Collection

Have you ever found yourself feeling a kind of ... distrust, when you find out someone isn't a reader? Or special admiration, even a crush, on a writer? Even the smallest phrases can be great storytelling; I am able to clearly remember some of the things that have swept my heart away: Beloved Ex's calling me a wonderful bag of things. Humorous, sure. But ... "telling" in a way that was important to me. A girl who once said to me, I have a voice like rain and brownies baking. The friend who called me a flower-eyed waterfall. And Mr. X ... that time he said to me, "You use your wit and intelligence as if your appearance had no power, and the effect is devastating."

Why the self-aggrandizing intro, today? Well, READ on, my friends. On the evolution of storytelling. It keeps humanity alive, literally. And the best storytellers get the greatest rewards, in egalitarian communities. Hmm.

And now, a little consumer culture ...

Of all the people I have known in the 25-year SUV trend, I am aware of ONE who ever used their winch, and none who ever went offroading, or even camping. (In the 1970s, my cousins did have a proto-SUV, but they skiied and camped and hunted and used its immense capacity in full, though not every single time they drove it.) SUVs looked to my contrarian eyes like a Baby Boomer/yuppie fad from the start, and what rugged behavior I ever *have* seen with them seems to be confined to drivers imagining that "SUV" confers upon them not merely invulnerability but also immunity to the existence of others on the roads when it is snowy and/or icy. (Strangely, this does not appy to rain; everyone in this whole town seems to just *crawl* when there is rain, mist, or drizzle anywhere in a 50-mile radius. No matter what they drive.) Anyway, to the link, Batman: on SUVs, and the developing social structure in America, over the past 30 years. As always, there is room for quibbling here. But it's an interesting wider look at "trends" ...

The older I get, the more I LOVE investigative journalism. Doesn't matter when it's a couple or few years old; the detective stories hold up, and truly good writing never goes out of date. Here's a great piece about discovering provenance, and for my writer friends, stay tuned to the end - the bit about publishing a book is priceless.

Here is a joyous(-ish ...) stocking stuffer for you all! More demented cover fails with the Caustic Cover Critic, guesting over at the Australian Book Designers Association. Featuring: Jane AusTIN and Slash. You know you wanna click!

Tesserae - or - In Democracy, You Don't Necessarily Have to Rewrite History ...

Image: Wikipedia (detail)

One of the reasons I love research is that, if you do it right, sometimes you learn a little bit more than "and then the Catholics enacted damnatio memoriae on Theodoric the Great, because he was Arian Christian."

In Ravenna, Italy, where Theodoric ruled and where most of my WIP takes place, is the Basilica of Sant'Apollinare Nuovo. Dedicated in 504 to Christ the Redeemer, it was his palace chapel. Theodoric subscribed to an early sect of Christianity known as Arianism, a non-trinitarian faith which was at the time of Theodoric and Clovis losing ground rapidly to a smaller, more obscure sect known as Catholicism.

After The Great King's death in 526, several political and religious (and yeah, same thing in many ways) forces combined to produce incalculable unexpected results.

Theodoric, who had spent his youth as a court hostage in Constantinople - honored, cared for, and almost undoubtedly educated by his captors, very definitely in favor with them and well liked by them - was rewritten by his own Ostrogothic nobility as an illiterate Barbarian. This picture of Theodoric the Great holds to this day in the popular imagination (so far as he's popularly remembered at all). Yet a cursory look at his career speaks to a different conclusion.

Also upon his death, the Catholic upsurge in Ravenna, Theodoric's seat as King of Italy, led to certain redecoration.

Look at the image above in another window, zoom a bit, let its details come clear. You will see a couple of disembodied hands.

The Church, taking over Christ the Redeemer when the king's palace chapel became the Catholic's basilica, made some edits to its mosaics and thematic decoration.

Theodoric's family were once framed in each arch showing in the mosaic above. His daughter, Amalasuntha, was one of the figures. Amalasuntha was one of those rare princesses who became a regnant queen - for a while. Theodoric had no sons, and she was his only legitimate offspring. Thus to her fell the responsibility for bearing a royal heir, which she did, but not to great effect. King Athalaric inherited as a child, apparently became dissolute in his youth, and died still under the regency of his mother.

