The Starlight Raven

 A lot of readers like series.  They get to know and like the characters, they enjoy the world in which the characters function, and they are eager to see what happens next.  This is why some authors keep a series going for dozens of books (mysteries are especially wont to do this), and why both TV shows and movies keep bringing out the same people to have new adventures.

I like a good series myself!  And I write them.  When I first wrote and published A Bad Spell in Yurt, I assumed it was a stand-alone.  At first I resisted suggestions that it become a series.  I'd seen too many series in which the problem solved in the first book turns out not to have been solved after all in the second book, thus undercutting what had been the first book's happy ending, or the same problems being presented repeatedly and unoriginally (as in the classic, Defeat the Dark Lord in book 1, defeat the Purple Lord in book 2, and in book 3, look, there's the Plaid Lord), or the author becoming so fond of his characters that he won't let anything exciting or dangerous happen to them.  But my husband persuaded me that my characters could mature and grow and face entirely different challenges, so "Yurt" ended up being a series, with 6 novels (and 3 shorter novellas).

But the series wrapped up well in the sixth novel, all the long-term plot lines resolved, our hero in a very different place than he had been at the beginning.  I didn't want to continue the series with lame adventures.

So instead I went with "Yurt, the Next Generation."  This series focuses on the hero's daughter, offspring of a witch and a wizard with the skills of both.  The Starlight Raven, the title of the first book about Antonia, has become a series in itself, with three books published and a fourth on the way.  It will probably be five or maybe six books in all.

These are quite different, I've found, than the original Yurt series, even if set in the same world.  A teenage girl (Antonia) is quite different from a perhaps overly-confident young adult male (her father when his series begins).  She has to worry about sex discrimination and unwanted attention from the opposite sex, things which never bothered him in the slightest.  I've added the dimension that witchcraft, female magic, is quite different from male wizardry, and Antonia has to try to find her way in both, while still being a girl.  Although the wizards' school gets mentioned a lot in the original Yurt series, Antonia's stories are actually set there, at least in part.  I've also done a lot more with inter-generational issues.

The result of introducing real teen-girl issues into fantasy is that a lot of people think of "The Starlight Raven" series as darker and for more mature audiences than the original Yurt, even though Antonia begins the series at age 14, whereas her father began his own series in his late 20s and has been killed at least once, although she's never been killed a bit.

 

Anyway, I hope that both "Yurt" fans and people who just enjoy teen fantasy will like "The Starlight Raven."  A sample is given below to whet your appetite.  Here's the link to the book on Amazon.

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Of course I knew my mother was a witch.
She never needed a match to light the fire.  She knew immediately if someone new had come to town, even if she had spent the entire day at home, sewing.  Sometimes in the evening, after she had finished tailoring a new ballgown for the mayor’s daughter or embroidering a new altar-cloth for the church, women would knock quietly on our door, giving quick glances up and down the cobbled street, and Mother would tell them if they were going to have a baby boy or a girl.
But I had no intention of living an uneventful life as a small-town witch.  I was going to study to be a real wizard.
That would be easy, I thought.  My father was head of the wizards’ school in the great City, a much more interesting place than our little town of Caelrhon.  He’d said himself that I could come and study there when I became fourteen, the first girl the wizards’ school had ever admitted.  Already I knew how to turn someone into a frog, something even my mother couldn’t do.
But on my fourteenth birthday it all became much less easy.

It started two weeks earlier.  A gentle hand on my shoulder interrupted my dreams.  “Antonia, wake up.”
“It’s too early to get up for school,” I mumbled into the pillow.
The hand remained on my shoulder.  “It’s not a school day.”
Then I remembered.  “We’re going to the City!”
I was out of bed with a bound, and then, with another bound, right back under the covers.  The air from my casement window was cold.  “It’s not even morning yet!”
Mother flicked a flame into life on my candlestick.  She was already dressed, her brown braids neatly wrapped around her head.  I loved her hair, smooth where mine was always tangled, darker than mine but showing golden highlights in the glow of the candle.
“I want to go there and be home again before it gets late,” she said firmly.  “After all, tomorrow is a school day.  In fact I hear,” she added with a smile, tugging the quilt off me, “that at the wizards’ school they give the new students only one warning.  Then, if they aren’t on time for the first early-morning class, they set the dragons on them.”
I swung my legs out of bed and kept them out.  “Sometimes I think everyone’s seen dragons except for me.  Father even killed one once when he was young, even though he won’t talk about it.  And there was the time we arrived in the City just too late to see a whole flock of them.”
“I’ve never seen a dragon either,” said Mother.  She had the brush and was working the snarls out of my hair.  “I think it would be more terrifying than exciting.  And I’m not at all sure they come in ‘flocks.’”
I let her work on my braids, thinking that once I was a wizard I would go visit dragons myself, rather than waiting for them to come to me.  A herd of dragons?  A pack?  A clutch?  I was fairly certain it wouldn’t be a gaggle.
“Besides,” I said after a minute, “I know they don’t punish students for sleeping late.  Father told me that when he was a student at the wizards’ school, he hardly ever made any of his morning classes.”
There was a chuckle behind me.  “Antonia, your father is an admirable man in many ways, and he’s made himself an excellent wizard over the years, but I would not recommend using him as your model when you become a wizardry student.”
I shrugged and laughed myself.  Having my hair braided was very pleasant.  I glanced toward my window, still nearly dark, and was hit by a sudden memory.  “I had the strangest dream,” I said slowly.  “It was about a bat.  He tapped at my window and squeaked this really high squeak, but when I sat up he flew off.  And for some reason I wasn’t frightened at all.”
“Of course not,” Mother muttered through hairpins.  “Bats won’t hurt you.  I’m glad you knew that, even in a dream.”
“And the strangest thing of all,” I went on, “was that he had a little cylinder tied to his leg—you know, like the carrier pigeons wear.”
“Who would send messages by a bat?” said Mother abruptly.  The last pin went sharply into my hair.  “Really, Antonia, you’re old enough to know that nobody finds someone else’s dreams very interesting.  Get dressed and come downstairs.”
She slammed my door behind her, leaving me wondering why she could possibly be so irritated by a dream.
No time to worry about it.  I splashed cold water on my face from the washbasin, pulled on a school dress, and laced up my boots.  In front of the mirror I smoothed out the hairs disarranged in getting dressed.  I grinned at my reflection and blew out the candle.  I was the daughter of a witch and a wizard, almost fourteen years old, and I didn’t think there was anything I couldn’t do.
When I clattered down the stairs into the kitchen, Mother was frying bacon and smiling again.
But then I saw it, lying on the table amid dressmaking scraps:  a tiny piece of parchment, half unrolled.  It looked like the kind of message usually brought by a carrier pigeon.

© C. Dale Brittain 2015, 2022

Medieval Slavery

 The ancient Mediterranean region had been a society of slavery.  Slaves then were usually people who had been captured in battle, or the children/descendants of such people.  Slavery is distinguished from other sorts of subservience by the fact that slaves are treated as having no will of their own.  They cannot say No to any command, no matter how arbitrary or foolish, and they can be bought and sold like animals.  Ancient slavery did not have the racial component of later slavery in the Americas, because slaves might be the captured citizens of a different city located only a few dozen miles away, who had (until captured) shared language, religion, and culture with their captors.

