Best Historical Novels About John/Eleanor Rykener

John/Eleanor Rykener

fl. 1394–1395

John/Eleanor Rykener is known chiefly from a remarkable London legal examination recorded in December 1394 and January 1395. The record describes Rykener, assigned male, presenting as a woman called Eleanor and working both as a sex worker and in traditionally female textile occupations including sewing. The testimony names clients and movements through London and other English towns, providing rare evidence for gender presentation, labour and sexuality in late-medieval urban life.

Because the surviving source was created by civic authorities during an interrogation, historians are cautious about treating every detail as a transparent autobiography. Even so, the case has become one of the most frequently studied records for medieval gender nonconformity and same-sex sexual behaviour, precisely because comparable first-person evidence is so scarce.

John Rykener appears as the companion of lawyer Nigellus Cobmartin in Jeri Westerson’s Spiteful Bones, bringing a documented person from Richard II’s London into Crispin Guest’s investigation of a body concealed inside a manor wall.

Historical novels and book series featuring John/Eleanor Rykener (1 series)

Crispin Guest Medieval Noir in Order

by Jeri Westerson 15 books 4.2(13,395)

The Crispin Guest Medieval Noir mysteries follow a disgraced former knight who survives in late-fourteenth-century London as the Tracker, an investigator hired to recover lost objects, expose secrets and untangle crimes that official justice cannot or will not solve. Crispin’s fall for treason gives him unusual access to…