Because I am a lying liar who lies ("writer"), at this point in drafting the manuscript (always note: with a WIP, anything I say and/or write is subject to change), the Catholic takeover of Redeemer, and their ascendancy, are accelerated a little. Not by multiple generations, but I pulled up the most likely time of their reconsecration of Redeemer, specifically, by roughly twenty-four years. Generally thought to have occurred in AD 560, I have it happening within about a decade of Theodoric's death.

The reason I pulled this piece of history into my historical fiction was to play parallels with the Ostrogoths' revisionist history of the Great King and the Catholics' damnatio memoriae of his dynasty, brief though that was.

The most striking thing about the latter events, in the symbol of those mosaics above, is the disembodied hands.

Imagine being the survivor of a dynasty that only survived three generations, looking up at the church your grandfather built, looking for the images of your family, your brother, your mother - and seeing only their maimed fingers or hands.

Irresistible scene, of course. I had to envision that.

But the reason those hands are most interesting is not the absence of everything else. It is their presence.

I've used the phrase damnatio memoriae - and, for the Romans and many other cultures throughout the world and through human history, destroying someone's name, removing them from the history books as it were, was a powerful tool. To be sure, we still remember those whose names have been stricken out. But that's not the point of a DM, not really.

The point of striking out a name is not to pretend "so and so never existed" ... but to point TO their existence, and to highlight the obliteration of anything so and so ever accomplished.

The disembodied hands are not an error, an incomplete obscurement of a vanquished opponent.

They are the reminder of the vanquishing.

We have erased something here, the images said. We have the power to remove—but we want to remind those we have supplanted.Damnatio memoriae was no obliteration. It was a reminder. This has been done, and we have undone.
--excerpt from the WIP

Possibly the deepest root of my patriotism lies in the pride I feel not only in voting, but in witnessing the peaceful transfer of power in the United States. I've participated for 30 years now as an active citizen, and watched this process for about forty-five. I remember Jimmy Carter's election, Reagan's - I remember Watergate, and the echoing word, "impeachment."

I remember the giddy sensation of watching the 2000 election, the fear then, the outrage. I don't expect to forget 2016 without illegal amounts of chemical intervention or outright dementia, neither of which appeals.

The new administration will do some amount of damnatio memoriae as it finds its way. ACA is on the block; many people's futures seem to be as well.

The American DM will not be a revision of history, it will be a change of what is envisioned.

Collection

Happy St. George's Day! Please join J.V. Cullen for a few minutes' fun with facts on April 23. He's always witty, easy reading - plus, Star Wars references and the phrase "Bring out the kittens." *Snort!*

Leila Gaskin has a GREAT post on women (or men) who read books. And I'll be needing the WWRB t-shirt she's designing.

THIS JUST IN: Lilac Shoshani has an interview with Donna Everhart, author of The Education of Dixie Dupree. Neato-spedito!

In the very last link here, we took a look at the stunning preservation of a seventeenth-century silk gown. Now we have an idea as to whose gown that was. I'm completely taken away when we can find owers and stories and histories of artifacts which are interesting enough in their own right, but can be deepened with this kind of provenance.

Gary Corby on The Beatles and stadium gigs even older than Shea. Who wouldn't want to hear an ancient Grecian trumpet-blowing contest?

Proving that The History Blog has more to offer than fascinating silk dresses - how about the intriguing finds at an archaeological dig at Malcolm X's house? From the eighteenth century to 1959 records (you can listen to at a link provided), get a load of where Mr.X (not mine) grew up.

Here is magnificent writing, including a grabber of a first sentence. Whipchick, on the times she's been on fire ... "Burn wards are full of children." *Shudder*

Dense, or Encompassing?

The work in progress has begun to insist to me that I have to work on a riot in which the citizens of my main setting burn down the synagogues.


Growing up, most of my closest friends were Jewish. My oldest friend, TEO The Elfin One, is not merely Jewish, but a teacher - a rabbi - as is her husband. I have known *about* anti-semitism all my life. But I have never KNOWN it.

To face this aspect of historical fiction, to know it must be a part of my own work, is not exactly difficult for me, but it is of course distasteful.

