Waking up in a French cave, by Gillian Polack

This morning I’m dreaming of France. 

I suspect this is a problem that writers who use history in their fiction tend to have. Not specifically to dream about France, but to wake up mentally in the place and time of a novel. This morning I was certain that I would step out of bed into a cave system and that, just outside the main entrance, I’d find the Languedoc I used for Langue[dot]doc 1305.

I can tell you exactly how this strange moment came about, and the story of how it came about is actually more interesting than the moment itself.

My favourite research time was when I walked in the countryside, on the pilgrim’s route. I saw the flowers and felt the air. That gave me a mental toolkit for walking from the channelled air and warm streets of St-Guilhem-le-Désert to a flowing path of the pilgrimage to what I already knew about the stillness and chill of limestone caves. To be honest, caves are seldom entirely still if they are alive, but compared with the different feel of the air in different parts of the hillside outside the caves, they felt so still that they became contemplative.

Leaving town to go on pilgrimage. Photogr

aph: Gillian Polack

The caves became my hallmark moment for the novel, the one I used as a bridge to get into it. This isn’t because that’s how the time travellers got there. It’s because I’ve loved cave systems since I was a child. The feel of my caves was from Australia, married with research into how the caves in that part of France were different to those I knew.

I still have a scribbled diagram somewhere of how I drew the caves and built them. My town is real and my countryside is something I could walk on today if I didn’t live so very far away. This whole blogpost is being written by someone in Canberra who woke up in Languedoc then got out of bed and thought, “Bother. Still Canberra.”

There be caves in these rocks! Photograph: Gillian Polack

But my caves are a place that cross time and space and I can wake up in them from time to time. Today a group of triggers tricked me into waking up to a cool and still world. Another blanket and I’d’ve stayed in bed an hour longer and dreamed dreams of France. 

The first of the events that triggered this morning’s moment of strangeness was my return to France this July. I was in the north. A different type of warmth. Amiens is clammier in summer, with marshes rather than hot hillside. Cooler, but it felt warmer. I found respite in a boat rather than in stone houses and in dreams of caves. Still, each time I’m in France, I remember other times and Languedoc was lurking.

The pilgrim route. Photograph: Gillian Polack

Then someone read my novel and didn’t like it. We all have our audiences and this reader wasn’t one of mine. He gave a neutral review, which was very fair, and I nodded to myself and hoped that he’d find a book to his taste in the next one he picked up.  The reviewer not enjoying it was not a problem.

One thing he said, though, niggled me.

When I built up that very careful Middle Ages, I put in a lot of history that people were living. It wasn’t explained. 

The way my Medieval people behave is based on research concerning lives, economy, religion and a range of other things. I already had The Middle Ages Unlocked to play with and all the notes on the French Middle Ages that went with earlier research (for I am a Medieval historian, when all’s said and done), and I also had all the material that didn’t go into that volume. This was my starting point for Langue[dot]doc 1305. I then spent several weeks building up the commerce of the region and understanding it and working out where each character fitted and how it affected their lives. I knew the flow of trade and what made that trade. I knew the seasons and the hierarchies and the odd little opportunities that came up.

There were no explanations of these commerce systems because my characters were living them. Bona’s apprenticeship was derived from some comments made in a teaching document from Montpellier. The document challenged existing assumptions about the opportunities for girls in medieval Montpellier. I measured its challenge against what we knew about local trades and crafts. from a commercial history of Montpellier and its region to see how to give her that path out of small town living that would have been so very desirable.

Modern Montpellier. Photograph: Gillian Polack

I researched how the sale of cloth took the sales part of a weaving team to fairs outside the town and why a particular type of horse should neither be kept in a small hilly town without the social infrastructure that would enable it to be used and why it was unlikely to simply be sold locally. I showed where people bought different items and how a noble would move from being in the world of his peers to being in the Mediterranean trade world and what it would cost him. I only showed these things as the story and its characters required it. 

I didn’t explain any of this. Anyone wanting a primer on Medieval commerce or politics or… most things… needs to go to non-fiction. My characters were living the world and didn’t tell each other the obvious. If I were to tell you I was typing this article on my trusty computer, it would be very tactful of you to stifle a laugh because, right now, it’s only if I get the article together in another way (by dictating as I swim in the local streams, especially given I cannot swim) that really is worth of comment. 

It’s a difficult decision that each writer makes. Worlds don’t come magically to life. We work at them and think them through and decide which bit works for us and how it will work and, today, why one particular approach worked for me for one particular novel and why this one approach is not a universal one and doesn’t work for all readers. 