The Roman Empire was built on slavery.  Rather than just raiding their neighbors, they captured hundreds of people from all over their vast territory.  Successful generals would have big parades, with captured slaves in chains walking along with the carts piled high with loot.  Some slaves were well treated, but there was no penalty for maltreating one's slaves, and even well treated slaves had nothing that we would call rights.  Runaway slaves would be captured and brought back.  In the city of Rome itself, slaves probably outnumbered the free people, and the Senate periodically worried that the slaves would figure this out and revolt (which they sometimes did anyway).

Mediterranean-region slaves might be given responsibility as school teachers, or those who ran shops, or those who ran a household, even as the equivalent of policemen in ancient Athens.  Certainly not every family had slaves, but all well-to-do ones did.  The gladiators who fought for the entertainment of the Roman masses were slaves.  The Romans used slaves for agriculture, working them very hard, even to death on big plantations.  Many Roman citizens in the countryside worked their own fields, and indeed it was from such yeomen farmers that the Roman legions were recruited, but with a lot of the young men off fighting, slaves made up the difference.

All of this changed in late antiquity.  Once the Roman legions stopped winning and bringing home new captured slaves, an economy built on the labor of slaves considered disposable become unsustainable.  With the breakdown of many of the structures of the Empire, due in part to changing climate, disease, and the rise of Islam, slaves could just run away.  In addition, freeing one's slaves became considered a Christian duty once the Empire became Christian, and it was clear that one was not supposed to enslave someone already a Christian.

Agricultural slavery was replaced during the sixth and seventh centuries by serfdom, as I have discussed earlier.  Serfs were not really free (and the term servus was the same Latin word used for slaves), but serfs could not be bought and sold or treated horribly without repercussions.  Most importantly, serfs had their own houses and own families and own plots of lands on which they raised their own food, rather than just being worked in gangs until they dropped, to be replaced by new slaves.

Household slavery continued until the eighth or ninth century in some cases, and one would never have wanted to be a serf, but for much of the Middle Ages slavery was not found in the West.  Slavs (in the Balkans and further east), who were not yet Christian, might be captured and sold as slaves (Slav is the root of the word slave), and Muslims and Christians might sometimes have engaged in the slave trade with each other around the Mediterranean, but this was rare.

But slavery returned at the end of the Middle Ages.  Both legal scholars at the universities and town councils in Renaissance Italy studied Roman law, where there was a great deal said about slavery.  North of the Mediterranean, there were attempts to reimpose serfdom, which had been dying out since the twelfth century. as I have discussed earlier.  In Italy, which considered itself the heir to Rome, slavery was once again considered appropriate.

And then Europeans started exploring the rest of the world in the late fifteenth century, discovering all sorts of people, especially in Africa and the Americas, who seemed very strange by their standards, thus perhaps to be treated as a lesser race, and who were not Christians.  With Roman law as their guide, people of the early modern period re-embraced slavery.

Today, one hopes, almost everyone would agree that slavery, treating humans like animals, is wrong.  But it has only been gone in the West (including North America) for about 150 years, and its legacy deplorably still lingers.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

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

Stonehenge

Stonehenge is not medieval.  It was built somewhere around 2500 BC.  But medieval people of course knew it was there, it's hard to miss a circle of huge standing stones, and they had their own theories about it.

 Modern archaeologists of course have had plenty of theories as well.  The current thinking is that it was built during a (relatively) short period at the end of the Stone Age (the Neolithic) which also saw most of the other great stone circles and standing stones erected across Britain, Ireland, and Brittany.  During a period that may have been as short as a century, Neolithic men across the region dragged huge stones many miles and heaved them up into position without machines, horses, or even the wheel.  (One assumes Neolithic women were wondering when the guys would do something useful, like raise some food.)  (Am I sexist in assuming the women had something better to do than create huge erections? of course not.)

And it certainly is a remarkable achievement.  Stonehenge's big stones weigh several tons each. The bluestones, those making a smaller circle in the center of the monument, came from Wales, 175 miles away.  (Stonehenge is unique in this; all the other stone circles in Britain just were built from local stone.)  There is even a site near the original Welsh quarry that has pits spaced the same as the stones at Stonehenge, but with no stones in them (maybe a test run?)  There is also some evidence that the cremated human remains found at Stonehenge are from people who had been living in Wales, perhaps those who had accompanied the bluestones to their final destination.

The biggest Stonehenge stones were all quarried locally, but they still would have needed to be dragged several miles.  And think about trying to heave the lintel stones up on top of the standing stones.  It's no wonder that Geoffrey of Monmouth, writing King Arthur stories in the twelfth century, said that Merlin had magically erected Stonehenge, having brought the stones from Ireland (some millennia-old legend of bluestones coming from Wales?).

In modern popular belief, Stonehenge is often attributed to the Druids and the Celtic peoples, and self-styled pagans like to hold special ceremonies there at the summer and winter solstice (the longest and shortest days of the year).  Stonehenge is indeed lined up with the sunrise of the summer solstice and the sunset of the winter solstice, but we know nothing of what this may have meant for the builders' religion.  We know a little about the Druids, but they came along some 2000 years later, making it pointless to assume similarities.

Whatever it meant to the people who built it, Stonehenge has generated lots of meanings in the last thousand years.  It has been taken as King Arthur's "real" round table, as proof that giants used to exist, as a sign of alien visitors from outer space, and of course as an excuse to wear green and do "pagan" dances.  The chronicler William of Huntington, writing in England in the 1130s, was probably more honest than most when he said he had no idea when or why it was built.  He still named it a "wonder of England."

The megalith builders (as they are called) did not only erect stone structures.  They also built huge circles of wood, sometimes made of very old, very tall oaks that would have weighed even more than the stones.  Archaeologists have found the remains of such "wood henges," though they are not visible now as the stone circles are; millennia ago, however, they would have stood as impressive monuments for centuries.

Although we can only guess at what the megalith builders were trying to do, it is interesting to note that they had agriculture, and thus a (fairly) reliable source of food, not needing to wander around hunting and gathering.  Some 4000 years after Stonehenge was built, the Inca emperors in what is now Peru had great stone structures built to honor their gods (and themselves), again using stone-age technology (this was not long before Columbus) and having well-established agriculture.  (They concentrated on walls, rather than standing stones, and smoothed the stones so that they would fit together so tightly you couldn't even slide a piece of paper between them.)

There is a good article on the current scientific understanding of Stonehenge's construction in the August 2022 National Geographic.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

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

500 Posts

So this is a milestone.  This marks the 500th post on my blog, "Life in the Middle Ages."

I started the blog back in 2014, over eight years ago, because I knew there was a lot of interest in medieval social history but not necessarily a lot of places to actually learn about it.  Sure, there were little "fun fact" things that might mention something from the Middle Ages, such as, "Medieval kings often received visitors while in the bathtub," complete with a drawing of someone lying in a clawfoot tub, wearing a crown, greeting someone dressed like the Vatican's Swiss guard.  (Ultimate source for this highly unlikely image is a comment by a contemporary biographer of Charlemagne, saying the king invited his courtiers to join him in the hot spring baths of Aachen, which would have been more like a small swimming pool.)  But I wanted to provide a look at how medieval people lived their lives, in an informal but scholarly accurate way.