I've blogged before about how much I dislike writing battle scenes.

But writing what is, essentially, one of the earliest pogroms in what isn't even "Christendom" at this period ...


Ugh.


And it's not merely the content that daunts me, it is the wider prospect of the scene, as a part of its world.

Mr. X and I were emailing yesterday, and he was (as he has always been) one of my favorite readers, all "ooh and ahh" that I wrote the atheism post in like 15 minutes (I had been thinking about it for a day - if not, in some form, for months or years beforehand), and discussing the WIP and generally being that guy and that brain who ruined me for all the other guys' brains, and he said that this scene was going to be dense stuff.

And I thought about that.

And I realized that, if it were dense, it might almost be easier. Something that is dense is, perhaps, also self-contained. It has a shape, and boundaries ...

And this scene is encompassing, instead.

I need to contextualize this scene, this moment, this city of Ravenna in the year 519. It needs to be clear to see, in its place within Theodoric the Great's rule, and alongside Italy itself in this period ... when an old king has taken it on as his kingdom - and has no heir. It needs to have a view to Constantinople, which was becoming the new Rome, and where the Nika Riots would follow soon enough. It needs to find its place and focus in the larger picture of what people will insist upon calling the "Fall" of the Roman empire - and its connection to the imperial structures of Rome and of Constantinople, and also the so-called "Barbarian" cultures flourishing just to the north and west of Ravenna.

I need, too, to see the finer grain - to set this moment in the lives of my characters, and the marshy port city they occupied, to understand the weather and the moment and "why here"/"why now" ... The divisions between the minority Ostrogoths and the diversity of this place - the very scent of the wind, and the heat of the day ...



It's scary stuff. And not least because it is a riot, a racist mob setting fire to houses of worship.

And then comes the question.

How do I set this in the picture of the world I live in, myself?

Tools

There are times it frustrates me when people say they are atheists because of what people have done in the name of religion. PEOPLE do dunderheaded things in the name of all sorts of things, and though religion does have extreme examples, there are also extreme idiots (Richard Dawkins) screaming passionately about their atheism. He's as dangerous as any other zealot; and that is the issue: zealotry in human hands is the problem. Not G-d.

To withdraw belief in G-d because of human behavior honestly bewilders me.

It's like me and not having kids.


I never had children because I never experienced the bone-deep desire - the *urge* (so named because of its *urgency*)  to have a child.

This seems to me the very best of reasons never to have them. There have been other thoughts on the matter that have been a part of my life, but at bottom it's the simple absence of need to procreate or adopt, to be a parent, that has been ultimately responsible.

So I can see, very easily, the absence of need for G-d ... and for faith.

But many of the atheists I know once HAD faith - and lost it, because of other people. They experienced disillusionment and shame in religion, because of the jerks who espouse it (whether their own or not) and decided against G-d, because of man.

I suppose this is overwhelmingly arrogant: but this bewilders me.


Anything hideous ever done in the name of religion came about by the hands, and the tongues, of human beings.

Religion is a tool. It can be a poor tool, misused, No doubt about it. So can science and history; my blog is filled with examples of the wrongheaded invocation of history, the way we think it's some sort of plotline leading ever-onward to betterment, and how that must mean humanity now is the best humanity history has ever seen, because: history equals evolution.

Which: no.

So I ABSOLUTELY concur, that there are a hell of a lot of people out there blunting their blades, hammering with a tool meant to cut through confusion, or mistaking the philosophy and questioning of faith for final, firm truth.

But the idea that we then throw out all the tools, instead of sharpening or learning how to use them (for those interested in what those tools have wrought, or could) ...

Isn't that the very last word in Luddite behavior? "It's of no use to me and it scares me, so HULK SMASH!" ... ?



Again: yes. The tools of religion have hurt many people. So have the tools that created the thing we call culture, or advancement. Innovation requires tools.

For me, it is an innovation of the highest order to grow spiritually.

I tried to do that without tools, without a congregation, without inspiration. I ended up making up a lot of religious tools for myself. Offerings, prayers, little personal rituals.

And it got me to a point where I felt I wasn't really that good an innovator, and I needed the help of something outside my own wee and paltry brain.