The bottom line is which parts of daily life need explaining and which don’t. Some writers would give a description of that commerce and their book would be perfect for that reader. I did not and my book was not. Thinking about it and working out why I did not and just how important it was to me to have my townsfolk live and my scientists talk about things led me into the cultural differences between my time travellers and the Languedocian townsfolk. 

That was why I made the choices I made. I wanted readers to see my Middle Ages from the inside, since I already had The Middle Ages Unlocked to show them from the outside. And that was the thought I went to bed on last night.

I may be a Medieval historian, but bringing the Medieval world to life in my novel meant I had to make it so believable that I myself can step into it and it’s there when I wake up in the morning. This morning I did just that.

History in my writing, a reflection - Gillian Polack

It's a very cold winter in Canberra. I ate lemonade fruit tonight and pretended it wasn't cold, but outside right now, it's zero degrees. It's easy to think about ghosts in the dark season and about being haunted.

Some winters are haunted in a good way. A collection of my short stories was released in June and the new edition of my time travel novel will be out in just two weeks. This means I’m haunted by how my writing has changed over four decades. That’s not what I’m going to talk about here. This is because there’s an even more interesting change that has happened to my writing and it’s one that’s a lot more interesting to people in this corner of the internet: how I use history in my fiction has changed.

In my heart of hearts I am an historian. I will always be one. 

When I was a child, I didn’t bring history together with fiction the way I do now. They were two equally important parts of my life, but quite distinct. I built a wall between them in fat, and kept building whenever I noticed one from the vantagepoint of the other. This began to change when I was an undergraduate, because I became an ethnohistorian and historiographer. This means my most important sources for my history were fiction. I used fiction to interpret the period and place a story was written. In fact, for my undergraduate thesis, I used the Old French chanson de geste to get some insight into how people described history in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. My history back then was challenging and theoretical.

My fiction back then was either straight literary (the story I won a prize for was about how an actor acted) or pure science fictional. Examples of both of these were included in my new collection and they made me wonder “Why wasn’t I writing historical short stories?”

Sherwood Smith, in her introduction to Mountains of the Mind, gave me the answer. My fiction is generally very tight character-based narrative. And it’s much harder for a cultural historian to stay in the head of someone not from their vicinity. The very nature of my research until a few years ago kept me at arm’s length. I knew that I couldn’t think like someone from twelfth century France, so I didn’t write much fiction using the Middle Ages even though I was not only a medieval historian, but one to whom other writers came for help. My specialisation was a two-edged sword.

I mocked myself about it. One of my short stories “Horrible Historians” is me laughing at my incapacity to break past the historian’s responsibility to not get too close to their subject.

Langue[dot]doc 1305was a sea-change for me*. I didn’t just create time travellers going back to my period: I finally sorted out how to get inside someone’s mind without breaking faith with my historian self. I also explored how other writers worked with history, and began to understand so many things about the wall I'd built for myself.

If I had a wall between my history and my fiction and if I was dismantling that wall, this novel was a volcano. It could erupt at any time and destroy a lot of things I loved. It didn’t. There were moments when I was researching and I had to write it in a particular way to deal with what we know about the past and what we cannot know about the past and the fact that a good novel makes the past real to readers regardless of how much we actually know and how little we can know. But those moments didn’t result in any volcanic action.

Ever since it first came out, I’ve been waiting for fellow-historians to say “This is all so very wrong” or for fellow fiction writers to say, “Shame you can’t write a good novel.” Neither has happened. Either they like it (and tell me so) or they’re politely quiet. I haven’t had to breathe in fumes of outrage. There may be a volcano, but if there is, it hasn’t even breathed gas.

This led, as night leads to day, to a change in my research. I wanted to know why we don’t get enough historical novels that have this placid effect on historians. What it is in our culture that helps us (as writers) choose what we put in our fiction? What do we put in our fiction without even thinking about it, by default? That’s what I’m working on now, and it’s illuminating. I’m writing more and more history into my fiction as I learn which choices come from where and what they actually do.

What this means is that I’m still a cultural historian, still an historiographer and still an ethno-historian. I’m partly a specialist in the Middle Ages and partly a specialist in narrative.

It turns out that my fiction and history were always linked. I just didn’t know what the links looked like and now they’ve morphed into something quite visible. Now that I can see them, I’m using a lot more history in my fiction. I finally understand what I’m doing, you see.

