Taking my hat off to millinery: when an historical novelist puts the art at the heart of her new book - Michelle Lovric

One of Casanova’s famous anecdotes dates to his time in Turin, where a milliner was fatally obsessed with her lover, the Comte de la Perouse. When she lay dying, the priest arrived to administer the last rites. Rather than take the Eucharist, the milliner swallowed a miniature of la Perouse. Casanova was inspired to write two poems about this gothic extravagance of romance.

I too wrote a poem about her. It was published in my first novel, Carnevale.

So, 25 years ago, I already earmarked milliners as women of interest.

I like a woman who can weaponize silk, art, gesture and love.

For the last few years I’ve been writing a milliner in early 19^th century Venice. In doing so, I fell into my own obsession with hats and feathers. You won’t be beaten over the head with hats in my novel, The Puffin. But you won’t be able to finish the book without learning something about the historical millinery trade: its language, its tools, its colours, its creative and even military possibilities.

I have been lucky enough to have superb partner in this enterprise – Tina Giuntini, who is both a millinery historian and modern-day milliner. Tina and I met by chance – but meeting her changed my writing life. (Photo of Tina below right by Kelly Lemon). 

Where do I begin to thank her? For the lessons in millinery in person and in correspondence? For the antique and vintage millinery tools she lent me so I could feel their weight and simulate their work? For the lexicon of millinery – toliker, awl, egg iron and more.

Tina shared her image library and directed me to the books I needed to read. She has also made hats that substantiate the roles they play in my novel’s plot. She even created little hats for the puffin who is the catalyst of the story.  

She took a model puffin back to her studio in Seattle, where she photographed it with her historic forms and tools.

Forget AI; I had Tina in 3D. Best of all, I knew she was checking my invented milliner against her real self, and I felt that the works of my imagination were somehow verified.

In The Puffin, the hats, tools and feathers in the book are not just decorative; they are also plot mechanisms. They are used to thwart the vigilance of Venice’s Habsburg masters. My protagonist Alva is a brimstone milliner making combustible hats. But she can protect herself by trading on the notion that hats are the merest feminine frippery and that no one needs to give them a second glance – rather like milliners.  

POEMS FROM HATS AND TOWARDS HATS

I started work on this book by writing poems about hats, straw, feathers, feather-curlers (gleaned from their trade cards in the London Archives), female places of work, colour. I used poems to explore ideas about the language and geography of hats and about the women who created them. The character of Alva emerged from somewhere between the lines of this poetry. So did the excellence of her millinery. To protect her modesty, it became appropriate for the poet Tommaso to explain the enchantment cast by Alva’s hats. Here is one of his descriptions:

Poetry erupted out of Alva in hats. Her bonnets told stories and sang lyrics in an irresistible accent.        Like a storyteller, Alva threaded pace through image. Like a poet, she could evoke the mist around a     spice-ship’s mast, using just a coil of net. She could swoop joy into the contour of a brim. She’d     sometimes let me sit behind a screen in her studio to witness her recasting women’s biographies with her hats. Straw was the least thing Alva worked with. She worked with luminosity, awling holes through brims so light exploded like a blown dandelion on the skin. Like weather, she could make the air different under a hat. A writer and the weather must bend the knee to a milliner of Alva’s genius, for she also illustrated her tales in a whole lexicon of colours: Dust of Ruins, Pomona Green, Barbel Blue, Nankeen Yellow and a cavalcade of reds. She had texture. She had fantasy. What if everyone had their own flower? – that’s what Alva made happen: scooping worlds into a single face. Her hats could steal the breath of strangers. Isn’t that intimacy? Isn’t that poetry? Stolen, intaken breaths?

Alva has a more pragmatic view of her profession, partly because she has other things going on. She speaks thus of her studio in Cannaregio:

Once upon a time the Calle della Pegola was the street of the caulkers, the men who keep ships afloat, attending to the risk of leaks with tar and wooden pegs. When I was sixteen, it became my street, where I fashioned hats to set women at full sail, keeping them safe upon the salt-sweet sea of encroaching age and lovelessness that might otherwise engulf them.

So what else does Alva have going on apart from astonishing millinery? She is also a member of the sect of the Carbonari, a variant of freemasonry.  The Italian Carbonari plotted liberation from the Habsburg empire, which occupied Venice from the early 19^th century until 1866.