I reached for religion. My church.

There I found the literally-angelic voice that perhaps inspired me most, but I also found Miss B., with whom I sat at yesterday's services. She was the first who ever welcomed me in the congregation, and she is the very, joyous definition of Christian fellowship. Not because we sit around quoting bible verses at one another. But because she saw me alone as a guest, and made me a member, as fully and as lovingly as education and confirmation and that bishop who laid hands on my head.

Religion, for me - as filled with ritual and script as my church is - is far less about dogma, and so much about communion: the communion of souls. Of just nice PEOPLE. Of congregation. Coming together, and sharing the sunshine yesterday. That is a religious act as profound as the eating of an intincted wafer.

I may still not be the craftsman, with my tools, that (oh, say) Jesus, who was a carpenter, was. But I am part of a team now, a crew, a congregation. Of people I honestly do love, though I spend little time with them of late. And appreciate and respect.

I found the phrase, "Okay, we're past the angelic robes and the beard and the penis, and we're onto something BIGGER!" one day over lunch ...

Faith and hope and growing spiritually? Yes, go big.

Why try for faith, without exultation?



What else is faith for but to bring us together as human beings, and what else, at bottom, does ANY religion foster? Even those religions we condemn as perverted - geared toward exclusion as much as inclusion - geared toward WINNING, and punishment of sin - still require one heart and mind to link to another, and another.

We're only human. We don't always do that well. We don't do it well in business or in study, in reaching goals or explaining them. It's not religion's fault.

And human behavior is human behavior - and flawed, as often as it is beautiful - in the pursuit of whatever it is we do to connect ourselves to others.

An ass in a choir robe is just as much of an ass once the robe is doffed and hymns are suddenly to blame for all that is wrong in the world. The robe didn't sin, neither (perhaps) did the hymn. They were there before disillusionment, and they'll be there after.



If I am a poor painter, I don't blame the brush; not even the paint. It lies within me to learn, or not. Perhaps it lies within me to know I'm a better writer than I am an artist.

But it's not the tools' fault, if I don't sell paintings for stunning pricetags.

Author's Notes - Three-fer

Today, we'll take the next thee entries in the Authorial Notary gloss.  As always, kids - please remember that these are written "in-universe" from the point of view of writing The Ax and the Vase, and so should not be used as sources nor complete explanations.


ARIANISM
Arianism, an early Christian faith ruled heretical by the Catholic Church, was at one time a powerful Christian cult.  The central conflict between the Arian and Catholic faiths lay in the doctrine of the Trinity, which Arians did not accept.  By Arian doctrine, the Son was considered to be a creation of The Father, divine, but not co-eternal with God Himself.  The term was sometimes used as a blanket epithet for any nontrinitarian Christian belief.

Much has been made of Clovis’ adoption of Catholicism, as opposed to the Arianism adopted by those of his peers who accepted Christianity at all—many Catholic faithful accept the tale of Clotilde’s persuasion of her husband; some posit political advantages to his conversion to the Trinitarian faith.  Whatever the case, Clovis’ religious conversion made him the first Catholic king in Europe—and his power and influence, along with the dynastic continuation of his faith, makes this choice one of profound consequence for the millennium following his rule.


ARMORICA
The Armorican Peninsula, or Brittany, was at the time of Clovis’ rule most likely experiencing an influx of Britons, which gave the region the latter name.  There is some speculation that the Catholicism adhered to by this population made Clovis a palatable leader, which could have contributed to his acquisition of this territory by treaty and only minor combat.  Like Thuringia and Tongeren, Armorica presents an example of Clovis’ willingness to forgo war—and, his pet strategy, deceit—for conquest, and to manage his increase of power administratively.


ARRAS
One of the three cities held during the reign of Clovis’ father, Childeric, Arras’ etymology is uncertain, but occupation at the site of the city dates to the Iron Age.  Arras lay southeast of Bononia, southwest of Tournai.

Kim Rendfield

Kim Rendfield has a lot of exciting goings-on and good posts, so I am not burying these within a larger "Collection" post.  She deserves her own, and I don't say that just because I dig the Franks so darn much either.