What am I doing this month? History in France. It’s time for a research trip so that I can write a new novel that uses history in fiction. I want to push these ideas a bit further.

*It’ll be out again on 17 July. Let me give you the new cover, to rejoice in its re-release.

Treasuring history through fiction, by Gillian Polack

This month other History Girls are writing about favourite books. I did that recently, so I thought, to balance those posts, I’d give you some context. Those books that we read and that we treasure and that we remember are part of a gorgeous cultural pattern. Right now, that cultural pattern means that historical fiction is changing. I want to look at what exactly is happening. 

Photo: Gillian Polack, Sydney 2015

Two decades ago there was a vast gulf between historians and fiction writers. This hasn’t always been the case. It wasn’t so much the case in the time of Walter Scott. And it’s not the case right now. It’s now socially far more acceptable to read certain types of fiction as part of enjoying history. The way history is written into many novels has changed: it’s more sophisticated, more aware and far more researched.

Writers have changed. Some of the writers who changed are here, in the History Girls. They looked at the history they fell in love with and they said “We can do this better.” They researched and they learned and they understood and they brought to their novels a greater depth of understanding. It didn’t happen overnight, but if you look at any of the established writers here, you’ll find that, over the years, their work has developed.

I discovered how this happened when I started researching historical fiction writers. Historical fiction writers have always loved history (why would someone write a novel on a historical theme if that someone didn’t enjoy history, after all) but what I discovered was that their attitude to research is at the heart of the sea-change in historical fiction. Some talk to scholars on their specialist subjects. Some frequent specialist archives. So many historical fiction writers do site tours and understand the place the novel is set. 

When I looked at the different attitudes towards research that writers of different kinds of novels have (for a book, which is still a new release and which I am still celebrating), the attitudes of historical fiction writers were closer to those of academic historians than those of science fiction writers, even of science fiction writers who write time travel or alternate histories. There’s still a big difference between history and fiction, but in recent years, historical fiction writers have worked to diminish that gulf.

Next came the readers. I discovered this very personally when I suddenly became more popular at conferences and conventions. Readers wanted to talk about my fiction with me, but they were even more interested in understanding history. These active and questioning readers of novels don’t just pose their technical questions to the historians: readers can be a lot tougher on the history fiction writers use than they used to be. 

There have always been some readers who knew a lot and questioned a lot and thought deeply about the subjects of novels, but the sea change means that there are a lot more of them. I meet them when they want a signature for the Beast (aka The Middle Ages Unlocked, which I co-wrote with Katrin Kania), for they love checking out the sort of background their favourite writers might use. Their favourite writers are usually those same writers who have done so much extra work on the history for their novels.

Some readers will spend as much money on books related to the history in their favourite fiction as they spend on that fiction itself. I’ve been asked about my sources for Langue[dot]doc1305 so often that I put a list of them on my blog, and written articles about them. And I’m not alone in this. So many writers end up talking about their experience in archives or in exploring primary sources or establishing an accurate date for an event as much as they talk about the characters their readers love and love to hate.

Readers do not work alone. They often join groups with similar interests. The Historical Novel Society has been a critical component of this change in historical fiction, and so have organisations like the SCA and the Richard III Society. 

Popular history and serious history are no longer as deeply divided. This opens the door to readers who want to approach novels with more insight into the history and more of an understanding of what possibilities it holds.

Writers respond to their readers. Often, they share similar interests. Elizabeth Chadwick, for instance, is a member of Regia Anglorum, a re-enactment group. She doesn’t just write the Middle Ages: she researches it, performs it and comes to understand it on many levels and from many angles. She is not alone. I can think of at least a half dozen writers who delve into the past during their spare time and whose novels reflect this. The tales these writers tell are still easy to read, but the history in them is better understood and more carefully thought out. It’s part of a complex feedback loop that has led to where we are right now, where historical fiction is successful commercially while its readers and writers see its historical contexts more clearly. They create possibly the best bridging between history and the general public that we’ve had since Walter Scott.

Compared with the demands of writers and readers, the critical world is a step behind. This is because the critical world is undergoing changes of its own. As I love saying, this is another story for another time, but it’s worth noting here. It’s also worth noting that blogs like the History Girls will help the world of criticism catch up, as it becomes clearer and clearer what audiences demand from historical fiction and what writers are willing to give.

Yesterday the History Girls turned five years old. I’m hoping it has many, many good years ahead because it’s very much a part of these changes in the way we see history and think about the past. It helps bring the work of scholars out of the university and gives it directly to the reader, whether the reader is on the train, on the beach or sneaking in a few pages of a favourite book on an e-reader.

