Religious Hysteria and the Black Plague

Lovely bones make a lovely face, and underneath the fictional flesh of each historical novel lie the lovely bones of history. The English Historical Fiction Authors (EHFA) blog gives historical novelists a chance to share their historical work and reach out to their readers. Each day the site features a nonfiction post by a historical novelist, usually related to some historical topic they have researched for their novel.

Today, I have a post over at the EHFA blog that ties in with the research for my book I Serve: A Novel of the Black Prince. It's titled, "Scourge of Europe: The Religious Hysteria Created by the Black Plague."

Death has always been one of the most frightening prospects faced by mankind. The fear of death even has its own word to describe it—thanotophobia. In a society where a third to a half of the people around you have succumbed to death within the past year, the terror of knowing that you might be next can become overwhelming. It can drive a person to bizarre and unthinkable acts as he tries to ward off death’s icy grip from descending on his own shoulder. This is what happened in the mid-fourteenth century, during the years of the Black Plague. The world went wild with thanotophobia, and the country of England was no exception.... (read more)

Questions for a Self-Published Author: Interview at Ashley Barron's Blog

In September and October I had the chance to do several interviews with historical fiction bloggers on my virtual book tour for Road from the West. Most of the questions involved the inspiration for and the plot of the book and there were a few personal questions about my life outside of authorship.

Today I have an interview of a totally different nature over at Ashley Barron's blog, a fellow self-published author. This interview focuses mostly on my publishing journey and the hurdles I have overcome to get my books out to readers.   The decision to self-publish, how I market my books, how I use social media--those are all topics I get to address in today's interview. If you're interested in a candid story of an indie author's path to publishing, head on over to Ashley's blog to get the scoop.

Butt-Kicking Beauties: Fighting Females in History

When my husband and I go to the movies, his favorite part  is watching the previews before the feature film starts. Me? Not so much. I hate how many thirty-second horror previews I have to close my eyes (and plug my ears) through, and I always groan when I see spots for another action movie with a 110-lb super-chick beating up tough guys three times her size. "This is so unrealistic!" There are many areas in which women are equal to, or even superior to men. Physical strength does not happen to be one of them. "Why, oh why," I wonder, "do today's movie goers want to watch something this ridiculous?"

Well, it turns out that today's movie goers aren't the only ones who appreciate butt-kicking beauties.
Xena, warrior princess, may have made her debut in the twentieth century A. D., but she belongs to an ancient sisterhood of fighting females that go all the way back to the twentieth century B. C.

The Amazons executing their
(male) Greek prisoners 

The Amazons, of course, are the most famous members of this sisterhood, a tribe of women warriors who lived near the Black Sea. Homer mentions them briefly in the Iliad as "those who fight like men." Other Greek writers talk of Penthesilea, the Amazon queen who comes to Troy with the intention of killing Achilles. Fearlessly, Penthesilea slays many of the staunch Achaean warriors and fights a deadlock battle with Telamonian Ajax. But when it comes to Achilles? Well, the great, Greek hero is able to knock her over with one blow and kill her. To his credit, he feels bad about it afterwards.

Penthesilea's sister Hippolyta shows up in a plethora of Greek myths, many of them contradictory, but my favorite version of her story is the one retold by Mary Renault in The Bull from the Sea. Theseus, king of Athens, takes an excursion out to the Black Sea and runs into the fearsome Amazon tribe, led by Hippolyta, a beautiful queen who can ride, hunt, rule, and fight as well as any man. After defeating Hippolyta in single combat, Theseus marries her and brings her home to Athens...although there is not necessarily a happily ever after in store for them.