Wallpaper is a pain, sure.  But the innovation in decoration beat out tapestries because it was still more practical than the textile wallcoverings, especially in an age when the production of paper was on the rise.

Speaking as an author dealing with long-haired Frankish kings, I'll always link to posts about tonsures of the period.  The power of locks wasn't only a masculine concern.  She also has another great guest-post here on the surprisingly contentious subject of clerical haircuts.  (I'm not hair-obsessed at all, why do you ask ... ?)

Finally, her upcoming work is discussed here.  Kim is definitely going to be the toppling point of my TBR pile.

Merovingian Heresies, Divine Descent, “What’s In A Grail?” and the Inspirations That Don’t Come to Fruition

Nyki Blatchley has a great post about all of the above, the Merovingian bit of which sets me to thinking, inevitably, about my own work and some of the more fringe people I might expect to meet once it gets out there.  The Heresy I have discussed before, but the origin of the Franks themselves I should perhaps get into further than the excerpt from Liber Historiae Francorum here.  He's got some good takes on some of the interpretations of what The Holy Grail "means" - both literally, and to us, as readers.

Nyki's experience is a useful illumination of how we come to retire certain stories, and why they can still be interesting even if not viable.

"Bloodline"

It's funny, the places you can run into wisdom.  I've thought for a while now, but continued to avoid, posting about exactly what my religion (as opposed to my faith) really means to me.  At times, it seems like it could be important; but mostly, I know that my heart is my vanity.

A couple of days ago, I fired up "Bloodline" on Netflix, and finally finished watching it just now.  This documentary is the breathless following, over a couple of years, of an investigation into the Merovingian Heresy.  It could be funny, I could play a game of (pardon the offensive terminology, yet it is exactly the right phrase) "bait the 'tards" - making fun of the whacko conspiracy nerds (as one could play the same way with so many docs - about Trekkers, about ferret lovers, what have you) - but I chose to put it in my queue just because the heresy, named for the very dynasty Clovis I founded, is one which, while maddening, is also of at least a passing interest to me.  I have a hard time abiding Dan Brown and this sort of thing (Foucault's Pendulum, which I allowed myself to read twice, with a decade or more between attempts, I have confirmed as a nuisance read), but anyone who knows me or reads here regularly won't be surprised to know this is exactly the sort of car wreck I succumb to rubbernecking.

So we started off this post with mention of wisdom.

I don't find wisdom in the games people play, performing edge-of-your-seat-AWFUL "archaeology" while following TV-series-Batman-level-silly/convoluted clue games and digging up bright shiny bottles they've caked with mud and swear are generations-old buried treasures.  I don't find wisdom in missing the point that, in debunking something passionately, you actually accept its premises in order to deconstruct them.  If you really don't believe a mythology, it isn't particularly necessary, for most people, to spend time and energy (and, in the name of making a documentary, one assumes many many thousands and thousands of dollarse/euros) obsessing about it.

The wisdom I found in "Bloodline" crops up near its end.  With ten minutes left in its nearly two hour run, we come to an interview with the Right Rev. John Shelby Spong, DD, retired Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Newark.  The documentary introduces him as controversial, and, though I must state that even as a relatively newly minted Episcopalian, I know nothing about him - I can believe he's controversial.  Like many in this Church I was drawn to for its compassion, Spong sees change, and perhaps even the abandonment of certain traditions, as growth.  I want to quote him at a little length here:

I think that traditional Christianity, that institutional form of Christianity, is probably dying.  And I'm not sure that letting it die wouldn't be a good thing to happen, because I think When you look at the manifestations of traditional Christianity, they're not very life-giving.  We blessed slavery with the Christian scriptures.  We blessed anti-Semitism with the Christian scriptures.  We stood by and watched Hitler destroy six million Jews, and then we were negative about women, and then we were negative about gay people, and we've been negative about left-handed people and we've been negative about mentally ill people and we've been negative about divorced people.  The Church has victimized a great number of people in this world; now how does that square with the portrait of Jesus drawn by the Fouth Gospel, that says the purpose of Jesus is that we might have life and that we might have it more abundantly?  Is the way we treat gay people giving them life?  Is the way we have treated women giving them life?  ... and so the traditional way in which we have told the Jesus story I think is inaccurate, and I think it will die.  But I don't think the Jesus story will die, and I don't think the power of a G-d presence in human life will die.