THE MIDDLE AGES UNLOCKED: Elizabeth Chadwick interviews the authors.

About 15 years ago I met medievalist historian, lecturer, editor and author Gillian Polack on an online forum and over the years we gradually got to know each other. (she's also a History Girl!)  I often send her historical queries and she's my go to person if I want to ask anything about French or English 12th and 13th century culture. 

Gillian Polack

I have only recently met textile archaeologist, teacher and academic Katrin Kania but she is lovely and highly knowledgeable.  I recently sent her a query about men's shirts in the 12th century and she was able to give me the answer!

Katrin Kania 

For as long as I have known Gillian, she has been writing The Middle Ages Unlocked. It has gone through several changes from catterpillar to butterfly. Its working title was 'THE BEAST' because of its vast scope.   I was uitterly delighted for both Gillian and Katrin when they found a publisher for what I consider is an essential work that should be on every medievalist's bookshelf.  I was also honoured and delighted when they asked me if I would write the introduction.

I thought it would be interesting to ask Gillian and Katrin a few questions about UNLOCKING THE MIDDLE AGES and their journey together so far, so here they are, complete with some enlightening answers!

ELIZABETH:  Can you give the blog readers a quick resume of THE MIDDLE AGES UNLOCKED and its purpose. What do you think readers will gain from it? 

GILLIAN: The original main purpose behind the book was because there wasn't anything quite like it (though a few came close) and there was a crying need for it.  I know there was a crying need because people kept telling me so.  So many readers wanted an introduction that didn't assume that they knew a vast amount of history, but that alseo didn't treat them as intellectual lightweights.  This is why it was begun, originally, and why it kept changing form and content.  It was quite hard to establish what people really did need when the main thing they knew was that they hadn't seen it.

KATRIN: The main purpose of the book for me is to provide a basic understanding of the topics and how they interconnect.  With a basic understanding, the reader can go on to research, for instance, stone masonry or stained glass or Arthurian legends or Judaism.  But to find scholarly articles for research and to really profit from them you need a solid basis to stand on, and that can be difficult to find.

ELIZABETH: Is there anything you would like to say to potential readers?

KATRIN: Be aware that you will have deeply ingrained cultural assumptions and biases that will colour how you read and interpret history.  While working together, Gillian and I kept stumbling across little differences in our basic assumptions that made big differences in how we read the same text with the same facts.  Working together has been an eye-opener for me in that regard, and although I was theoretically aware of how one's own background can be an influence, actually dealing with effect of these influences really drove the point home.

ELIZABETH: THE MIDDLE AGES UNLOCKED has been a long labour of love for you - Gillian, I can remember you were working on it more than ten years ago and its unofficial title has always been 'THE BEAST'. What made you begin writing it in the first place and allied to that, can you tell us a little about its journey to publication?  I know that it has been a tale of ups and down.  How did the collaboration work between you and Katrin as part of that journey?

GILLIAN: There once was a mail list called LMB. Seriously it's where I met you and a lot of my friends. It's where we all chatted and swapped tales and a friend called Tamara Mazzei said (and everyone else echoed) 'We need this book.'  Tamara Mazzei was key to the first team, as was Wendy Zollo, who did some lovely sketches for clothes, and Lara Eakins (an astronomer) who was going to do the astronomy.  Life caught up with everyone and somehow I was left to carry THE BEAST through to publication.  I've joked so many times that it was my albatyross, for it was one of those tasks that one does for others and finds that it takes over one's life.  Now it's out there and people are finding it useful.  I'm glad I did it, but I'm also glad that Katrin joined me about this time of year in 2011: THE BEAST is not a book to be written by one person alone.  I'd like it if the material Tamara worked on saw the light of day sometime; she did some lovely work.  I'll hand over to Katrin to talk about the publishing end. 

KATRIN:  We did have a lot of ups and down - many of the editors we spoke to were interested in the book and did like it, but it still didn't work out.  There is more to getting a book into a publishing house catalogue than pleasing the editor: it also has to fit in with the rest of the programme, sales and marketing has to decide - whether it's saleable and so on.  Which means that we heard 'I like this book, but we're not the right house for it' more than once.

Our collaboration in finding a publisher was much like our collaboration in writing the book itself.  We tried to play to each other's strengths - I would often draft the letters and e-mails and provide the basic structure and Gillian made sure it was proper English (she can tell a tale or two of how German and English spelling clash at key points in letters) and that there was proper narrative.

