Oh, man, I love The Sun in Splendour liek woah. I went on a major (major) Richard III kick starting in high school and here was actual fiction with him as the protagonist! (Yes, yes, there is the Josephine Tey novel, but he's just vindicated there, not the hero.)
I went through a lot of the Jean Plaidy books (that's the name Penman's novels were published under) in high school. A lot.
I liked the Sharan Newman 'Catherine Levendeur' books, at least the first handful, but those are pretty much in my demographic and educational wheelhouse: she's the French Catholic daughter of a crypto-Jew (she doesn't know and the revelation shatters her family) who is a student of Heloise (yes, that one) in a convent and ends up solving a mystery with a student of the visiting Abelard. They eventually get married and continue to solve crimes, but there's a decent amount of 'it ain't that easy' (death of children, religious issues, mistrust of foreigners -- her husband's a Saxon) and they were fun.
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I went through a lot of the Jean Plaidy books (that's the name Penman's novels were published under) in high school. A lot.
I liked the Sharan Newman 'Catherine Levendeur' books, at least the first handful, but those are pretty much in my demographic and educational wheelhouse: she's the French Catholic daughter of a crypto-Jew (she doesn't know and the revelation shatters her family) who is a student of Heloise (yes, that one) in a convent and ends up solving a mystery with a student of the visiting Abelard. They eventually get married and continue to solve crimes, but there's a decent amount of 'it ain't that easy' (death of children, religious issues, mistrust of foreigners -- her husband's a Saxon) and they were fun.