As a rule, I write this blog to the standard that anything here could be read by my coworkers, my boss, my government, my nieces - my mother.  This post is not one she'd have a happy time reading.  It's also possible that, apart from being described as "controversial" by a conspiracy documentarian to whom he agreed to give an interview, the Bishop holds views or has done things I might find anathema.  For some reason, I prefer not to start worrying about that with facile research; because in many ways what he says resonates with me.

At bottom, the very concept of divinity is beyond the ability of the magnificent, and yet wee and paltry human brain to actually comprehend.  Those of us who believe in it choose mythologies to cope with it, to guide us, to grapple with *everything* we encounter which is beyond our wee and paltry brains (spirits and hearts).  Some believe those mythologies very deeply indeed.  Some believe an "essence" of these roadmaps to faith. Me, I give up on the particulars, rejoice in the spiritual leader I have been fortunate to find,  and bless what wisdom can be gleaned, without (as above) trying to peer too closely at its provenance.  Staring into the sun is bad for the eyes, and doesn't look interesting enough to justify doing it.  Take the light, live in it, hope it shines on a good path, and try to stay on *some* track, for the most part.

Or explore, be brave, bless the light and still proceed at night as well.  If that means concerning yourself with conspiracies, go with G-d  as they say and try not to hurt anyone including yourself.

It's an interesting watch, in some ways.  But could have been edited down significantly and still have said everything it does.  Watch it, or don't.  This is just the story of what I accidentally seem to have gotten from stumbling on this in my own path.


Edited 07/29/13 to add this - turns out the hoax is admitted.  Hardly a pearl-clutching revelation, but does make taunting the fakers less fun.

Religion

Wow do I like this post.  Yes, any one or group of similar religions may be deconstructed - for silliness, for validity, for hyper-specific oddments, or general pugilism - but at the end of the day ... those of us who choose to subscribe to them do so because they challenge us.

Yeah, or they reinforce us, or tell us we're superior, or that others are inferior, or whatever message it is we in our hearts and selfishness want to hear.  Often, the message is a shared one - this is fellowship.  "We are all better than They", unfortunately, is a commonly preferred message.

(U)nderstanding even the most apparently nonsensical religious practices (and this isn't nearly the most nonsensical, if you're on the lookout for nonsense) is vital to understanding how we are all shaped.    --K. M. Grant

The message I choose to hear from my religion (not my faith, nor my G-d) is that it is itself a tool - and a poor one - for reaching something better.  Better than I am, better than "we" are, better than today, better than yesterday, better than This Plane.  I believe in G-d, but I also very fervently believe there isn't a religion in existence which provides a portrait of the divine - much less a usable map (as if there is such a thing).

This (and my priest) are the reasons I am Episcopalian.  While I'm here, the only way to eff the ineffable is to "give" to the world I live in, to try to make myself a sufferable part of it, to love, to seek greater good, and to - yes - share in some fellowship in that quest.

To the point of Grant's post - as a historical novelist, if I refuse to respect the faith of my characters, the world and expectations in which they lived, I will be unable to write well.  This means respecting all the bad maps and (apparently?) aimless paths we wear for ourselves, in the challenge and the quest to make "better" of ourselves - however "better" is defined.

Part of creating great characters is taking them on their own terms, in every context.  Writing Clovis - a pagan believing himself divinely descended, who accepts and champions Catholicism during a period when so many forms of Christianity (and, indeed, pagan cults) abounded - I had to very seriously consider what motivated him.  Where some historians will say "politics" (... "money"), I could not in the end accept that there was no component of faith involved.  This man renounced some pretty bone-deep beliefs in order to espouse his chosen new religion.  Yes, he was also ambitious to a mercenary extent.  Where to draw all those lines ...

It was a fascinating question I had begun to consider even before Clovis discovered himself to me, became my subject.  It never has quite been answered, nor lost any part of its thrall.

Category By Themselves

At Historical Fiction Online, there's a new discussion centering on History's new series about the Crusades.  For those who haven't seen the advertising, it centers on the statement that "Of all of the wars fought over religion, the Crusades belong in a category by themselves" - and this statement is the focal point of the discussion.