The blog has been a success.  It routinely gets hundreds of hits a day.  I think some home-school curricula include links to it.  My post on "medieval farm animals" is especially popular, being viewed multiple times a day.  I try to post new material fairly regularly, but there's a whole lot out there already, everything from what medieval marriage was like, to latrines, to war horses, to medieval diet, to the origins of universities, to the history of the Bible, and so much more.  Scroll through, and I'm sure you'll find something interesting.

Along the way I also discuss, at least in passing, some of the things that modern western society takes for granted, like electricity and clean running water (and chocolate), to draw a contrast between our lives and those of our ancestors.  On the other hand, a constant effort has been not to draw too sharp a contrast between us and medieval people.  They really are like us in everything besides the material objects that surround us.  Looking down at people of the past as somehow defective because they didn't have cell phones doesn't help anything.

I also blog intermittently about my own fiction.  I write fantasy, set in a semi-medieval world.  It helps that in knowing a lot of real medieval history I can add texture and detail to the background.  And when I'm anachronistic, I'm doing it on purpose.

So if you've just stumbled across my blog, or if you've been following it for a long time, I hope you continue to find it enjoyable.  And are there topics I've never covered that you'd like to know about?  If so, let me know in the comments section, or email me (link in my profile).

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

For much of the material from the first half dozen years of the blog, organized into handy chapters, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback, on Amazon and other on-line retailers, or for sale from your local bookstore.

Burgundy

 Medieval and early modern France was divided into counties and duchies, held by powerful lords.  These divisions were all done away with in the aftermath of the French Revolution of 1789, replaced by the départements, administrative units (originally there were 89, but more have been added around Paris).

But the old regional divisions persisted in people's minds, even if there were no more dukes or counts.  In recent years, there has been a new interest in regions, so it isn't only the Michelin guides anymore but also the local administrators who will tell you proudly that you have entered Anjou or Normandy or Alsace or whatever.

One of the most important medieval duchies was Burgundy.  Interestingly, the name Burgundy has been applied over the years to a great variety of different geographic locations, a lot of which don't even overlap.  Originally the Burgundians were centered in the Jura, the region where modern France and Switzerland meet.  They had their own kingdom in the early Middle Ages, and the end of their line of kings was preserved in legends that became attached to the story of Siegfried.

In the ninth century, the kingdom of Burgundy extended from there down the Rhône valley to the Mediterranean, with its capital at Vienne (near Lyon).  It included Provence and was part of what had been the Lotharingian "middle kingdom" between France and Germany (another part of this middle kingdom lingered on further north, in the region that became known as Lorraine, from "Lotharingia").  This kingdom did not however last more than a generation or two.

From the tenth century on, Burgundy became defined as the duchy centered on Dijon, stretching from the Loire on the west to Lorraine on the east, from the region of Sens in the north to the Mâconnais in the south.  Borders varied over time, and in the early modern period part of the northwest section of Burgundy, the regions of Nevers and Auxerre, were no longer under the dukes, but they are considered Burgundian by medievalists.

Medieval Burgundy was a great center of monasticism.  The great medieval monasteries of Cluny and Cîteaux, both soon heads of orders, were both founded in Burgundy (in 910 and 1098 respectively).  The region is still dotted with medieval churches, both Cluniac and Cistercian.  (That's part of the ruins of the abbey church of Cluny, below.)  Burgundian Romanesque architecture from the eleventh and especially twelfth centuries may be found throughout the region.

 Burgundy was in the Middle Ages, as it is now, also a great wine growing region.  It was conveniently located on rivers that ran downstream to Paris, making it easy to move wine to market.  One tends to think of Burgundy as red wine, but the region has plenty of white wine too, including Chablis; the valley of Chablis is entirely lined with vineyards.  The standard local white wine is called Bourgogne aligoté.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

For more on medieval politics and religion, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.

Siegfried the Dragon-Slayer

 The story of Siegfried the Dragon-Slayer is a very old Germanic story that, in the Middle Ages, got attached to several other old stories, and in the nineteenth century was picked up by Richard Wagner for his massive "Ring" opera cycle (that's Wagner down below, click here for more on nineteenth-century efforts to reimagine medieval culture).  Literary scholars have a field day figuring out how all the parts of the Siegfried story might fit together.

 

The core of the story is that the hero Siegfried killed a dragon (also called a worm or a serpent), tasted the dragon's blood, and now was able to understand the language of birds.  A bird warned him that the dragon's friends and/or relatives were seeking revenge.  The dragon's horde of gold entered into it too.  There are many medieval images of someone with a sword in one hand licking the fingers of the other hand, with a bird perched in the tree above him.  These are Siegfried images.

But what happened to the story then?  One has to do some sort of mental archaeology to follow all its twists and turns.   The fullest medieval account is in the thirteenth-century Icelandic "Saga of the Volsungs."  Here Siegfried (Sigurd in Norse) enters the story well along, as a descendant of the (pagan) Norse god Odin.  It turns out that the dragon is the brother of Siegfried's foster father, who first encourages Siegfried to kill his brother, then wants to kill Siegfried to get revenge for the brother he himself wanted dead, but Siegfried kills him first.  Nice family interaction.  You will note that this saga was written long after Iceland had become Christian, and a constant theme is the horror of family feuds (conveniently set in long-ago pagan times).

Then we have historical events getting drawn into the Siegfried story, including Attila the Hun, the Merovingian-era kings of Burgundy, the Merovingian queen Brunhild (originally from Visigothic Spain), and the Carolingian-era Burgundian lords named Nibelung (Volsung in Icelandic).  There were also some ninth- and tenth-century epic tales that survive now only in fragments, whose heroes got attached to the Siegfried story,  These varied historical and fictional accounts seem to have circulated all during the early Middle Ages, different authors playing mix-and-match with pieces of them, until they emerged in the two great thirteenth-century epic tales, the "Saga of the Volsungs" in Norse and the "Nibelungenlied" in German.  Although Wagner tried to combine them (working in some material from the Norse Eddas while he was at it), the two versions were very deliberately written to reject parts of the story found in the other.

In the "Saga," as already noted, Siegfried enters the story rather late.  He kills the dragon and has a hot affair with Odin's daughter Brunhilda (who is actually his aunt, but we won't go into that), well before he marries.  In the "Nibelungenlied," however, the story starts with Siegfried, a rather reckless but Christian prince, who had killed a dragon and gotten its gold sometime in the past and had never met Brunhilda in his life.  In this version everyone is wealthy, courteous, and courtly--though soon it will all change.

Both versions have Siegfried marry a princess, then be killed by his brothers-in-law, because they have been stirred up against him by his oldest brother-in-law's wife, Brunhilda.  Having left the story, he plays no further role except as a reason for long-term revenge plots, which lead to just about everyone being dead.  Both the Norse and the German versions have this central plot, but it's handled very differently.

In the Norse version, Brunhilda wanted Siegfried dead because he had forgotten her, and she was wildly jealous.  She laughs to learn he's dead, but then commits suicide.  In the German version, she's very irritated with Siegfried's princess, who mocks Brunhilda by saying she (Brundhilda) had had sex with Siegfried thinking he was her own husband (she hadn't), and Brunhilda decides to get revenge by having Siegfried killed.  (She herself stays alive.)

