh poet who wrote in English. Many regard him as one of the 20th century's most influential poets.
Buy books on Amazon
In addition to poetry, Thomas wrote short stories and scripts for film and radio, with the latter frequently performed by Thomas himself. His public readings, particularly in America, won him great acclaim; his booming, at times, ostentatious voice, with a subtle Welsh lilt, became almost as famous as his works. His best-known work includes the "play for voices" Under Milk Wood and the celebrated villanelle for his dying father, "Do not go gentle into that good night." Appreciative critics have also noted the superb craftsmanship and compression of poems such as "In my craft or sullen art" and the rhaps -
Marie de France
Marie de France ("Mary of France", around 1135-1200) was a poet evidently born in France and living in England during the late 12th century. Virtually nothing is known of her early life, though she wrote a form of continental French[citation needed:] that was copied by Anglo-Norman scribes. Therefore, most of the manuscripts of her work bear Anglo-Norman traits. She also translated some Latin literature and produced an influential version of Aesop's Fables.
Buy books on Amazon -
Geoffrey of Monmouth
born perhaps 1100
Buy books on Amazon
Historia Regum Britanniae circa 1139 of Geoffrey of Monmouth as English chronicler, popularized Arthurian legend and contains the source material for several plays of William Shakespeare.
Geoffrey, a Welsh cleric, figured in the major development and the popularity of tales of king. Much of his work is considered to be false.
People best know Prophetiae Merlini ( Prophecies of Merlin ), his document of attributed quotations, and Vita Merlini ( Life of Merlin ), his poem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffre... -
Asser
Asser (died c. 909) was a Welsh monk from St David's, Dyfed, who became Bishop of Sherborne in the 890s. About 885 he was asked by Alfred the Great to leave St David's and join the circle of learned men whom Alfred was recruiting for his court. After spending a year at Caerwent because of illness, Asser accepted.
Buy books on Amazon
In 893 Asser wrote a biography of Alfred, called the Life of King Alfred. The manuscript survived to modern times in only one copy, which was part of the Cotton library. That copy was destroyed in a fire in 1731, but transcriptions that had been made earlier, together with material from Asser's work which was included by other early writers, have enabled the work to be reconstructed. The biography is the main source of information a -
Catalina de Erauso
From the introduction to Lieutenant Nun by translator Michele Stepto: "She gives 1585 as the year of her birth, though records in San Sebastian indicate she was baptized in 1592. * * * Sometime between 1626 and 1630 -- that is, between the visit to Naples, which concludes her memoir, and her return to the Americas--she wrote down in manuscript or dictated to an amanuensis an account of her life. * * * A 'Relación' of Catalina's final years, published in Mexico in 1653, places her death in 1650 in Orizava, on the road to Veracruz."
Buy books on Amazon -
Mark A. Kishlansky
Mark Alan Kishlansky (1948-2015) was a historian of seventeenth-century British politics. He was the Frank Baird, Jr. Professor of History at Harvard University.
Buy books on Amazon
He completed his undergraduate degree at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1970 and proceeded to graduate study under David Underdown at Brown University, receiving his M.A. in 1972 and his Ph. D. in 1977. From 1975 to 1991 he taught at the University of Chicago, successively as instructor and professor. From 1990 to 1991 he was a member of the Committee on Social Thought. He was a visiting professor at Northwestern University in 1983 and was the Mellon Visiting Professor in the Humanities and Social Sciences at the California Institute of Technology in 1990-1991. -
John Mandeville
"Jehan de Mandeville", translated as "Sir John Mandeville", is the name claimed by the compiler of a singular book of supposed travels, written in Anglo-Norman French, and published between 1357 and 1371.
Buy books on Amazon
By aid of translations into many other languages it acquired extraordinary popularity. Despite the extremely unreliable and often fantastical nature of the travels it describes, it was used as a work of reference — Christopher Columbus, for example, was heavily influenced by both this work and Marco Polo's earlier Il Milione (Adams 53). -
Alice Roberts
Alice May Roberts is an English anatomist, osteoarchaeologist, physical anthropologist, palaeopathologist, television presenter and author.
Buy books on Amazon
Roberts studied medicine and anatomy at Cardiff University, qualifying in 1997 as a physician with a Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery (MB BCh) degree, having gained an intercalated Bachelor of Science degree in anatomy. She earned a PhD in paleopathology in 2008 from the University of Bristol.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. -
C.S. Lewis
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Buy books on Amazon
Clive Staples Lewis was one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century and arguably one of the most influential writers of his day. He was a Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Oxford University until 1954. He was unanimously elected to the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University, a position he held until his retirement. He wrote more than thirty books, allowing him to reach a vast audience, and his works continue to attract thousands of new readers every year. His most distinguished and popular accomplishments include Mere Christianity, Out of the Silent Planet, The Great Divorce, The Screwtape Letters, and the -
Samantha Shannon
Samantha Shannon is the New York Times and #1 Sunday Times bestselling author of the Bone Season series. From 2010 to 2013 she studied English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford. Her fourth novel, The Priory of the Orange Tree (2019), was her first outside of the series. It has sold over a million copies in English alone, and was a finalist in the Lambda Literary Awards 2020. Its standalone prequel, A Day of Fallen Night (2023), won the gold medal in the Fantasy category at the Ippy Awards 2024.
Buy books on Amazon
Samantha's work has been translated into twenty-seven languages. Her most recent book is The Dark Mirror (2025), the fifth instalment in the Bone Season series. -
Josiah Bancroft
Before settling down to write fantasy novels, Josiah Bancroft was a poet, college instructor, and aspiring comic book artist. When he is not writing, he enjoys recording the Crit Faced podcast with his authorial friends, drawing the world of the Tower, and cooking dinner without a recipe. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Sharon, their daughter Maddie, and their two rabbits, Mabel and Chaplin.
Buy books on Amazon -
Pope Gregory I
born perhaps 540
Buy books on Amazon
From 590, Saint Gregory I the Great, known pope, increased authority, enforced rules of life for the clergy, and sponsored many notably important missionary expeditions of Saint Augustine of Canterbury in 596 to Britain.
Commonly vigilant Gregory guarded the doctrine of the Church. He founded numerous monasteries, including a school for the training of church musicians. He collected the melodies and plainsong, so associated and now Gregorian chants. In his time, he served as a monk, an abbot, and a leader of Italy. He also momentously influenced the Catholic Church through doctrine, organization, and discipline. People thought of his foremost skill in grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic in all Rome, Gregory of Tours tells us. G -
Catalina de Erauso
From the introduction to Lieutenant Nun by translator Michele Stepto: "She gives 1585 as the year of her birth, though records in San Sebastian indicate she was baptized in 1592. * * * Sometime between 1626 and 1630 -- that is, between the visit to Naples, which concludes her memoir, and her return to the Americas--she wrote down in manuscript or dictated to an amanuensis an account of her life. * * * A 'Relación' of Catalina's final years, published in Mexico in 1653, places her death in 1650 in Orizava, on the road to Veracruz."
Buy books on Amazon -
Henry of Huntingdon
Henry of Huntingdon (circa 1088 to circa 1158), was archdeacon of Huntingdon and a canon of Lincoln Cathedral. Wrote poetry, prose and a history of the English people down to the year 1154.
Buy books on Amazon