My post:

If the point of a tag line is to market a show about the Crusades, a sensationalistic and narrowly interpreted view of history may well be a must.  I've seen the ads too, and it's not exactly the stuff of dissertations; it's entertainment.  That doesn't make it okay, but to hold this statement to any sort of scholarly analysis is beside the programmers' point.  In any case, the statement itself is one of those technically-defensible declarations like saying to a bad actor, "your performance was *interesting*" or "such-and-such (whatever) is unique."

Depending on how one sets up the concept and determination of "category", sure, the Crusades (as K**** points out, there is more than one way to define that designation, too) belong in one by themselves.  So does any war, so does any ruler, so does any leaf or molecule or system of planets.  It's a pretty meaningless phrase, but it *sounds* heavy with import, so it sells a show.  Nothing new - over millennia now, popular perception still trades on certain stereotypes, facile (mis)interpretations, and misconceptions galore.  This one, being empty, is probably a less important statement than the hard-trodden regurgitations and tropes that will probably comprise most of the content of the programming itself.

The History Channel is a station which also touts a show called "The Men Who Built America" (because, after all, women hadn't been invented in 18th- and 19th-century North America (and that is the only period in which this country's history is relevant - hah)).  They also, not for nothing, rarely broadcast anything to do with history at all anymore, much to a lot of electronic "nyah-nyah"-ing discussion and sneering.

It's not like these folks are anyone's idea of a go-to resource for serious historical scholarship.  I may even watch - if only to encourage the brand (history over pawn-focused "reality" teevee) ...

Season of the Coin

The past month or two seems to be an immensely rich (pardon the pun) time for coin finds.  This one, for variety, did not take place in Britain or the Channel islands!

"Well Cut Through the Body"

My post the other day about ancient underwear was flip and meant to be funny, a failure to represent the level of understanding I do have of the history of human costuming.  Today I'll link a piece probably less accessible to a general audience, but to me significantly more fascinating because of its depth.

A silhouette arose during the post-Conquest period, in Europe, favoring length and slenderness.  Breasts were, ideally, very small and firm - "hard as an apple" - as a description, used even many centuries later, extolled.  The ideal sustained for a very long time, in an age when marriage often involved brides who were very young indeed - though of course it waxed and waned even in those centuries of "get them young, get them virginal."

As interesting to me as anything is the science, in fashion, of *exposure*.  Some may recall my posting about the vogue for nipples in 18th century muslin; here, in another lengthy article we have discussion of side lacing - and the nakedness of skin underneath ancient lacings.

***


Just yesterday I was in church and saw a kid with a bright turquoise curly mohawk.  Being a middle aged old thing in church, it may be it looked like I was ogling the weird youngster.

In reality, I was remembering a bet, thirty years ago.  My brother had a mohawk then, and a classmate who also went to our church bet him (was it twenty dollars, Mojourner? I always remember it as being a pretty good sum) he wouldn't show up there looking so crazy.

She bet against our mom, who wasn't letting anyone out of church for shaving any PART of their heads (replayed a few years later, when I only nipped one side off).  And he won the wager, easy.


What I was thinking, in fact, was that it's sort of funny something which wasn't even completely new 30 years ago is still considered shocking.  Aww.  It's sort of cute.

We didn't invent ... any means of covering, uncovering, nor even actually modifying our bodies any time recently.  None of it.
Cut out sides exposing underwear and naked skin are at least 900 years old.  Exposed nipples probably go back more than the 200+ noted in that link above.  Bras aren't 19th century, and string bikinis have enough sensibility of design we may have been echoing the design even half a millennium ago as well.  Cinching in the midriff, manipulating the breasts, men in long hair, women shaving their skulls (for that matter bodily depilation of both sexes, and not just the head) ... we've done many of the same things through history.  We also use similar techniques to do different things, or come up with new ones to do same-old things ...

Mohawks were wild when this middle-aged woman was a little kid.  They're still shocking The Normals, and tight-laced men and women were a subculture countless generations ago.  Funny how some things don't change:

(Pretty sure this model is a certain acquaintance of mine ...)