ELIZABETH: How did you go about organising your sections? Did you always know that it would begin with 'Rich and Poor. High and Low: The People of Medieval England'  and end with 'How Many Miles to Babylon? Measuring Things?  How did you decide?  And how did yu decide on the great, evocative chapter headings?  Incidentally I love 'Death and Taxes you cannot avoid.'  Too true!

KATRIN:  We swapped chapters around more times than I like to remember.  Any book about a complex topic with lots of cross-connections will run into chapter structure problems, and we had them all the way through. Many of the tings we write about are relevant to more than one topic.  The final chapter order is a mixture of a big restructure that we did while discussing the book with another editor and our original structure - for a long time the book started with the government and religion sections.  The chapter headings were actually one of the last things we did before handing in the manuscript, our working titles were much less interesting.  Apart from the one about the land which was 'Nature Calls' for a long time!

GILLIAN: Some of our working titles were fun but not usable. We had one that was perfect for Katrin but reminded me of a well-known Australian song for instance, and it took ages for us to find a workaround that didn't bring the tune to mind.  I don't work with soundtracks because my soundtracks become earworms and that's exactly what Way Out West was.  Let me share it with you.
Way Out West

ELIZABETH: Which areas of this period do you think are well represented in terms of what we know and which have scarcer resources?  What would you liked to see researched in the future?  Is there anything  that especially interests you that you'd like to see? And are there any changes you'd like to see in the way we study history? 

GILLIAN: That's such a huge question.  I'm going to be quite evil and let Katrin answer.

KATRIN: I think that whatever topic you are looking into, as soon as you delve deep, you will find there are a lot of things we don't know.  On the surface many aspects seem to be well researched and well known but once you burrow down, there are holes in our knowledge and so many details that are confusing or unexplained.  As for changes in how we study history, I'd like to see more interdisciplinary work.  We can learn so much from our colleagues in adjacent disciplines - but it can be hard to get started because questions and methods are often very, very different.  So what I would like to see for future research is a way of teaching scholars how to communicate with those from adjacent disciplines.

ELIZABETH: If you could write a reference work as big as you liked, is there anything else you would add to 'UNLOCKED.'

GILLIAN: All the things we left out!  A vast and detailed bibliography, footnotes, lists of birds and animals and plants and comets and eclipses.  For THE BEAST as I would have preferred it, we would have needed four times the number of pages.  It would be unpublishable alas.  Most of the things we left out, we left out because there are limits to what one can do with a print book.

ELIZABETH: Can you give us examples of common misconceptions about this period that you have come across? 

 KATRIN:  Clothes were drab, grey sacks.  Making a fire with flint and steel was difficult and took a long time.  That's just naming two of them that irk me on a very personal level but Gilliam can tell you many, many more...

GILLIAN: So many misconceptions!  That castles were built in the geographical centre of towns, always. That people never washed and were deeply superstitious and weren't very bright. That people in the Middle Ages disguised rotting meat with expensive spices. That chastity belts and iron maidens were not later inventions. That...so much.
I teach whole workshops in breaking down misconceptions.  We have a lot of fun, but there often comes a moment when I explain very gently to someone that these are our ancestors we're talking about and if their ancestors really did all these things, then I'm terribly sorry for them. We generally come to an agreement that I won't be rude about their ancestors and that they will pay attention to the historical evidence and do some serious thinking.

ELIZABETH: THE MIDDLE AGES UNLOCKED brings together a vast range of subjects under one cover - the life cycle from cradle to grave, languages, religion, taxes, the military, economics, travel, clothes, food and so on.  I am struck by the breadth, depth and scope of the work which never fudges or skimps, and unites disciplines.  It's one of those books that in my opinion should form part of the backbone in the library of anyone interested in the Medieval period.

GILLIAN: Thank you!  I learned more from working on it than from my doctorate.  I now have a a much better insight into how my own work fits into the wider medieval world.  I'd read a squillion books about the Middle Ages and of course I'd studied my own specific subjects, but it takes the depth of a big and broad project to see how it all fits together. Working with Katrin was also very good for expanding my horizons.  I studied a bit of archaeology as an undergraduate but that was all.  I know so much more about what archaeologists do and the insights they can give us.  It's been a roller-coaster ride, but I am very pleased to have ridden that roller coaster.

KATRIN; I can only second what Gillian says - both the thanks and the statement.  It really was a wonderful and very long roller-coaster ride!