Elizabeth Loupas

Am immersing myself in sixteenth-century Ferrara. So much of the old city has been preserved—the medieval city walls, the Castello with its four massive towers, the magnificent Romanesque cathedral, the many palaces of the Este including the Palazzo dei Diamante, which today houses the National Picture Gallery, and the Palazzo Schifanoia with its incredible fifteenth-century frescoes. My Barbara would have known them all, walked their floors, touched their walls, breathed their air. It’s a daunting and delightful thought.

Sometimes I watch the various webcams of modern-day Ferrara.

Città di Ferrara, various webcam views

Today, for example, it’s clearly sunny and cold—the sky is blue behind the clouds but there is snow on the roofs and here and there in the streets. Much of my story takes place in December, January and February of 1565 and 1566, and I imagine the weather to have been similar. I imagine Barbara’s breath as a visible cold mist when she goes out into the city to pursue her secret plan…

My ancestors didn’t come over on the Mayflower, but they were not far behind on one of the voyages of the Abigail, which sailed from London April to July 1635, arriving in Massachusetts Bay. Henry Collins, my ninth great-grandfather, a starchmaker (all those ruffs and caps had to be starched by someone, you know) from Stepney, Middlesex, brought his wife Ann and his three young children Henry, John and Margery. I’m descended from John (who was only three at the time of the voyage), through the Motts, Rhodeses, Sarjents, McConnells and Flemings.

So although they weren’t Pilgrims but ordinary Puritan tradesmen, here’s to the Collins family, who sailed to the New World and settled in Lynn, Massachusetts. Here’s to Ann Collins, who undertook a two-month-plus voyage across the Atlantic in cramped shipboard quarters with three children, ages five, three and two! Men may have gotten all the credit for bravery in those days, but a woman who could manage that is a woman I’m proud to be descended from.

Happy Thanksgiving wishes to everyone—because even if you don’t celebrate Thanksgiving Day as a holiday, it’s always good to be thankful.

Last week the National Library of Scotland offered a week-long opportunity for visitors to see the last letter of Mary Queen of Scots, written only a few hours before she was executed at Fotheringay Castle. For preservation reasons, the letter is put on display only rarely.

The letter is directed to her brother-in-law Henri III, the king of France, and dated 8 February, 1587. It closes with the phrase, “Wednesday, at two in the morning.” When you look at the images you can see blurry splotches, particularly on the first page. Was Mary crying? Or are the blotches the product of the many hands through which the letter passed after her death?

The letter itself is remarkably cool and rational, the writing steady, the lines even. What was Mary thinking as she wrote it, in the middle of the night, knowing she would be taken to a scaffold and publicly beheaded when the morning arrived?

Readers and writers of historical fiction don’t always agree about how much of our art should be history and how much should be fiction. This, to me, is a good example. The letter remains; we know Mary wrote it. We have her words. We know something of what she did before and after she wrote it. But what was she truly thinking and feeling? Ah, now that is where the storytelling comes in…

Had a good chuckle at Lisa Brackmann’s comment about why plumbago is called plumbago—“I would have gone with ‘it’s plum-colored and can be used to treat lumbago.’ For that matter, what IS lumbago?”

Ask and you shall receive. The word “lumbago” dates to early in the seventeenth century and comes from the late Latin lumbago, “weakness of loins and lower back,” which itself is from the Latin lumbus, “loin.” Here’s a fellow from an early 17th-century book of “anatomies” [Cousin, Jehan. Livre de pourtraiture. Paris: Jean Leclerc, 1608] who has obligingly taken off his skin to show us his musculature; his loins are indicated by the number 3. For more fascinating historical books of anatomy, see the Research section of the Wonders and Marvels website. I particularly like the ones in which the subject is rather coyly peeling back his or her own skin and muscles in order to display the organs beneath. What were the artists thinking?

“Lumbago” has rather fallen out of use these days, in favor of “Owie! I just threw out my back!” Perhaps we should bring it back. Or perhaps this evening I’ll tell the Broadcasting Legend™ I’m going to cook him a nice lumbus of pork with potatoes, apples and sauerkraut. Mmmm!