In both versions, Siegfried's widow (Gudrun in the Norse version, Kriemhild in the German) is married off to Attila the Hun to get her out of the way.  When her brothers come to visit, there is a great battle with great slaughter, and Gudrun sides with her brothers in the Norse version.  In the German version, Kriemhild instead helps kill them.  The courtliness of the early parts of this story is long gone.

The brave young warrior who kills a dragon and gets the gold has shown up in various stories for 1500 years, and he seems to have started with Siegfried.  In the hands of two great thirteenth-century poets, he became the starting point about the horrors of betrayal and revenge.

There are various translations of both versions.  I like Jesse L. Byock's translation of the "Saga" and A. T. Hatto's translation of the "Nibelungenlied," both available from Penguin Books.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

For more on medieval epics, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.

Whose Middle Ages?

 Memory studies teach us that those who control the past control the present (and future).  That is, if one can create a particular version of history, and have it accepted, one can seek to have the present (and future) shaped to be more like the Good Old Days.

Historians are always acutely aware of this.  We try to present a history that matches the records and do our best not to portray a past that was like what we would have preferred it to be like.  (This can of course work both ways:  the past could be a Golden Age to which we need to return, or the past can be a horrible, savage time, and we need to do the exact opposite of everything they used to do.)

Every generation thinks it's finally gotten it right, only to have the next generation raise their eyebrows at such evident bias.  But I do think that, over the two-plus generations that I've been a medievalist, we may be getting closer.  At least historians tend to focus on medieval records rather than some romantic vision.

Though here one has to be aware that "the records," things written down in the Middle Ages, supplemented with archaeology, do not give a unitary result.  When you have millions of people doing various things, it's always possible to find someone in the past who said something about their period that matches what you wanted them to say.  One of the great challenges for any historian is approaching the archives with an open mind, not going in determined to find only certain things, because if you do, that's all you'll find.

There's been a recent surge of interest in the general population in the Middle Ages, due in part to the fantasy versions found in the wildly popular Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones.  Although medievalists are delighted to have people interested in our period, it does give us pause when people create their own version of the Middle Ages, trying to shape the medieval past to match what they'd like to be the situation now.

Specifically, there has been a strong effort to portray medieval Europe as completely white and completely Christian, where lower-class people "knew their place," so that the wealthy could dominate them, and where women were "properly" subservient to men.  The Crusades are sometimes portrayed as a wonderful time when Christians beat the heck out of Muslims (leaving out the tidbit that all Crusades after the first were disastrous for the West).  Now historians know that none of this is true.  As I have discussed before, there were certainly people of color in medieval Europe, there were significant minority populations of Jews and Muslims, and both women and peasants were entirely capable of resisting any effort by powerful men to dominate them.

And yet the Middle Ages have such a hold on the population that it is often invoked as informing the present.  A great many white, male organizations call their members "knights."  This needn't mean they are white supremacists, but it does indicate an effort to invoke a period believed to be one of honor, strength, and willingness to sacrifice for a higher goal.  (In a period today where such things seem to be in short supply, one can appreciate their approach, though I continue to find men in nice suits, glasses, and a comb-over calling themselves knights somewhat, shall I say, droll.)

Now, as in LotR and GoT, one can create fantasy imbued with at least some medieval aspects.  Part of fantasy's appeal is that honor and glory can find a home.  Just make it clear this is not historical fiction.  After all, medieval people wrote such fantasy themselves, creating larger-than-life versions of their own world for their heroes and heroines to run around in.  But it seems mean-spirited at best (not to say a-historical) to make up a fantasy Middle Ages in which everyone is white and Christian, except for the bad guys, and where women and lower-status people can safely be ignored.

(Interestingly, the "Indiana Jones" movies, deliberately using the language of Crusade as the heroes rampage around the Middle East, did not have Muslims as bad guys.  Rather, the bad guys were Nazis.  Nazis make a convenient all-purpose villainous enemy, though it's disturbing to see Nazi flags show up at some rallies.  Guys, we beat them.  They were not only evil, they were losers.)

There is a new book out, called Whose Middle Ages?, by Andrew Albin et al. (Fordham University Press, 2019), full of ideas for those teaching the Middle Ages, to avoid modern prejudices and stereotypes.

 © C. Dale Brittain 2022

For more on medieval society and religion, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Lost medieval manuscripts

 Most of the Middle Ages was pre-printing press.  Until the second half of the fifteenth century, everything had to be written by hand.  No printing, not even laser jets, no copy machines, only people writing or copying onto parchment or (by the fourteenth century) paper.  Understandably, there were far fewer books and documents than we have now.  This makes the loss over the centuries very noticeable.

Some medieval records we know only because the author's original manuscript (improbably) survives.  Others we know because the work was copied many times, such as the Arthurian stories I've previously discussed.  Property transactions at monasteries are known primarily if the records of these transactions were copied into cartularies.

It was not only the passage of time, with inevitable decay and fading, that did in medieval manuscripts.  Fire or flood will destroy parchment.  So will rats, who find parchment tasty good.  But the biggest losses were caused by humans.  Medieval bookbinders used old manuscripts in their bindings, a handy (free!) source of parchment.  The Wars of Religion in the sixteenth century destroyed many medieval records.  In France, the French Revolution of the eighteenth century destroyed many more, as these records were seen as oppressive tools of the ancien régime that was being overthrown.  Documents that survived into the twentieth century were sometimes destroyed during the two world wars.

And then a number of people set out deliberately to destroy medieval manuscripts.  They didn't do so with destruction per se on their minds, but due to seeing these manuscripts as sort of random pieces of interesting material, to be used or sold or recombined in ways to please the owners.  For example, there was a fad in the nineteenth century of carefully cutting out decorated initials from medieval manuscripts and gluing them to white paper, then framing them as attractive decorations.

Liturgical manuscripts especially, those which had been done with great care and artistry, were especially prone to such mutilation.  Even if the initials were not actually cut out, individual leaves might be separated from the rest of the book and sold individually.  Rare book dealers realized that they could make far more money selling individual leaves of medieval manuscripts than selling the entire book to one person.

A recent interesting example is the Beauvais missal.  It is a liturgical manuscript, highly decorated, which exists as a partial volume.  Recently a number of individual leaves, separated in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries, have come to light, most in individual hands.  Some were picked up at an estate sale, where the deceased's heirs thought an attractive late medieval sheet of parchment ought to be worth something.  Lisa Fagin Davis, director of the Medieval Academy of America, has been on a mission to identify as many of these missing leaves as possible. This is what one of the missing leaves looked like.

 

I've had folks selling individual medieval manuscript leaves tell me, "Well, the leaves were already separated from the book when I got them."  I consider this similar to, "Well, the leopard was already dead when I made its fur into a coat."

It's disconcerting how limited our collection of medieval manuscripts must be compared to those that existed 500 years ago.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

For more on manuscripts, writing, and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available as a paperback.

Dysentery

 Dysentery, sometimes known as the "bloody flux," is a very unpleasant subject.  But it's important for medieval history because so many important people died of it.  It didn't kill millions within a short period as the Black Death did, but it was a constant concern.