The Roman poet Virgil, familiar with the fighting female motif, includes the colorful character of Camilla in his epic, the Aeneid. As the princess of the Volsci, one of the neighboring tribes to the Latins, Camilla helps King Turnus fight against Aeneas and his band of invading Trojans. Virgil describes her as a phenomenal runner, though not so keen on the domestic arts:

Last came Camilla, of the Volscians bred,
leading her mail-clad, radiant chivalry;
a warrior-virgin, of Minerva's craft
of web and distaff, fit for woman's toil,
no follower she; but bared her virgin breast
to meet the brunt of battle, and her speed
left even the winds behind; for she would skim
an untouched harvest ere the sickle fell,
nor graze the quivering wheat-tops as she ran;
or o'er the mid-sea billows' swollen surge
so swiftly race, she wet not in the wave
her flying feet.

Camilla acquits herself as well as any Amazon would on the battlefield. But unfortunately, while she is distracted with all her kills, one of the Trojans manages to slay her with a sneak attack.

In the medieval and renaissance eras, this familiar character of the woman warrior was not forgotten. While doing research for my First Crusade trilogy, The Chronicles of Tancred, I ran across an Italian epic from the sixteenth century titled Jerusalem Delivered. The poet, Torquato Tasso, tells a highly fictionalized story of the heroes of the First Crusade, showing no scruples about inventing characters and events to embroider the tale.

Clorinda, the Muslim warrior-maiden, is one such fictional character. The description given her is strikingly like that of Camilla.

She scorned the arts these silly women use,
Another thought her nobler humor fed,
Her lofty hand would of itself refuse
To touch the dainty needle or nice thread,
She hated chambers, closets, secret news,
And in broad fields preserved her maidenhead....
While she was young, she used with tender hand
The foaming steed with froary bit to steer,
To tilt and tourney, wrestle in the sand,
To leave with speed Atlanta swift arear,
Through forests wild, and unfrequented land
To chase the lion, boar, or rugged bear....

Clorinda dies in Tancred's arms

Like the warrior princesses of Greek mythology, Clorinda enjoys a good deal of success against her masculine opponents, attracting the love and respect of Tancred, one of the Crusader lords and the hero of my trilogy. Tragedy, however, is not far off. During a night battle where the brave and beautiful Clorinda sets a Crusader siege tower on fire, she encounters Tancred unrecognized and loses her life to his sword. Tancred's grief over mistakenly killing Clorinda is even more profund than Achilles' sorrow over slaying Penthesilea, since the poet has taken the trouble to provide a pre-existing relationship between the two.



Unrealistic or not, it seems that societies throughout time have enjoyed the motif of the "women who fight like men." There is one marked difference, however, between the warrior women of the old world and the butt-kicking beauties of today's movies. In the ancient and medieval epics, the female fighter--despite her success against many lesser men on the battlefield--can never quite measure up to the prowess of the hero, often dying in her attempt to defeat him. In the modern version of the motif, the Lucy Lawless's, the Angelina Jolie's, and the Yvonne Strahovski's can actually hold their own against all comers, and even prevail.

A Meditation on Infant Mortality

The standard figure given for infant mortality in the Middle Ages is thirty percent, although some historians' numbers go as high as fifty. Thirty children out of every hundred, dying before their first birthday--a staggering amount of tiny graves.

* * * * *

At the beginning of this week, I was intending to do a Thanksgiving Day post about my son Adam, giving thanks that he has had no complications since his surgeries for biliary atresia in January. But on  Monday night, as my husband and I sat bleary-eyed in the emergency room at Doernbecher Children's Hospital, we realized that he was having his first complication.

He had registered a low grade fever off and on for the past five days and been exceptionally fussy. Maybe he's teething, I thought. (Isn't that every mother's rationale for unexplainable baby behavior?) Then, on Monday afternoon, I changed his diaper and discovered that his stool was white--an indication that his bile ducts might no longer be working. His doctors suggested taking him to the lab to get some blood work done. And so, instead of running to the grocery store to get eggnog, and allspice, and Thanksgiving Day hors d'oeuvres, we zipped down to the doctor's office and had Adam's blood drawn. It would take a day or more to get the results. I was worried, but David reminded me that there was nothing to be worried about...yet.

