The Witch & the Cathedral

"The Witch and the Cathedral."  Sounds like an interesting scholarly book about women and heresy during the twelfth century, doesn't it?

Well, it's not!  This is me in my fantasy-author mode, not my medieval-scholar mode.

One of the things that I think makes my fantasy different from most of the genre, however, is that I have real, working Christianity in it.  It's not that my books are pious, however--the wizards are always leery of religion, and the priests are leery of wizardry.  But as a medievalist I would have trouble creating even a semi-medieval setting for my stories without including a functioning church.

In this book, as well as the tension between religion and magic (a thinly disguised version of the modern tension between religion and science), I also focus on the tension between the sexes, the female magic-workers the wizards distrust and call witches versus the male version of magic.

And besides, the book is funny.

The reason I'm talking about it right now is because it's just been released as an audiobook, available on Audible.com, on iTunes, and on Amazon.  You can also get it as an ebook through Amazon (details here) and go back and forth between reading it and listening to it.

If you like the Yurt books but haven't tried audiobooks yet, I suggest you start at the beginning with "A Bad Spell in Yurt."  Eric Vincent, the narrator, does a great job.  In my own head of course Daimbert (my wizard hero) sounds like me, but Eric voices him very well.

Enjoy!

© C. Dale Brittain 2015

History and Fiction

I am often asked how I ended up writing both history and fiction.  There's no easy answer.  I've been writing stories since before I could actually read (copying sentences from the comic strips, where I didn't know what they said, and announcing what they meant).  Medieval history is so fascinating in its own right that I've been involved in it my entire adult lifetime.

At the moment, the number of my published history books is slightly ahead of the number of my novels, but they're both decently large numbers.  I think I must just love to type.

For the history, I use a slightly different version of my name than I do for the fiction.  I'm using my "fiction name" on this blog because it frees me from the compunction to use footnotes, and I assume no one reading a blog wants to see footnotes.  (But why not? says the historian in me.  I love footnotes! especially in Latin.  I'm not kidding.)

It's important to keep the two personas separate, even though most of my history colleagues know I write fantasy.  I wouldn't want another medievalist seeing that I (the historian) had a new book out called "The Witch and the Cathedral," and think, "Doubtless an insightful close analysis of the relationship between medieval learned religion and folk practice--I think I'll assign it to the graduate students in seminar."  (Tom Kidd is responsible for the above delightful cover.)

For that matter, some of the titles of my medieval history books might suggest fantasy to the hard-core fan, though they might wonder why the "latest installment" of my series is going to set them back $75 in hardcover….

I do try to incorporate real medieval social history into my fantasy, even though, as discussed in previous posts (click here and here), the Yurt series, my main series, is set in a version of what the nineteenth century might have been like if the Middle Ages had not ended.  And because I'm a medievalist, I've got a real church.  I've never liked fantasy where the priests are all either dimwitted fools or else scheming hypocrites.  In both the real Middle Ages and in my stories, there were both good priests and bad ones.

The fiction is just enormous fun, but I could never give up history.  For one thing, in writing stories, I'm looking into myself.  In doing history, on the other hand, I'm connecting with real people.  That they've been dead for 800 years doesn't change the fact that they have an awful lot to say.

(Click here for more on the relationship between medieval history and fantasy.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2014