Herzliya Find

Crusades coins found in Israel at Herzliya.  I used to know some folks there!  Also:  archaeological geekery.  Yum.

The condition of these coins is astounding, isn't it?  (Photo via Reuters.)

NPR Sadness

The least saddening thing about this is that at least nobody is talking about "winning" anything.

Still.  Sigh.

Illuminating Illuminators

As an inveterate marginalia-ist, I loved this and wanted to share the link.

The Thing About Research

When I was researching Clovis, one of the things I found frustrating about the lack of direct and contemporary sources was the fact that this led to an awful lot of echoes.  "Facts" about his life are picked up and reported frankly, without citation and without clarity.  And thus does common wisdom become history.

Your less deeply analytical sources will repeat the knowledge that Clovis' baptism, for example, took place immediately upon his conversion.

Reading Ax is going to irritate these people.  Because I chose to hearken to other sources.  Sources which analyzed everything from the extent of Clovis' Romanization (did he really convert from Roman paganism? or was he a Thor sort of fellow?) to his dalliance with Arian Christianity to the likelihood of his wife's thirst for blood against her own uncles.

Gregory of Tours said Clovis was a Roman pagan, and an awful lot of pearl-clutching has gone on over the past century and a half or so, regarding how this is a terrible assertion to take at face value.  Historical scholarship needs its pearl-clutching, and I am glad people are willing to think twice about the word of a somewhat less than contemporary cleric not writing history quite to the standard we might (for little reason, really) expect of a scholar today.  Greg had a character to create, a point to make, and either he or Clovis himself was interested in making our man a second Constantine.  The patterns can be drawn ... and so one must ask oneself - how much of this is fact?

I actually used that template - the recreation of Constantine in Clovis - as a choice on the monarch's own part.  And it was this which led me to separate the baptism from the conversion.  Constantine was converted for a LOT of years before he had himself moistened over the whole thing.  And so I took Clovis' Christmas consecration and removed it by many years, too, from his dramatic battlefield conversion experience.

Even if I didn't accept this removal (which, for the record, I wholeheartedly *do*), the fact is that, as an author, the separation of these events provides opportunity for drama.  I am able to build in the tension of a man who has always believed himself descended from a (pagan) god renouncing the tenet of ANY divine descent at all, and setting the standard for Europe of divine *right* ... which is, in fact, ongoing today.  If any of you thinks Elizabeth II considers her position as a simple inheritance, like you or I might inherit a painting or a gold pocket watch - think again.  She expects of herself adherence to a divine placement in her throne.  And it may not be she is alone in looking at her seat that way.  And if she didn't think it her right, G-d-given (and a responsibility to live up to) it's unlikely she'd keep sitting there.

Fifteen hundred years, divine right has been with the cultures extant and born of Clovis' time - and decision.  He had a thing or two to do with the way the world has developed, this guy.

And even so, what we know about him from anyone who ever met him even once:  absolutely nada.

The story about five thousand of his followers following him to the altar right after the battle of Zulpich becomes history, when nobody who was there has a voice we can hear.

The tales of SAINT Clotilde's cruel whispers, to kill those uncles (we also hear sometimes as if it were hard-history) who murdered her father and mother (a mother who, there is POSSIBLE evidence, lived into the sixth century!), are repeated as fact.  Even by those who acknowledge her a saint.

The stories are good, to be sure.  I won't pretend I didn't cherry pick the ones I found most intriguing.

But read with care, *any* history.

And read with joy, historical fiction ...

Pyx Ampoule

There is a legend sometimes attached to Clovis, always attached to Remigius of Rheims, that at his baptism, the miraculous oil was brought from the heavens by a sacred dove.  The Sainte Ampoule was one of those tales I saw no way to incorporate in the novel, and felt no urge to, and so did not - yet it is a fun legend, and I was strongly reminded of it again here.

New to Episcopalianism, I didn't grow up with burses and pyxes, nor even consecrated Hosts, so (what is to me) High Church accoutrements are still novel to my eyes.  I didn't know the pyx ever came in the shape of a dove

but it *is* a fascinating point - even if the migration of the form seems to have been inherited from the East - that this was an early Church style used in France.

Peace be with you, from St. Remigius and me.