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Think medieval history is confusing? There is only 1 author you need to know if you want to get into books on medieval history and you might be surprised to know that they are actually 2 people, the husband and wife team of Frances and Joseph Gies, aka “Gies & Gies.”
If you are an expert on medieval times you will already have read the collected works of Gies and Gies; however, if you are just getting into learning about your medieval ancestors, the complete Frances and Joseph Gies medieval bibliography is a must-read.
I started getting fascinated by medieval life when I became interested in the Plantagenet Dynasty and then needing to know more about heraldry, warfare, genealogies, geography, etc of that famous era.
My Arthurian quest for knowledge led me to find a book called Life In A Medieval Village which was superbly written, came with illustrations, and seemed to effortlessly capture the imagination of the time.
I later found out that the authors, Frances and Joseph, were a husband and wife writing dynamic duo with unparalleled powers and had written a whole series of books on all kinds of medieval subjects.
In 2015 when I was in a Texas-sized bookstore in Dallas called Half Price Books I came across the mother lode of Gies and Gies collected works (8 in total, or 60%) sitting on a shelf. I bought the whole lot! Since then I have purchased the rest online to complete my personal collection, pictured below.
The 3-volume Folio Society edition box set was a thrilling addition to receive in the mail!
It is important to note that Gies & Gies published both collectively (as husband and wife) as well as individually – which is color-coded below. The chronological publishing dates listed below cite the original publishing year; most of their works have multiple publications and updated versions.
For example, the first item “Life In A Medieval City” was originally published in 1969, however, its most recent version was republished in 2016 under Harper Perennial.
The Complete Frances and Joseph Gies Medieval Bibliography
- Life In A Medieval City (1969 – Frances and Joseph)
- Merchants and Moneymen: The Commercial Revolution, 1000-1500 (1972 – Joseph Gies)
- Life In A Medieval Castle (1974, 1979 – Frances and Joseph)
- Women in the Middle Ages (1978 – Frances Gies)
- Joan of Arc: The Legend and the Reality (1981 – Frances Gies)
- Leonard Of Pisa and the New Mathematics (1983 – Frances and Joseph)
- The Knight in History (1984 – Frances Gies)
- Marriage and the Family in the Middle Ages (1987 – Frances and Joseph)
- Life In A Medieval Village (1990 – Frances and Joseph)
- Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel: Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages (1994 – Frances and Joseph)
- A Medieval Family: The Pastons of Fifteenth-Century England (1999 – Frances and Joseph)
- Scenes of Medieval Life: Life in a Medieval City, Village, and Castle [3 volumes] (2002 – Frances and Joseph)
- Daily Life in Medieval Times (2005 – Frances and Joseph)
Gies and Gies did write a bunch of other biographical type books as well. If you visit their Amazon page you will find strewn among the list above other works of scholarship. I have slowly started collecting those works; as you can see on the middle left of the picture below in my collection are “Merchants and Moneymen” by Joseph Gies, “Joan of Arc” by Frances Gies, and “Leonard of Pisa” by Joseph and Frances Gies.
Both Wikipedia and Amazon surprisingly do NOT have the complete Gies and Gies bibliography published, either editions are missing or multiple publications conflated. This is THE complete Frances and Joseph Gies medieval bibliography.
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