Because Rinette, the central character in my new book, is a floromancer deeply connected to flowers and their properties, I find I’m becoming fascinated with everything I can find out about flowers as well.

Take the plumbago bush in our back yard. What a strange name for such a lovely flowering shrub, with its masses of bluish and lilac-colored blossoms, so sweet and irresistible to butterflies. The name comes from the Latin “plumbum,” the metal lead, as dull as dull can be. How on earth did it get connected with such a beautiful flower? (It’s also called skyflower, because of its color, but that’s a modern invention.)

The stories differ. Some say the plant—called for centuries plain “leadwort,” and only given its Latinized name in the eighteenth century—was used to treat lead poisoning, which was recognized as an affliction as early as the second century BC. Others say it was associated with lead because it was used to treat conditions that turned the skin a leaden color. Still others say the plant itself is toxin-loving, and where it grows there is lead to be found. Traditionally it’s also been used to treat warts, wounds and broken bones; made into a powder to be sniffed for headaches; and brewed as a tea to ward off nightmares. Sticks of leadwort were woven into thatched roofs to ward off lightning. In French it was called dentelaire, and the chewed root was said to relieve toothache.

So in the sixteenth century Rinette would have known it as leadwort. How to work it into her unique personal scheme of floromancy? With its association with nightmares, perhaps it could bring on a vision of bad things that might happen if one makes a particular decision. That would certainly fit into the plot. Heh.

…having nothing to do with history. Well, maybe only a little.

• Top Chef. Jennifer Carroll for the win! That chocolate bread pudding with peanut butter sauce sounded delectable, but people—what’s the point of posting a recipe calling for 120 egg yolks and 5 1/2 gallons of heavy cream, which ends up serving 100 people? Cut it down a little. Top Chef website fail.
• Homemade Apple Crostata. The Broadcasting Legend™ brought home a bag of Granny Smith apples by mistake, and so I’ve been baking up a storm. Delicious as a dessert with a scoop of vanilla ice cream, or as a breakfast pastry with a wedge of cheddar cheese. I don’t really follow a recipe—I make piecrust the old-fashioned way (rubbing the butter into the flour by hand) and just mix up the filling as the spirit moves me—sliced apples (skin left on, please), a little lemon juice, a little white sugar and brown sugar, a pinch of salt, a sprinkling of flour to thicken, and of course lots of cinnamon.
• Attention Deficit Theatre. I love Mad Men and these are the best recaps ever. J. Kristin Ament is a hoot and a half.
• And speaking of recaps, History Spork, from Two Historians. This comes with a hat tip to the best agent ever, Diana Fox. Needless to say I love historical movies but I sometimes follow along with commentary much like this. Although I’m nowhere near as funny.
• The Daily Digital. The adventures of my friend Laurie, her husband Philip, and their wonderful beagles. I’m nowhere near as funny as Laurie is, either.

As the Gershwin brothers would say.

Wonders and Marvels

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.

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!

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.

A Google trail, that is. I’m stealing an idea from my friend and fellow Shrinking Violet P.J. Hoover, and tracking my “Google Trail.” What have I been Googling this past week in the name of research?

• Wildflowers of sixteenth-century Scotland
• Pierre de Bocosel de Chastelard
• Quatrains of Nostradamus
• Lennoxlove House
• Antoinette de Bourbon, Duchess of Guise
• Battle of Corrichie
• Clan Leslie

One of the great delights of writing historical fiction with sprinkles is that one can spend hours reading about the most fascinating bits and pieces of history and actually be working. Could there be any better job?

And look, there’s summer, right behind you. One of my summer projects (in addition to my wonderful new book that I’m madly in love with but don’t really want to talk about too much yet for fear of jinxing it) is refurbishing some beautiful old pieces of family furniture I’ve had in storage for years and years. I’m starting with this chest—four large drawers and then two small drawers on top. It dates back to about 1910, and as you can see, it has actual shelves inside for each drawer to rest on. Solid mahogany. Weighs a ton, as the Broadcasting Legend™ and our neighbor the Proud Father of Twins™ can attest, after wrestling it out of the storage unit, onto the truck, off the truck, and into our front foyer. My first step is to take out all the drawers and give it a good scrubbing with Murphy’s Oil Soap.

