Sacred Hearts by Sarah Dunant
Have finished Sarah Dunant’s Sacred Hearts. What a beautiful touch with words Dunant has! This book draws the reader into a leisurely, thoughtful, and ultimately compelling pilgrimage through the labyrinthine world of convent life and convent politics in the late sixteenth century.
Nothing ever happens in a convent, you say? Not true. At the time women were often shunted off into convents for no better reason than to save their families the cost of a dowry, and so it is with Suora Serafina, formerly Isabetta, torn from the musician she loves (a musician! horrors!) and immured behind convent walls. She is befriended by Suora Zuana, the convent’s herbalist and dispensary mistress. What a wonderful character Zuana is—an unwilling nun herself, she has found a hard-won peace in her garden and among her carefully-compounded remedies. That peace is sorely tested when Serafina’s screams of fury—and later her dazzling voice—and still later her equivocal visions—turn the convent on its collective ear.
I was particularly anxious to read Sacred Hearts because it’s set in Ferrara in 1570 (immediately following the ill-fated marriage of Lucrezia d’Este to the young Duke of Urbino, which is a story in itself), which is of course the same place and within a few years of the same time as the setting of my own novel. It turns out, however, there’s very little connection with the Ferrara of the court, other than a few mentions of the bishop and a glance at Duke Alfonso’s younger sister Leonora. The convent of Santa Caterina is a city and a court and a world unto itself, and as the shadow of the Counter-Reformation looms its nuns are a fascinating microcosm of women facing change.
Set aside time to savor Sacred Hearts. It’s not a particularly fast-paced read and certainly not a quick read, but it’s a lovely lovely book and will richly reward your time and patience.
‘S wonderful! ‘S marvelous!
As the Gershwin brothers would say.
Anyone interested in history to the slightest degree must check out this site. Want reviews of wonderful new historical novels? Want to know what the Romans used for toilet paper? (You will be surprised.) Want to read about nose jobs in the Renaissance? (I have to work this into a book somehow.)
Wonders and Marvels is more than just a blog. It’s a “community for curious minds who love history, its odd stories, and good reads.” My kind of place.
The Sale of a Wife
This is quite a bit more modern than my beloved sixteenth century, but I ran across it while researching other documents and couldn’t resist sharing it. After all, how often does one come across:
“A full and particular Account of the Sale of a Woman named Mary MacKintosh, which took place on Wednesday Evening, the 16th of July, 1828, in the Grass Market of Edinburgh, accused by her Husband of being a notorious Drunkard; with the particulars of the bloody Battle which took place afterwards.”
You must read the full transcription, if nothing else for its vivid nineteenth-century slang. One of the fighters (and yes, a huge fistfight between women and men broke out, with the women pretty much carrying the day) is described as being “as drunk as 50 cats in a wallet.” I can’t wait to use that one. Heh.
The Scottish broadside, ladies and gentlemen—the TMZ-crossed-with-Craigslist of its day!
The Time Traveler’s Life
I’ve changed the title of my site a bit. Here’s why.
Reading and writing historical fiction is the closest we can ever come to traveling in time. From my earliest days as a reader I loved stories set in “the olden days”—I loved Little Women and Black Beauty, Gone with the Wind and Forever Amber and the Angélique books, ancient Frank Yerby and Thomas B. Costain novels lurking in dusty library bookshelves like pirate treasure, my beloved Crawford of Lymond novels by the peerless Dorothy Dunnett. To this day I gobble up historical fiction with relish. Right now I am reading the mother of all historical novels (no pun intended), Eve by Elissa Elliott. It’s a beautiful and somewhat controversial book and a fascinating piece of time travel.
My life as a writer is a time traveler’s life. When I slip inside my characters and look out through their eyes, I’m away—in a Ferrarese castello, in a garden by the sea in sixteenth-century Scotland. I return almost reluctantly to the twenty-first century. I say “almost” because, for all the delights of the sixteenth century there are still modern necessities like clean hot running water, gleaming conveniences, air conditioning, and—of course—Ghirardelli chocolate.
The Skies of August
5-6 August: The August full moon is the Sturgeon Moon, so called because the mighty sturgeon, which lurks in the Great Lakes and other large bodies of water, is supposedly most easily caught this month. Fish for dinner, to celebrate!
11-12 August: The Perseid Meteor Shower reaches its peak. A great night to lie out in the back yard and wish on each meteor streak. The meteors are called Perseids because their radiant, the point they appear to come from, lies in the constellation Perseus—look to the east-northeast between midnight and dawn.
All month: the Summer Triangle. If you look straight overhead, you’ll see an almost perfect triangle of bright stars, with the Milky Way sweeping through it from the northeast to the southwest. The brightest of the triangle is Vega, brilliant white, in the constellation Lyra, the lyre. To the left of Vega as you look up is the white supergiant Deneb, marking the tail of Cygnus, the swan. Looking down toward the horizon is the white dwarf Altair, the heart of Aquila, the eagle.
For a star map of the Summer Triangle’s stars and their associated constellations, go here.
The Second Duchess
Read the First Chapter
The Second Duchess is available on iBookstore!