Dysentery of course remains a concern today, especially in developing countries, although the most common (bacterial) form can be cleared up with antibiotics, as long as the sufferer is not too badly dehydrated.  (There is also a harder to treat amoebic version.)  It is spread through food and water that have been contaminated.  Today it remains a real threat in places like refugee camps, where people are crammed together without proper sanitation available.  In the Middle Ages, it was a constant concern in siege camps.

Think about it.  A siege involves a whole lot of men living in tents, close together, without easy access to clean drinking water or to proper latrines (no modern port-a-potties).  The people inside the castle being besieged certainly had problems, but at least they had their own well and their own "comforts" of home.

It was thus one of the reasons that powerful men, the type who would be in siege camps, often died at an age that we would consider very young (in their thirties or maybe forties).  Some notable English kings who died of what appears to have been dysentery include Young Henry, the heir to Henry II of England; King John of England (Young Henry's younger brother); and Edward I (John's grandson).  In France Louis VI probably died of dysentery (though not acquired in a siege), as did Louix IX (acquired in a siege in north Africa).

Medieval cities were acutely aware of the danger of dysentery.  Without modern urban sanitation and water processing, which are really twentieth-century developments, contaminated water was a constant concern.  You could do in your enemy by plausibly accusing him of poisoning the wells (this was one of the accusations made against Jews in the late Middle Ages).  City governments were accordingly extremely strict about anything that might lead to outbreaks of the "bloody flux."  One does not have to know about bacteria to know about infection and contamination.

We do mot know how lucky we are to be able to turn on the tap and get clean water.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

For more on medieval health and disease and other aspects of medieval history, see my book Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.

In Search of the Historical Arthur

The noted humanitarian to Africa, Albert Schweizer, wrote a book back in the twentieth century, "In Search of the Historical Jesus."  He and many others wanted to see what sorts of evidence there might be that would be considered the kind of record that historians use, in addition to the religious texts of the Bible, to tell us about the life of Jesus.  That is, he wanted sources that could be read and understood about Jesus's life whether or not one was a Christian, and also to see how the Gospels could be read historically.

The Roman governors of first-ccntury Palestine, the ones who put Jesus to death as a revolutionary, kept zero records of their decisions and activities, or at least none that have survived.  But there are scraps of mentions of Jesus in other (mostly Jewish) records and chronicles, and of course the Gospels themselves, written some two generations after the crucifixion for religious communities that considered Jesus their founder as well as the Messiah.  As Schweizer and other historians have concluded, there's no question of Jesus as a historical person, an itinerant Jewish preacher who attracted disciplines, who spoke of the brotherhood of all people, with special reference to the poor and marginalized, and who was put to death by the Romans.

Other aspects of Jesus's life, the miracles, the resurrection, being the Messiah, are aspects of faith, not subject to being supported or refuted by historical methods.  But a lot of Christians like having the historical underpinnings for their faith.  In a parallel way, a lot of people want to know about the historical underpinnings of the King Arthur stories.  (Big topical leap there, you say?)

Arthur is a far more nebulous historical figure than Jesus.  He didn't have four different accounts of his life written within 40-50 years of his death.  And the stories we think of as the "real" Arthur stories were compiled by Thomas Malory in the fifteenth century, out of bits and pieces spread out over the previous 900 years.

But there may still be a historical Arthur lurking somewhere in there, as I have previously noted.  In the fifth and sixth centuries, when the Roman armies pulled out of Britain and the Angles and Saxons arrived, some local leaders fought back, determined to keep their Christianized Roman culture.  The name Arcturus (Arthur) is a good Roman name, and in areas where the Saxons made little headway (Wales, Cornwall) the Celtic communities had occasional references over the following years to someone being "as brave as Arthur" or a vague mention of the "great warrior Arthur."  This Arthur would not have been a king but a military commander, and nothing we think of as "the Arthurian story" would have been attached to him (Camelot, the Round Table, the Grail, Lancelot and Guinevere, etc.).  There were also stories of the great leader Arthur leading a pig-rustling raid, but we'll let those pass.

A sixth-century account by the monk Gildas mentions the great and glorious battle of Mount Badon by the Britons against the Saxons, which certainly shows the presence of such war-leaders as the supposedly historical Arthur.  Unfortunately for Arthur fans, Gildas named the glorious leader as Ambrosius Aurelianus, somebody totally different.  But never fear!  Three centuries later, the chronicler Nennius retold the story of Mount Badon, and this time Arthur was the hero.  Whew, that was close.

 

But Arthur as we know him really begins with Geoffrey of Monmouth.  He was Welsh and a bishop, writing in the 1130s when the Normans had conquered England, and Geoffrey wanted to glorify his Celtic heritage, which was now threatened by Norman French culture on top of the Saxon influences that had dominated England (not Wales) since the sixth century.  His "History of the Kings of Britain" first made Arthur a king, first told the story of Uther Pendragon who impregnated the duchess of Cornwall while disguised as her husband (resulting in Arthur's birth), first mentioned the magic sword Caliburn (later Excalibur), and first noted a dying Arthur being taken to the isle of Avalon.  Geoffrey seems to have made everything up, including a great many other great British (Celtic) kings.  His book was hugely popular throughout the Middle Ages, and the story of Arthur was off and running.

While Arthur became a very popular hero in Britain, his reputation also spread to the Continent.  Chrétien de Troyes, writing at the court of the counts of Champagne in the 1170s, gave us the story of the Grail and of the adulterous love of Lancelot and Guinevere.  The latter he seems to have adopted from the somewhat older story of Tristan and Isolde, a story set in Celtic Cornwall as Geoffrey of Monmouth had set Uther and Arthur in Cornwall.  The name Arthur was given to a grandson of King Henry II of England in the late twelfth century (young Arthur may or may not have been done away with by his uncle King John, but that's another story).

The monastery of Glastonbury decided in the 1190s that it was actually located in the isle of Avalon and "discovered" the tombs of Arthur and Guinevere, leading to much better tourist trade than had ever shown up for their saints.  The earl of Cornwall, younger son of King Henry III, built a castle at Tintagel, in Cornwall, in the mid thirteenth century, explicitly to tie himself to the spot where Geoffrey of Monmouth said Arthur was conceived.

Tintagel today is a spectacular ruined castle high above the sea, and people still come there in search of the historical Arthur.  While there they can enjoy Guinevere's English Tea and Merlin's Beer and buy toy swords.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

For more on kings, legends, and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available as a paperback.

Miracle Stories, Part 2

 In my previous post, I discussed miracle stories, the kind that would be collected at a shrine to extol the power of the local saint in healing the sick.  But how about saints like Mary, who were not nearly as closely tied to a specific locale?  (Though she too would have special veneration in certain places; the most important healing shrine today, that of Lourdes, is dedicated to Our Lady of Lourdes.)

Miracle stories of the Virgin would be told and retold in many places.  Although she was entirely capable of healing, many of her miracle stories involved other sorts of intervention in human affairs.  At one time modern scholars tended to be a little embarrassed by some of these stories, and tried to pass them off as the superstitious tales of the unlettered.  But these were stories told by monks and clergymen.