What has it seen, in the century or so of its life? What stories could it tell? I dream as I work on it. What was folded away in its drawers? One element of my new book is an object (not really a piece of furniture, but definitely a personal object) that passes through various hands and affects each person, on its way to its moment of destiny on the world stage, and then back to obscurity. What could be more intriguing? (Oh, and it has Nostradamus, too.)

I just finished The Séance by John Harwood, and what a deliciously eldritch gothic tale it is. As a reader one must have a little patience through the first few chapters, but it all turns out to be important in the end and there are rewards to come. Constance Langton, orphaned and dependent on a single feckless uncle, unexpectedly inherits Wraxford Hall, a derelict manor house by the Sussex coast with—would you ever doubt it?—a dark history. A dark history entangled with Constance’s own past. Or is it her past? Told in multiple viewpoints and narratives, The Séance is like a crumbling scrapbook of mysterious apparitions, betrayal, blackmail and horror.

With a dreamlike photograph by Julia Margaret Cameron (see the post below on the Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood) on its cover and the stuff of nightmares inside, The Séance brings late-Victorian England to effortless and mesmerizing life. One of the best books I’ve read so far this year.

My beloved Pre-Raphs are usually referred to as “The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood,” even though there were women peripherally associated with the group—the poet Christina Rossetti; the model, poet and artist Elizabeth Siddal; the model Jane Morris, the artist Marie Spartali Stillman; the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron come to mind. Here, however, is a way-cool website that turns the whole concept around:

The Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood

…and focuses primarily on the women involved in, and inspired by, the Pre-Raphaelite movement. The site is full of tidbits (a “Lady of Shalott” film!) and dozens and dozens of gorgeous images. I often call myself a Post-Pre-Raphaelite, and this site is definitely going on my must-read list. When I “see” scenes from my writing, I almost always see them as intricately detailed, color-saturated, intensely romantic Pre-Raph-style images.

I suppose you could say (as Alec Baldwin does in those funny Hulu commercials) it’s just the way I roll.

Could anything be more irresistible? It seems an international team of astronomers have discovered what’s called an extended Lyman-Alpha blob so far away that what they’re seeing (given the speed of light) is something that happened at the dawn of the universe. It doesn’t look like much but to astronomers it’s a mysterious and fascinating object.

It has been named Himiko, after a queen in ancient Japan, said to be a sorceress. Quoted from Japan in the Chinese Dynastic Histories: Later Han Through Ming Dynasties by Tsunoda Ryusaku, tr. 1951:

She occupied herself with magic and sorcery, bewitching the people. Though mature in age, she remained unmarried. She had a younger brother who assisted her in ruling the country. After she became the ruler, there were few who saw her. She had one thousand women as attendants, but only one man. He served her food and drink and acted as a medium of communication. She resided in a palace surrounded by towers and stockades, with armed guards in a state of constant vigilance.

Even more intriguing:

When Himiko passed away, a great mound was raised, more than a hundred paces in diameter. Over a hundred male and female attendants followed her to the grave. Then a king was placed on the throne, but the people would not obey him. Assassination and murder followed; more than one thousand were thus slain. A relative of Himiko named Iyo, a girl of thirteen, was [then] made queen and order was restored.

Makes me want to write a young-adult historical with the shaman princess as the heroine.

No, not that kind of court. A law-and-lawyers kind of court. I found this linked this morning in a Twitter tweet by Karen Essex, author of the wonderful Leonardo’s Swans, and it absolutely made my day.

“May It Please the Court” by Maira Kalman.

When something has delightful, quirky drawings and starts out with “In ancient Mesopotamia…” I’m hooked. Now I have to find a copy of the version of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style that Kalman illustrated. It has a basset hound on the cover. Clearly it was meant to belong to me.

With a tip of the capigliara to Deanna Raybourn, another of my favorite authors:

History Undressed

Yet another “Who can resist?” moment. I do love the Internetz, I do.