* * * * *

by Giotto

One popular misconception about the Middle Ages is that since so many of their children were certain to die, medieval parents refused to become attached to their offspring. In her article "The Medieval Child: An Unknown Phenomenon?", Sophie Oosterwijk refutes this notion. She points to the popularity of the Madonna and Child paintings, a clear representation of an affectionate mother. She also provides a wealth of other evidence that medieval parents were "fond of their children," despite the likelihood that they would lose "at least some of them to diseases or accidents."

Miracle reports and other types of documents attest to the lengths to which parents were prepared to go to obtain healing, rescue or salvation for their children, as well as to their grief when their efforts proved futile. The popularity of the theme of the Massacre of the Holy Innocents and its vivid depiction in medieval art and drama also suggest that medieval people viewed child death with anything but indifference.

It was not uncommon for a woman to bear ten children. It was not uncommon for nearly half of them to die in infancy. It was uncommon for the woman to feel no sorrow for their passing. She was still a mother, after all, and though she lived in a hard place and a hard time, that did not make her heart a heart of stone.

* * * * *

When Adam's fever spiked to above 100 degrees that night, I called the advice nurse. After reviewing his file with the doctor on call at Doernbecher, they instructed me to bring him in to the emergency room. "It could be nothing, or it could be really bad. With his history, we don't want to take any chances." 

The blood work we had done earlier was upgraded to "stat." We arrived at Doernbecher and waited in the emergency room for several hours for the blood work to be completed. When the lab delivered the results, the liver numbers were way higher than normal, giving evidence of a possible liver infection. The next step was an ultrasound to see if there was some sort of blockage in Adam's bile ducts. The ultrasound was inconclusive. Meanwhile, Adam's fever began to go down. While the doctors conferred into the wee hours of the night about whether they should admit Adam or send him home, David tried to get our scared and screaming boy to go to sleep. Every time he closed his eyes, another doctor or nurse would come in to poke and prod him into resuming his screams.

I sat in the recliner, too exhausted, too uncomfortable, and too anxious to sleep. Were his bile ducts really blocked? Was the surgery that had seemed so successful no longer working?

* * * * *

Edward I and wife Eleanor

Oosterwijk gives this anecdote about King Edward I of England:

One example of the supposedly indifferent attitude of medieval parents towards their children is the chronicle description of Edward I's reaction while on crusade at hearing the news of the deaths of first his son John and then of his father, king Henry III of England. According to the chronicler, Edward grieved far more for his 64-year-old father than for his five-year-old son and, when asked to explain the reason, he replied that the loss of a child is easier to bear as one may have many more children, but that the loss of a father is irremediable. This has often been taken as the typical medieval response to the death of a child; indeed, Edward himself was due to experience such losses all too often, for only six of the (probably) fourteen children he had by his first wife Eleanor of Castile reached adulthood. 

However, what has often been overlooked is the fact that Edward's reaction, instead of being typical, was in fact seen as unusual even if proper and devout; the episode illustrates surprise at his behaviour both on the part of Charles of Anjou, who asked him to explain it, and on the part of the chronicler, who considered it significant enough to record. Although it may have been exemplary of Edward to mourn so much more for the death of his aged father (which actually made him the new king) than for his own little son, it seems at the same time to have been considered far from normal.

* * * * *

The doctors decided to put Adam on antibiotics in case his liver was infected. He would spend the night at the hospital and undergo more imaging in the morning to locate the assumed blockage. I drove home at 3am, hoping that my seven-months-pregnant body could get a few hours of sleep. David stayed at the hospital to deal with more doctors and more disruptions to Adam's sleep.