They may have been embarrassing (now) because a lot of them lacked what you might call a clear moral lesson.  Rather, they emphasized the power of the Virgin in helping those who called on her.  In one story, a knight on the way to a tournament stopped at a shrine to Mary to pray, and he prayed so long and so hard that he forgot all about the tournament.  In the evening, he proceeded into the town where it had been held to find a place to stay and was shocked to be heralded as winning the tournament!  It turned out that Mary had been so impressed by his piety that she put on armor, took his horse and lance, and fought disguised as him, winning the prize.

Okay, you can see why some scholars would rather not talk about this as the product of learned priests.  In another story, a criminal, caught and deservedly condemned to death, prayed so hard to the Virgin that she came to the gallows where he was to be hung and, when the trap door opened to drop him and break his neck, she held him up.  After a few hours the authorities realized there was a miracle going on (man with a noose around his neck hovering, unhurt, in the air) and carefully lowered him and set him free.  In this story at least the criminal was reformed, having learned his lesson, and lived the rest of his life very virtuously.

So what is going on?  These were stories both about the power of the saint and stories to tell sinners that anyone can turn to the saints for help.  The greatest sin has always been despair, feeling that you are so evil that you are beyond redemption (which of course requires pride in one's wickedness).  These stories say that anyone, even knights (routinely branded as sinful) and criminals, could count on mercy if it was sought with a truly contrite heart.  Mary took the role especially of the mother who always will love you, no matter what.  (That's a medieval wooden statue of her below.)

 

Other saints would also listen even to sinners.  In fact, a lot of miracle stories were quite subversive, with those in authority, both secular lords and church leaders, being given their comeuppance by the saint.  For example, at Conques (see previous post), Saint Foy routinely broke the chains of escaped criminals, and when the monks tried to lock the church doors to keep poor pilgrims out, she swung the doors open herself.  Not just sinners but the poor and downtrodden were depicted in the miracle stories as helped by the saints.

The New Testament parallels were entirely deliberate.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022


For more on religion, saints, and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available as a paperback.

Miracle stories

 Medieval people, like modern people, believed in miracles, as I've discussed previously.  But miracles were not free floating events, being usually attached to a place, a relic, and a saint.

Miracles were one of the chief attributes of saints.  All saints worked miracles, and from the twelfth century onward one could not become a saint without sufficient post-mortem miracles, all properly verified.  (This is still the case for the modern Catholic church.)  Throughout the Middle Ages, an account of a saint's life and activities, his or her vita as it was called, was routinely accompanied by a second volume, stories of the miracles the saint worked after death.

Major shrines to particular saints all had collected stories of miracles their saint had performed.  By far the majority of these miracles involved healing, everything from the pox to a broken arm to gout, even an infected toe.  In an era without modern medicine, when few people could expect to live past their 50s, they turned to whatever healing procedures might be available.  And they may well have worked!  Who are we to dismiss their testimony, when we weren't even there? (and are in a society that has seen some, well, unlikely "cures" promoted for Covid-19).

Miracle stories tended to be very detailed.  The person who was healed was named, as was the specific ailment for which they had suffered.  We often learn a lot about such a person, their social status, their occupation, even which friends and relatives helped them reach the shrine if they did not walk there themselves.  (Pilgrims on the Santiago route, from Burgundy to northwestern Spain, walked 20 miles a day, pretty impressive considering a lot of them were sick and seeking healing or redemption.)

The specificity of the miracle stories added a note of verisimilitude that would not have been possible if they just spoke of generic people being healed of generic diseases.  The stories always stressed that saints were ready to help even the poorest petitioner, and that even the mightiest might need their help.  The miracle stories also tended to stress one particular kind of healing if the saint had a specialty; Saint Foy of Conques, for example (village seen below), was noted for cures of the eyes.

 

Often the miracle stories would speak of someone who had long suffered from an ailment, had visited shrines to other saints without relief, but had finally found healing when appealing to this particular saint.  Those healed were expected to be suitably grateful.  They needn't make a monetary offering (though it was never refused), but they would leave their crutches as a marker of being able to walk again or the like, and they were expected to live a properly virtuous life in the future.  A sinner who had been cured of an ailment was likely to sicken again if he returned to his sin.  And of course it was hoped that those healed would spread the good word about the saint's power.

The miracle stories then could be seen as a form of advertisement for a particular shrine, but they also stressed that the saints listened to people of all economic or social status, and that a moral, virtuous life was needed to accompany a healthy life.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022


For more on religion, saints, and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available as a paperback.

Medieval summer

 We think of summer as vacation time, a break from school, a chance to get to the beach or just sit under a shady tree sipping lemonade in a welcome break from work.  A medieval summer had different expectations.

On the one hand, one didn't have to worry about keeping warm, a major worry in the winter.  On the other hand, one did need to worry about keeping cool.  We now take air conditioning for granted, but it only began to spread in the second half of the twentieth century.  Working outdoors on a scorching hot day (and most medieval work was outdoors work) was just as much a pain then as now.  Their only advantage is that the weather was overall cooler, before global warming really kicked in during the last generation or two.  (And Europe is still cooler than much of the US—parts of Britain recently recorded 104 F, the highest temperature ever recorded, though parts of the US get there repeatedly all summer.)

A medieval summer was a time to work, not to vacation.  For most of the population, who were all farming, the spring was the time to plow, sow, and plant.  Hay was cut in June, winter wheat in July.  Vegetables had to be tended all summer.  Their harvest began in August, along with dry beans and lentils.  September was time to reap the rye or barley and to pick and press the grapes, October to bring in the root vegetables and start planting winter wheat.  All spring and summer livestock farmers were busy helping with baby animals being born and getting established.  Life didn't calm down until after the great November pig-slaughter.

At least there was food.  Last year's grain would be mostly gone by early summer, as would last year's pork, but there were plenty of vegetables coming along (peas, beans, lettuce, celery, summer squash, cabbage), and once the winter wheat was harvested there would be lots of bread again.  Young animals (lamb, veal) and extra chickens could be eaten.  The woods and wild places provided song birds to be caught as well as mushrooms and wild berries.

And one could look forward to the root crops (turnips, onions, and the like) and especially the pork of autumn, before settling down for winter repose.  (Being cold a lot and wondering how long the food would last.)

All this summer work was why, when modern schooling was established in the nineteenth century, it was determined that children (and teachers) would not be in school during the summer.  They were needed to work on the farm.

For the aristocracy, summer was a time for activity and adventure.  It was hopeless trying to go to war in the winter, when you'd get bogged down in cold mud and have trouble finding food to scavenge.  Tournaments were always summer events, as were most trade fairs.  And landlords also wanted to keep an eye on their peasants.

In spite of the constant rush of work and activity in the summer, everyone was delighted in the spring to see winter go and to get outdoors again.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

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

Editing

 One of the challenges for any author is editing.  Traditional publishing houses have full-time editing staffs, but the author had better edit her manuscript pretty thoroughly before submitting or the publishing house won't want the book anyway.  And for indie authors (like me), everything the publishing house would do is up to the author herself:  editing, cover design, layout, marketing....

So what is editing anyway?  And why is it necessary?  Short answer, editing means that the story is told in a way to engage the reader, without sloppy mistakes or contradictions that will pull the reader out of the story.  Here's an example of the opening of a story that could sure use some editing (I've made this up, but unfortunately a lot of indie-published books have the same problems).

