Every generation gets its own Robin Hood. Sometimes he appears on the big screen: Mel Brooks’ “Robin Hood: Men in Tights” or Disney’s anthropomorphized take on the mythic outlaw. Sometimes like in the case of Luigi Mangione, the alleged killer of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO, he is crowned in the headlines and sociopolitical zeitgeist.
The story of this medieval outlaw has been told, retold and reinterpreted so many times. However, a new novel reveals that Robin Hood’s story is one everybody might know but nobody really understands. By stripping away all the layers of modern reinterpretation, “The Traitor of Sherwood Forest,” the first novel from medievalist and Northeastern University graduate Amy Kaufman, paints a much more complicated portrait of this heroic figure.
“It’s a Robin Hood who is not 100% a good guy, not even 50%, but it’s based on the medieval ballads where he’s not a good guy,” Kaufman says. “He’s kind of an aggressive, conflicted man.”
“The Traitor of Sherwood Forest” still tells the story of a disaffected outlaw named Robin Hood. He steals from the rich and sometimes gives back to the poor, but in Kaufman’s retelling, he is a volatile antihero.
Kaufman’s first published novel comes after years of teaching and writing about the Middle Ages in academia. A self-described “fantasy nerd,” Kaufman has long been interested in medieval European history. In 2006, she received her Ph.D. in medieval literature from Northeastern, where she started dissecting how people in the modern era have reinterpreted medieval history for their own purposes.
“A lot of people used medieval gender identity or the way they think of it, like big strong knights and frail ladies, to talk about the way gender should be today,” Kaufman says. “What it means to be a man, what it means to be a woman, they look really different in the Middle Ages. Masculinity can be deep and sensitive and emotional and compassionate, and femininity can be brave and calculating and bold and sexual.”
11/05/25 – BOSTON, MA. – Amy Kaufman, a Northeastern grad, poses for a portrait on Wednesday, Nov. 5, 2025. Kaufman is exploring the man behind the Robin Hood myth in her first novel, putting a new spin on her studies on medieval literature. Photo by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University
11/05/25 – BOSTON, MA. – Amy Kaufman, a Northeastern grad, poses for a portrait on Wednesday, Nov. 5, 2025. Kaufman is exploring the man behind the Robin Hood myth in her first novel, putting a new spin on her studies on medieval literature. Photo by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University
The Robin Hood who appeared in the original medieval ballads was a much more complicated figure than the hero he’s seen as in today’s cultural landscape, says Amy Kaufman. Photo by Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University
Kaufman’s approach to her academic work — her passion for the medieval period and desire to reframe the public’s understanding of it — is still present in “The Traitor of Sherwood Forest.” Still, the decision to leave academia was not easy, Kaufman says.
She stopped teaching in 2017, and published her last nonfiction book, “The Devil’s Historian,” in 2020. Despite all her experience and expertise, sitting down to write fiction, something she had been dreaming of for years, was humbling.
“You’re an English professor and you think, ‘I’ve been teaching literature for so long. I know everything there is to know about storytelling,’ and you know nothing,” Kaufman says. “Writing a book is how you learn to write a book in fiction.”
The idea for “The Traitor of Sherwood Forest” had been kicking around in Kaufman’s head for about two years before she sat down to write it. It wasn’t the first book she wrote — that one is still unpublished — but it was the first to catch her agent’s attention.
It helped that Kaufman had taught courses on medieval myths and legends, so she was well aware of the Robin Hood ballads. She was always struck by the feelings her students had reading the original depiction of Robin Hood.
Kaufman uses so much from the original Robin Hood ballads and the historical record. Large parts of the novel pull episodes and even lines from those stories. However, her students’ reactions inspired her most major departure from the literary and historical canon: her protagonist, Jane. A peasant woman, Jane gets thrown into Robin Hood’s gang, and the reader largely sees this mythic hero through her eyes.
“She comes in with the idea of him sort of the way we think of him in the modern era as a hero, and that slowly dissolves over the course of the book because she realizes she’s involved in a criminal gang and he’s arrogant and difficult and violent in the way that he is in the poems,” Kaufman says.
He can also be courteous and chivalrous, but in both Kaufman’s novel and the original ballads, he is not an underdog hero with a heart of gold. He wanted the world to see him.
“The Traitor of Sherwood Forest” paints Robin Hood as an ex-mercenary traumatized from his time in the Second Barons’ War, a civil uprising led by English barons against the monarchy. Here, Kaufman fills Robin Hood’s backstory with fictionalized but historically accurate details, while still getting at the core of what his story stands for.
“What does it mean to push back on an authoritarian figure?” says Kathleen Coyne Kelly, an English professor at Northeastern and Kaufman’s mentor. “He is the victim of what happens when they tried in their little medieval way, historically, to foment a rebellion and revolution.”
Kaufman recognizes the book arrives at a time when the public is looking for a Robin Hood-like hero. Despite clear differences in their stories, in the celebratory public reaction to Mangione’s case, she sees the same feelings that led people in the Middle Ages to grip onto the story of an outlaw pushing back against the powers that be.
“The church, the crown, all those things, ordinary people couldn’t even begin to think about disrupting any of that at all,” Kaufman says. “They were all at the mercy of it, so for someone to come in and screw that up in some way and show there are flaws and holes, that’s what the medieval Robin Hood did. It was cathartic.”