The Psalmist says that "weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning." And so it happened for us. By the time I got back to the hospital at 9am, Adam's fever had disappeared. The white bowel movement proved to be an anomaly. The head GI doctor told us that if there was some sort of sludge blocking his bile duct, it seemed to have gone away. Whatever had sent his liver numbers up in the lab tests was probably just a minor infection. They released us from the hospital at noon that day and we went home to sleep, sleep, sleep.

* * * * *

by Masaccio

Oosterwijk says:

Medieval reality might have been a far cry from our own twentieth-century idea of childhood as a joyous and carefree phase of life -- in itself rather a modern Western idealization-- but the medieval popularity of the Virgin and Child could only have worked if people recognized its fundamental truth: the bond of affection between mother and child. 

* * * * *

At the beginning of this week, I was intending to do a Thanksgiving Day post about my son Adam, giving thanks that he has had no complications since his surgeries for biliary atresia in January. At the end of this week, I can finally make my Thanksgiving Day post, and praise God that Adam's adventure at the hospital was short-lived and far less serious than it could have been.

The standard figure given for infant mortality in the Middle Ages is thirty percent. The infant mortality rate in today's United States is currently less than one percent. It is a blessed thing to be a mother in this country and in this century. It is truly a thing for which we can give thanks.

Same Name, Different Person

Suppose that you're in a conversation with a friend talking about a mutual acquaintance named "John." An outsider comes up, listens in for a few minutes, then says. "Oh, I know a John too. They're probably the same person." You both stop talking and stare at the newcomer flabbergasted. Does he really think there is only one person named John in the entire world? 

This naivety is not something you often encounter in conversation. But somehow, in the world of historical fiction, it is a conclusion that readers often jump to, especially if a character has a name that is unusual or unfamiliar to them. 

Tancred of Lecce

During my recent blog tour, countless people who heard that "Tancred" is the main character of my book Road from the West said, "Oh, Tancred! I read about him in Sharon Kay Penman's latest book Lionheart." Sorry as I am to sever this (possibly advantageous) to SKP's novel, my sense of historical accuracy has been begging me to exclaim, "No. You did not!" My Tancred was an obscure Italian marquis who eventually became Prince of Galilee and Duke of Antioch after the First Crusade. SKP's Tancred was a distant relative, called Tancred of Lecce, who ruled Sicily and lived nearly a century later during the time of the Third Crusade.

The name Tancred, although incredibly unusual to the modern ear, was a popular one in this Norman family. Their original Norman ancestor, a shadowy figure named Tancred de Hauteville, was born in Normandy shortly after the French king bestowed it on Rollo and the other Vikings. Tancred of Hauteville was renowned mostly for the deeds of his progeny, begetting twelve superlative sons from two successive wives. One of the chroniclers records that whenever William the Conqueror was feeling unmotivated to conquer, he would remember the doughty deeds of the family from Hauteville and stir up his spirit to attempt greater things. These sons of Tancred de Hauteville would eventually spread across Europe and establish princedoms for themselves in Italy, Sicily, and the East. 

Two of the sons to travel to the sunny south were Robert Guiscard (the "Fox) and Roger de Hauteville. While Robert focused his activities on driving the Byzantines out of Italy and then making an expedition toward Constantinople itself, Roger focused on driving the Muslims and Byzantines out of Sicily and setting up a kingdom there. It is from these two brothers that the two easily-confused Tancreds descend. 

Tancred and Erminia, by Nicolas Poussin

Robert Guiscard's daughter Emma married an obscure Italian marquis named Odo the Good, and from their union arose Tancred, the hero of my novel, a dedicated leader of the First Crusade. Roger set up a dynasty in Sicily leaving the throne to a tangled web of sons and grandsons until it was eventually seized by his (illegitimate) great-grandson Tancred of Lecce. 

Although it may be tempting to assume that every historical figure with the same name is the same person, a simple request for Wikipedia to "disambiguate" the name can keep you from being the "newcomer" to the conversation. A simple reference to a historical timeline can keep you from confusing the King of Sicily with the Prince of Galilee.