-----

Sue was very bootiful. she long hare; and blue eyes.

"One day sue go shoping for booty products on sail, oh look! say Sue its' the rite shade for my brown eye,' And a good prize.  She bouhgt some makup and went home she was so happy!

-----

Okay, you would doubtless stop reading right there, and a story that started like this would be, I'm afraid, beyond redemption.  But even good writers need an editor, at a minimum a well educated friend or family member who will read carefully and be able to make critical comments when needed (the author of course has to be able to take criticism).  A professional editor can also be hired, but plan to spend a lot of money.  Before hiring someone, the author needs to figure out what kind of editing is needed.  There are several kinds.

Content Editor.  This is mostly for non-fiction or fiction set in a real time and/or place where accuracy matters.  You don't want the hero to look up at the Empire State building while walking through Chicago, or have a historical novel about the court of Henry VIII set in the seventeenth century.  Similarly, a non-fiction book about battles of the Civil War should not discuss their use of bazookas.  These are the kind of things that make readers put down a book in disgust.

Developmental Editor.  This can be a very important person, and a friend/family member who reads widely in your genre can work well.  A developmental editor addresses such issues as having the story start with something interesting happening, or suggesting that another scene is needed to make the transition between when the guy and gal meet and when they declare their undying love, or pointing out unnecessary scenes where the characters just stand around having boring conversations, or urging the author, who has been building up to the big climax for 100 pages, have the crisis not resolved so quickly and easily.  Sometimes a developmental editor will get over-excited and suggest major plot changes, which the author is free to reject, but remember that the editor is also a reader, and readers like and expect certain kinds of scenes and events.

Continuity Editor.  This is a variation of a developmental editor, keeping track of the story's continuity.  They watch for things like the hero wondering about something he had explained to him the chapter before, or the heroine's eyes changing color inexplicably, or the scene changing in the middle of a conversation from the characters driving down the highway to eating in a diner without any indication of how they got there (this can happen if the author originally set the scene in a diner, then decided it would be more interesting if they were driving, and didn't entirely follow through).  For a mystery, the continuity editor also makes sure that there are clues throughout but that they are obscure enough that the hero solves the mystery before the reader does.

Line Editor.  Here the editor is looking at sentences, to assure that there is a variation of kinds of sentence, that the same word isn't repeated unnecessarily, and that there are no obvious grammatical mistakes or misused words.

Copy Editor.  A copy editor may be the same person as a line editor, but they are looking mostly for minutiae, for misplaced punctuation (as in the example above), or missing words, or misspelled words (like booty for beauty or sail for sale).  This may seem trivial, and some authors say, "Who cares about a few typos? it's the story that counts."  But there are plenty of readers who will return a book for a refund or decide never to read a particular author again if the typos mount up.  No author wants that.  (And typos are the kiss of death for anyone trying to interest a traditional publisher--they're looking for reasons to reject, so don't make it easy for them).

For those deciding to hire an editor for money, start by having them edit a sample or one chapter.  See how well author and editor can work together.  If you're not satisfied, pay them for what they did and try with someone else.

But at last your book will be finished!  And after editing and polishing you decide to self-publish.  The self-publishing platforms (like KDP for Amazon or Nook Press for Barnes & Noble) give you step by step instructions for formatting and uploading, but what happens next?  I've written a book that gives you tips, available from Amazon, "Know your Self Publishing."

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

Medieval Childbirth

 Childbirth is always a perilous time.  Even with modern medicine, it is among the leading causes of death for younger women (especially those in communities without good access to health care).  It was, not surprisingly, even more perilous in medieval times.

Girls hit puberty then rather later than they do now, around fourteen or fifteen rather than at the age of eleven, which has become the most common age in the US.  Partly they didn't have all the hormones now found in the water, and partly girls were skinnier then (onset of puberty is governed in part by body mass).  So they didn't have the cases one hears about now, of ten year olds discovering they're pregnant, but by a time a girl was in her mid-teens she was considered of marriageable age, with the assumption that she would soon start having children.

Childbirth is more risky for humans than for most mammals because of our upright stance.  To keep all our internal organs from slopping down around our knees, our pelvic bones provide a solid floor to the torso, with only a narrow opening in the middle, through which a baby has to squeeze.  A cat or dog can flop down on the floor and pop out half a dozen kittens or puppies through a wide gap in the pelvis, but not humans.  The baby has to go through head first, so if a baby is upright in the womb (breech position), having a leg go through first is just not going to work.  If the baby gets stuck halfway through, both baby and mother are going to die.  King Louis VII of France lost a wife that way.

Through the first half of the twentieth century, obstetricians would practice reaching in and twirling a breech baby before it entered the birth canal, but this of course required a special touch.  If medieval midwives did something similar we don't know about it.  These days the usual answer for a breech baby or for prolonged contractions that aren't pushing the baby out is a Caesarian section, cutting open the mother's abdomen and womb to bring out the baby.  This is fine for the baby, but the mother has to recover from fairly major surgery.  It was impossible in the Middle Ages, because without antibiotics and microclamps to stop the bleeding the mother would die, so it was only undertaken if the mother was going to die anyway.  (Caesar, after whom the procedure is named, was cut out of a dying mother.)

Medieval women of course gave birth without pain killers, but at least they did not give birth lying on their backs with their feet in the air, which works fine for the attending doctor but works against gravity.  They were attended by midwives, who had a wide mix of fanciful and accurate ideas about how the procedure worked.  They would help with things like breathing exercises and would keep the procedure fairly clean, while also muttering charms, putting knives on the floor to "cut the pain," and the like.  Here they were ahead of nineteenth-century doctors, who might go straight from treating a patient with an infectious disease to treating a woman in labor, without bothering to wash up, and who would often chloroform the mother.  She'd miss the worst pain that way, but by being out of it she wouldn't be able to consciously push.

Women all lactate after giving birth, although not all give enough milk, and some babies have trouble figuring out how to latch on.  Most women nursed their own babies, but one could also hire a "wet nurse," someone who'd recently had a baby herself.  She might nurse her own baby on one breast and the baby she was paid to nurse on the other, though it was considered best by those hiring wet nurses if her baby had died, because then there was no competition.  Fashionable women might prefer wet nurses as it kept their breasts from getting as large (small breasts were considered attractive).

Contraception, without modern pills and devices, was always tricky.  Medieval people knew perfectly well "where babies come from," but humans lack the "being in heat" condition that defines the fertile period for most mammals.  There were lots of supposed ways to prevent pregnancy, including herbal suppositories, condoms made from animal intestines, and various concoctions to drink.  Some may even have worked, though humans are not nearly as fertile anyway as many creatures, and being underfed or nursing reduces the chance of pregnancy.

If they got pregnant anyway when they didn't want to, there was always abortion, or at least herbal concoctions that were supposed to end the pregnancy.  One saint, still a saint in the Catholic church, miraculously caused an abortion.  A nun, the story went, had been raped, and she was very worried that her abbess would not believe her and would cast her out as a wanton woman.  But when she realized she was pregnant she prayed to the saint, who miraculously restored her to her previous condition, as though she had never been pregnant at all.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

For more on women, children, and hygiene in the Middle Ages, see my book, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages, available in paperback or as an ebook from Amazon and other on-line booksellers.