Nostradamus wrote a lot more than his well-known Prophecies and Almanacs. He cast many individual horoscopes and made many individual prophecies to private (usually noble or royal) persons. In the course of my research for The Second Duchess I found a prophecy Nostradamus made privately to Alfonso II d’Este, the Duke of Ferrara, although I won’t go into detail about it here because who knows? Perhaps one day it will play a part in another Ferrara story.

However, this seed of information is presently flowering into a lovely plotline in the new book I’m working on. What if, what if. What if Nostradamus had written a series of prophetic quatrains for Mary of Guise, the dowager Queen and Regent of Scotland, mother of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots? Mary of Guise visited France in 1550-1551 and might, just might have met Nostradamus, whose first published Almanac was for the year 1550.

What if the secret quatrains revealed the future of Scotland, vis-a-vis England and France? Imagine what, say, Elizabeth Tudor in England and Catherine de’ Medicis in France would have given to lay their hands on those prophecies.

What if Mary of Guise kept them in a silver casket? What if it was the same casket that eventually held the Casket Letters? What happened to the casket in between?

The thing is, to make this work I have to write the prophecies myself. So I have to write like Nostradamus. Now that is historical fiction with sprinkles.

I am such a sucker for mysterious theories like the Mayan prediction of the end of the world on December 21, 2012. (Apparently it isn’t so much the end of the world as it is the end of a cycle. But I digress.) I also love fiction set in historical Mesoamerica—Gary Jennings’ Aztec, for example, and Simon Levack’s wonderful and not-well-enough-known Yaotl mysteries. So when I saw Brian d’Amato’s In the Courts of the Sun I snatched it up immediately.

I wasn’t disappointed. Wow. What a ride. What an immersion in an ancient, utterly alien culture. It’s part historical fiction, part science fiction, part speculative fiction, part game-theory treatise. The dissonance between the modern-day protagonist and the world he’s thrown into is staggering and really brilliantly done.

I do have to ask, though—why does every book I read these days seem to end with a tacked-on “hook” into the next book? Why can’t a book just end, complete and beautiful in itself? I loved this book and I would have found and purchased a sequel, all by my lonesome. Really, I would.

I am a committed fan of Ariana Franklin’s Mistress of the Art of Death tales. The third book in the series, Grave Goods, finds Adelia Aguilar, medica of Salerno and the English King Henry II’s unofficial medical examiner (or “mistress of the art of death”), sent to Glastonbury to examine two mysterious skeletons which may or may not be the remains of Arthur and Guinevere. (There is fascinating historical background for this, which of course I had to research further after reading the book—one of the great pleasures of historical fiction.)

Franklin’s wry humor intertwines with mysterious monks, suspicious inn-keepers, vanishing traveling parties, terrifying (and sometimes quirkily sympathetic) forest outlaws, walled-up crypts on Glastonbury Tor, sealed secret passages, brooding marshes, and of course the forensic mystery of the skeletons—who are they? How did they come to be buried as they were?

I loved this book, as I loved the first two in the series. I wish, however, that Franklin had not added the very last paragraph. I won’t give away the content of the paragraph or even go into detail about why it jarred me so, but I would be very interested to hear other reactions!

For a writer, I don’t actually write much about writing here, do I?

For me, writing a book is like making piecrust. (Mmmm, pie.) One must pay attention to what one is doing and pull it together with a light hand. Work it too much, and it gets tough and gray. Give it to someone else to play with, and it may turn out to be mince instead of apple. Take it out of the oven every few minutes to see what it looks like, and it will never be more than half-baked.

So although I am in the very early stages of working on a new project, I won’t be writing about it in much detail. It’s also set in the sixteenth century. It also features some historical personages and some fictional characters. It also combines elements of mystery, adventure, romance, character study, fabulous food and magnificent costumery, palace intrigue and sudden death.

Or as I like to call it—historical fiction with sprinkles.

And speaking of stargazing: this month the Moon finds its way from planet to planet, with a star cluster thrown in for good measure; and the Lyrids return.

