October 22, 2024

Oathbreakers - Reviews and ... MAGIC!

Glowing Reviews about the book, in both real and imagined worlds

Modern Medieval

by David M. Perry and Matthew Gabriele

The next two months is going to include a lot of Oathbreakers content and we appreciate you sticking around for it. We’re excited as well to be planning for Modern Medieval’s growth as a way to support new medievalists working in public spaces.

But back to Oathbreakers, the success of our book really depends on you - as we’ve written before, pre-orders have a cascading effect, convincing booksellers everywhere to stock the book and place it where customers can see it, persuading reviewers to write about it, and more. We know many of you have already ordered it and are grateful! But if you haven’t, we’d really appreciate it if you contact your local bookshop today, or click here for 20% off!

In the meantime, we have some exciting announcements about Oathbreakers. It’s already received three glowing reviews!

• Publisher’s Weekly writes, “Through subtle readings of biased chronicles and documents, Gabriele and Perry dispel the romantic aura of the Carolingian era, depicting it as an entertaining but gruesome medieval picaresque of power-hungry plots, murders, and—stomach-churningly—blindings. The authors also shrewdly explore the Franks’ genuine belief in the sacredness of kingship—and especially of royal oaths—that kept such a violent system in motion. The result is an enlightening portrait of the medieval mindset.”

• Kirkus writes: “Lively writers, the authors cast a critical eye on the surviving sources, delivering a painless education on how historians try to determine what actually happened from fragmentary and wildly biased accounts. A scholarly and entertaining history of warring brothers.”

• Even better, Shelf Awareness published a much longer review, with this great ending:

Though the events in Oathbreakers are distant in time, Gabriele and Perry describe them with an immediacy that's both informative and entertaining. Without making any overt effort to do so, they reveal that the emotions driving the actors in the Carolingian drama--ambition, greed, and the lust for power--are in fact as timely as today's headlines

The book is a story of political violence, including coup attempts that fail and do not result in significant consequences for the plotters… leading to more coups. It obviously has some parallels to our own world, and this context was on our mind the whole time, but wasn’t something we wanted to engage directly, as we feared it would distract from the narrative and pull the reader out of the 9th century. So it’s a delight to find out that the resonance rings through without us having to say it.

But also, there’s the magic

Ars Magica is one of the great medieval-inspired TTRPGs (tabletop role-playing games) out there right now. It’s set in a “mythic Europe” that parallels our own actual past in many ways. It’s now owned and published by Atlas Games, who are currently raising funds for a definitive collection of their 5th Edition books. They raised over half a million dollars in three days, and yesterday included this wonderful announcement in their update to their fans.

Book Recommendations: The Bright Ages and Oathbreakers

For many of us, our love of Ars Magica marches alongside a fascination with the Middle Ages. If you're looking for some historical context for your saga in Mythic Europe, I'd like to recommend a couple of popular history books by Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry -- one available now, the other due to be released soon -- rooted in the latest historical scholarship. (Perry and Gabriele also have a free newsletter, Modern Medieval: https://buttondown.com/ModernMedieval)

The Bright Ages challenges the myth of the "dark ages," a purported time of ignorance and isolation. The medieval world was rich, complex, and interconnected. As members of the Order of Hermes, your magi and their companions have plenty of occasion to experience or embody this diversity.

Oathbreakers is about the collapse of the Carolingian Empire. It's due for release on December 10th. I placed my pre-order today at Zenith Books in west Duluth! For the Ars Magica fan, this book promises inspiration, especially for sagas early in the history of the Order of Hermes.

According to Ars Magica game lore, thirteen wizards swore an oath in the Black Forest in 767, creating the Order. A year later, Charlemagne became King of the Franks. Coincidence? As Charlemagne built the Carolingian Empire, the Hermetic founders spread across Europe, demanding that wizards join the Order or die. How about a saga that begins at the death of Charlemagne, when the order has blossomed across Europe, perhaps even as the true "Carolingian renaissance" ... but now the mundane world is about to plunge into division and civil war!

We’ve always felt that there needs to be more communication between scholars and gamers. The imagined medieval — whether appearing in fantasy books, RPGs, video games, movies, etc. — has long fueled the study of the Middle Ages. So many medievalists got their start via some form of this medievalism, and so many more enthusiasts have been inspired by this form of play as well.

But it’s often hard to connect the scholarly world and the creative one, perhaps in part because of the academic instinct to fact check, to limit the boundaries of what we can say. And that’s true for us as well, but only to a degree. Oathbreakers - along with the rest of our writing - is bounded by the actual past. But we always, always want to show the roads taken as well as those not taken, with the hopes that our writing fuels a richer imagination, a richer sense of possibilities, of connections. Our very basic argument is that medieval people were people, with all the potential and flaws inherent in the human condition.

So we’re just so thrilled that the folks at Atlas Games who make Ars Magica find inspiration in our books, and want to encourage everyone to take a look at their game!

Also, from the comments, this is true:

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