A Bad Spell in Yurt

 Although for most of the time here I blog about medieval social history, occasionally I like to discuss my fantasy novels, which are informed by real history even though they are not historical fiction.  So today I'm going to talk about A Bad Spell in Yurt, my first published novel, and comment on publishing in the thirty-plus years since it first appeared.

 It was originally published by Baen as a mass-market (small size) paperback and, after going through three printings, went out of print some time ago.  But it's now available again in a variety of formats:  ebook on all major e-platforms, trade paperback (larger size) that can be ordered through any bookstore, hardcover from Amazon, and audio book from Audible and iTunes.  Here's the link on Amazon.

Sometimes an author will be embarrassed by their first book (especially these days when it's so easy for anyone to self-publish).  Alternately, sometimes an author will pour years of ideas and writing and rewriting into their first book, and it remains their favorite and the readers' favorite, as they throw together later books without the same prolonged attention.  For me, Bad Spell is somewhere in between.  It's my favorite, but I don't think it's my best.

For one thing, it was the first published but by no means the first written.  I've been writing stories since I was five, studying "how to write better" guides since high school, and I'd been intermittently submitting stories to publishers for twenty years before Baen bought the book.  The editors did suggest some changes that I believe strengthened the story.

The title of course is something of a pun, and the book is fairly light-hearted.  Probably this shouldn't be a surprise.  After all, when I lecture about medieval history to my students, there's plenty of humor there.  I think I tend to see the incongruity and humor in a lot of situations.  (I get my sense of humor from my father.  Unfortunately he didn't live to see this book.)

But it's not intended to be a laugh-fest.  In fact, I've gotten some grumpy reviews about how they expected it to be funnier, and what was with all these serious themes?  Because the book does include themes of mortality and redemption and similar knee-slapping topics, and a lot of it concerns people with very different perspectives needing to learn to get along.

My husband persuaded me to make it into a series, our young wizard hero having other adventures over the next 35 years or so of his life, becoming actually decent at magic in the process.  For those of you who like a series, there are six novels, three novellas (short novels, maybe a third the length of the novels), and a three-volume "next generation" series.

After the book went out of print, I got my rights back and published it as an "indie," an independent author/publisher on Amazon, initially as an ebook and then with the other formats.  It's my best-selling ebook (I have about 20 now), in part I think due to Tom Kidd's excellent cover (seen above) which I think captures the flavor of the book, even though it does not illustrate any specific scene (for one thing, no Oriental princess with a princess phone ever appears).  Some people who read the book in the 90s are happy to read it again, and I'm also reaching a new generation of readers, which is very gratifying.

Indie publishing is in something of a wild-west stage right now.  Far more indie books are published each year than traditionally published books.  "Get rid of the gatekeepers!" would-be published authors cry.  The problem is that the "gatekeepers" at the traditional publishing houses do keep some good books from being published, but they also turn away a lot of really really bad books.  This makes it hard for the well-written indie book to emerge from the haystack.  I've done surprisingly well as an indie, in large part I believe because I already had a fan base from before (we love you, fans!).

To whet your appetite for the book, here's the opening of Bad Spell.

_______________________________________________________________________________

I was not a very good wizard.  But it was not a very big kingdom.  I assumed I was the only person to answer their ad, for in a short time I had a letter back from the king's constable, saying the job was mine if I still wanted it, and that I should report to take up the post of Royal Wizard in six weeks.

It took most of the six weeks to grow in my beard, and then I dyed it grey to make myself look older.  Two days before leaving for my kingdom, I went down to the emporium to buy a suitable wardrobe.

Of course at the emporium they knew all about us young wizards from the wizards' school.  They looked at us dubiously, took our money into the next room to make sure it stayed money even when we weren't there, and tended to count the items on the display racks in a rather conspicuous way.  But I knew the manager of the clothing department—he'd even helped me once pick out a Christmas present for my grandmother, which I think endeared me to him as much as to her.

He was on the phone when I came in.  "What do you mean, you won't take it back?  But our buyer never ordered it!"  While waiting for him, I picked out some black velvet trousers, just the thing, I thought, to give me a wizardly flair.

The manager slammed down the phone.  "So what am I supposed to do with this?" he demanded of no one in particular.  "This" was a shapeless red velvet pullover, with some rather tattered white fur at the neck.  It might have been intended to be part of a Father Noel costume.

I was entranced.  "I'll take it!"

"Are you sure?  But what will you do with it?"

"I'm going to be a Royal Wizard.  It will help me strike the right note of authority and mystery."

"Speaking of mystery, what's all the fuzzy stuff on your chin?"

I was proud of my beard, but since he gave me the pullover for almost nothing, I couldn't be irritated.  When I left for my kingdom, I felt resplendent in velvet, red for blood and black for the powers of darkness.

It was only two hundred miles, and probably most of the young wizards would have flown themselves, but I insisted on the air cart.  "I need to make the proper impression of grandeur when I arrive," I said.  Besides—and they all knew it even though I didn't say it—I wasn't sure I could fly that far.

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© C. Dale Brittain 2022

Medieval Laundry

 As I have discussed earlier, when talking about medieval soap, medieval people wanted to be clean.  The wanted their persons, their clothes, and their surroundings to be clean.  This was of course very difficult without washing machines, hot showers, vacuum cleaners, and all the soaps and cleaning agents you can now find at the store, but they tried.

 

Washing clothes without modern technology was especially a challenge, in no little part because there was not much cotton (to say nothing of polyester, nylon, or permapress), and the most typical fabrics, wool, linen, and (for the wealthy) silk, were all fabrics that today we feel need "special handling."

Wool shrinks when wet, and therefore it would have to be "fulled," beaten and pulled and stretched to get back into the right size.  Fulling was a specialty occupation, shop keepers who would sell fabric and also wash wool and get it back into shape.  Fulling hammers were one of the things which a mill would run.  Obviously one did not get a wool outfit cleaned every time it was worn.

Linen doesn't shrink nearly as much, but it does wrinkle.  It could be ironed (with flat irons, of the sort now used as door-stoppers), but the biggest challenge was keeping it pure white.  Without modern chlorine bleach, it mostly had to be bleached by being laid out in the sun.  Fair maidens in the stories were described as wearing garments of pure white.

Silk is a lot stronger than it looks.  It also holds dye colors well and, unlike wool, is not munched by clothes moths.  It also does not smell sweaty as fast as most fabrics. With no dry cleaners, those who could afford silk gave it the old rub-a-dub.  (The silk saris worn by women of all social stations in India today are not regularly sent to the dry cleaners either.)

So where did washing take place?  One possibility was going down to the river with your dirty clothes, some lye soap, and starting to scrub.  This was sometimes still the case in parts of the US into the twentieth century and even occasionally in southern Europe as late as the 1960s.  Alternately, many towns had wash houses, a well or fountain surrounded by an open-air structure where one could come, wash clothes without getting rained on, spread them out to start drying, and chat with one's neighbors.  Some of these wash houses were in use until quite recently.

So medieval people are often portrayed (in movies for example) as dirty, and by our standards they probably were.  But they did their best not to be.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

For more on clothing and hygiene in the Middle Ages, see my book, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages, available in paperback or as an ebook from Amazon and other on-line booksellers.