• April 6: Saturn, which will look like a bright gold-colored star, appears close to the Moon tonight. Observe them together and meditate on the vast distance that actually separates them.
• April 18: Jupiter appears a little to the lower left of the Moon in the very early morning, low in the southeast.
• April 21: Meteors! The Lyrid meteor shower is at its best tonight. For more information click here. Meteor showers are a law unto themselves, sometimes dazzling, sometimes virtually unnoticeable. Bit of historical goodness: in 1095, an April meteor shower (almost certainly the Lyrids) was so spectacular that one Gislebert, Bishop of Lisieux, took it as a sign of heavenly approval for what became the First Crusade.
• April 22: The Moon, Venus, and Mars appear close together low in the east, just as it begins to get light. The Moon will actually occult Venus, hiding it briefly from view.
• April 26: The Moon, the planet Mercury and the Pleiades align low in the west-northwest as night falls. Mercury will look like a fairly bright star. The Pleiades star cluster is a little below the Moon, sandwiched between the Moon and Mercury.

Happy sky-watching!

Have I mentioned that I love history? I’m particularly partial to the sixteenth century, of course, because that’s the setting of my book (books, actually, because I’m beginning to work on another)—but I love bits and pieces of history from any time and any place.

For example, the Associated Press has this to say about Robin Hood:

Julian Luxford, an art history lecturer at Scotland’s University of St. Andrews, says a 23-word inscription in the margins of a history book, written in Latin by a medieval monk around 1460, casts the outlaw as a persistent thief.

“Around this time, according to popular opinion, a certain outlaw named Robin Hood, with his accomplices, infested Sherwood and other law-abiding areas of England with continuous robberies,” the note read when translated into English, Luxford said.

Luxford said he found the reference while searching through the library of England’s prestigious Eton College, which was founded in 1440 by King Henry VI.

And the Times Online reports that a very cold case has been solved:

Archeologists and forensic experts believe they have identified the skeleton of Cleopatra’s younger sister, murdered more than 2,000 years ago on the orders of the Egyptian queen.

The remains of Princess Arsinöe, put to death in 41BC on the orders of Cleopatra and her Roman lover Mark Antony to eliminate her as a rival, are the first relics of the Ptolemaic dynasty to be identified.

Cleopatra’s DNA! There has to be a story there.

From Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Act I, Scene ii:

CAESAR:
What say’st thou to me now? Speak once again.

SOOTHSAYER:
Beware the ides of March.

CAESAR:
He is a dreamer; let us leave him. Pass.

Fortunately there were no soothsayers around on the Ides of March some years ago, and my mother made it safely to the hospital to bring me into the world. Is the Ides of March a cool birthday or what?

My mother had a way with birthdays. My sister’s is April Fool’s Day. Really. And my brother’s is more or less on Thanksgiving (depending on the year). At least they’re all easy to remember!

A vampire? Supposedly that’s what her sixteenth-century contemporaries thought when they wedged a brick in this poor woman’s mouth to keep her from vamping her fellow plague victims and eventually gaining enough “strength” to rise from the dead and start vamping the living.

What is up with ANSA, though, calling 1576 the “Middle Ages”?

We’re in “zone 8” here along the Elm Fork of the Trinity, which means our last frost-free date is in early April. Time for me to start thinking about my garden for 2009! I do love my garden, although I’m not quite as intense about it as Isabella was about her pot of basil!

I always start with a salad garden—tomatoes, red and gold peppers, cucumbers and lettuce. The garden plot is a twelve-foot square divided into four quarters: one quarter for the tomatoes, one for the peppers, one for the cukes and one for the lettuce. The cukes and the lettuce I’ll grow from seed. I’ll buy plants for the tomatoes and peppers. Mmmm—tomatoes fresh out of the garden. There is nothing like them.

I like to plant herbs in containers, in nooks and crannies around the yard, and in the salad garden between the vegetable sections. This year I want oregano and a couple of types of basil, dill and mint, Italian parsley and cilantro, some thyme and sage and mint and lavender, plus chamomile and lemon balm for teas. I have to admit that I don’t cook with fresh herbs as much as I probably should, but I love growing them because they’re so fragrant. And they’re infused with so much history. When I pick leaves of thyme and sage and lavender and breathe in their scents, I feel as if I’m part of a long, long line of women who’ve grown and used herbs back to the dawn of time.