The Knight of the Short Nose

"Count Guillaume is the biggest, boldest knight in southern France. So why does he keep needing a woman to get him out of trouble? A rollicking (semi) epic tale. Adventure, humor, a touch of romance, and occasional sword fights."

I've got a new book!  It's called The Knight of the Short Nose.  As I mentioned earlier, I originally posted the story on Kindle-Vella, where people can read it one episode at a time on their phones (first three episodes are free, plus you can get "free tokens" to "unlock" later episodes).  Now I've also made the book available on Amazon (you can "borrow" it if you're a Kindle Unlimited member), either as an ebook or a paperback.

Here's the Amazon link.  Also available on Kobo, B&N/Nook, and Apple Books.  It also remains on Vella for those who enjoy serials (19 episodes await you).

 

The cover artist is RL Sather.  I've used a lot of her covers.  She specializes in medieval-style fantasy, which works for me!  This one may be my favorite of hers.

This book isn't, strictly speaking, fantasy, because there are no wizards or magic.  It's a loose retelling of a twelfth-century epic, that was written both to glorify and to mock chivalrous deeds.  That aspect I've most definitely kept.

The epic (actually a series of epics) was based on a real eighth-ninth-century Count William of Gellone, who was a rough contemporary of Charlemagne.  In the twelfth century, the epics made him more or less a contemporary of Louis the Pious, Charlemagne's son and heir.  They also filled their story with a variety of real eleventh- and twelfth-century people, none of whom were contemporary of course with the original (real) Count William.

So I've taken this twelfth-century William of Orange epic cycle, which sort of tells about the ninth century while actually commenting on its own contemporary society, and retold it for a twenty-first century audience.  Take some humor and stir.  "Alternate history" at its finest.

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

Archives

 Historians love and rely on archives.  An archive is a storage facility for documents, and there are hundreds and hundreds of archives in the US and around the world.  In these days of digital imaging, it is no longer always necessary to travel to an archive (and the dangers of losing everything in a fire or other disaster are to some extent mitigated), but most documents have never been digitized and may well never will be.

A local historical society may accumulate such things as minutes of the city council meetings, or old newspapers, or photographs, or the diary of a Civil War soldier found in someone's attic.  The archives of presidential libraries may include books a president read, with his marginal notes, along with correspondence, signed bills, videos of press conferences, etc.

As a medievalist who works especially on France, my favored archives are the archives départementales.  Where the US is divided into states, France is divided into "departments" for administrative purposes.  There were originally 89 of them, but a few more have been added for the heavily-populated Paris region.  They go back to the French Revolution, when they were created to replace the old counties and duchies (defined by aristocracies).  Every department has its own archives, set up in the early nineteenth century and intended to preserve the region's history and "patrimony" as it is called.

Because France officially went atheistic during the Revolution, church archives were broken up and an awful lot lost.  But when the departmental archives were established, everything that could be found was taken there.  So you have confirmations of a church's possessions from the ninth century, charters of donation from the twelfth century, seventeenth-century parish records recording births and deaths, and so much more.

The documents I myself work on are mostly from the twelfth century, handwritten on parchment (sheep skin).  There is something extremely satisfying about holding in one's hand a piece of parchment someone used to record something important nine centuries ago, to see where he or she was getting tired and sloppy, or made a mistake and corrected it by scraping the ink off the parchment, or carefully stretched the words in a line out to fill the width of the parchment, or decided to write some capital letters very big, and so on.  I'll be sitting there in the archives looking at my documents while other folks there are looking for great-great-grandpa in the parish records.

But where were all these documents before the French Revolution?  Churches all had their own archives.  Some were very careful and systematic, organizing them in boxes by topic, writing brief summaries on the back.  Others were fairly sloppy, just piling everything up in a big pile in a back room.  Monasteries, which were undying entities, tended to be better at preserving their archives than bishoprics.  When a new bishop came into office, he usually brought in a new staff, who might or might not have the slightest interest in the records of what his predecessor had done.  A lot of documents were lost well before the Revolution, to careless storage, rats (who may nibble on parchment), mildew, and the destructive Wars of Religion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Most documents found in the archives are entirely authentic.  But medieval scribes might sometimes feel compelled to "improve" the record by creating a few documents that really should have been there.  The people they were most likely to fool were their own successors, who might be startled to discover, a generation later, that they had legal title to some property they hadn't realized they had, and that a king centuries earlier had confirmed it to them in perpetuity.

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

For more on medieval records and literacy, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.