Alva hosts the  secret ‘baracca’ of the Venetian Carbonari in her studio. She is more than their landlady. In fact Alva is the ‘Mother Tongue’, the musa ispiratrice of the Venetian movement. She makes hats for fashionable women who love to talk – and are happily indiscreet in front of a mere milliner, a tradeswoman, a person who is socially invisible. Information is life-and-death for an outlawed sect. So Alva makes sure her client include Austrians and aristocratic Venetians. 

Her least favourite client is Portia Saukalt, the daughter of an Austrian banker.

I came to know her face as well as my own. La Sau’s features were crude, like an imprint in a stale pillow. Her hair was dulled by thirty Habsburg winters. Her voice grated. Portia Saukalt’s enormous ears needed to be hidden inside bonnets and turbans of intricate inner construction. A small thorough blue eye she had, with a great appearance of stoniness about it. Missing: any trace of empathy. Yet I’ll never know anyone to match Portia Saukalt for seeking out your glance and forcing it to stay on her. She confused you with her singular intensity; your aesthetic sense was destabilized by her.

With her small head and lumpen shoulders, my newest client was a story even my hats struggled to tell gracefully. She was from the start a constant trial to me, not least because a woman who wore a hat of mine should look like a woman who deserved to wear that hat. And it was precisely for this reason that la Sau made me rise to the highest expression of my art, that is, of composing hats to make you forget an ugly face. More, Portia Saukalt needed hats to intimidate the enemy and everyone was the enemy. 

As a woman, laughably, she also hunted admiration and lovers. My hats expounded on the structural differences between men and women, each of whom naturally craves what he or she is not and has not. The more I succeeded with her millinery, the more heat Portia Saukalt knew she could raise in men who wouldn’t understand they were actually falling in love with a hat.

WOMEN’S WORK

Writing Alva gave me a chance to look at women’s work … how it is persistently undervalued even to the point of being unseen. No one thinks that Alva could be a member of the revolutionary Carbonari movement, because her work has the ephemerality and triviality of fashion, and because it is to do with women. The plot shows how women and women’s work are underestimated … and not just by men. Women also underestimate each other. By the end of the story this is going to prove deadly to one of them.

There was a real-life example from the period for me to follow. Alva takes as her model the Colombian seamstress Policarpa Salavarietta (image from Wikimedia Commons). Poli (as she is still known) spied on Spanish aristocrats of Bogota while sewing their clothes, gleaning information that was used to fuel the fight for independence. None of her chattering high-born ladies suspected that Policarpa was working to destroy the Spanish hold on her country. In my novel, Alva reaches out to her heroine. But Policarpa was betrayed and executed by the Spaniards. It’s only at the end of The Puffin that Alva finds out what happened to the letter she sent to her sister in needles and revolution.

FEATHERS  & EMPIRE

Alva works with feathers obtained by her merchant brother at the famous London auctions. Here Favaloro secures exotic sought-after feathers such Quetzal tails from South America, which was at that time rising up to throw off the shackles of Spanish domination. So hats also gave me a path into my other chief theme of Empire. Feathers also worked for me in the exploration of the predatory, wasteful, misconceived relationships between humans (the word ‘humanity’ doesn’t work here) and birds –  and indeed between humans and all too many animals.

The novel’s eponymous bird comes from Norway where it was and still sometimes is a perilous thing to be a puffin. Norwegians not only eat puffins but also use their feathers for soft furnishings, their leather for shoes and even burn their oil in lamps. And a raw fresh puffin heart is apparently still considered a delicacy in some parts of Scandinavia. 

In my novel, the way people react to the puffin serves as a useful index of their humanity. 

The villain captures the puffin, exploits it for commercial gain and even imagines the profit in a stuffed puffin as a hat ornament.

At a key point in the book, Alva has a close encounter with the puffin. Lost in his eyes, she has an epiphany about her own place in the complex international business of murdering birds.

I try to be less human, more bird.

  … And that’s how I fall. That’s how I know.

In the puffin’s eyes I see dying ranks of egrets, their heads and shoulders meat-raw to the bone from feathers ripped out. I hear the slow, hoarse screams of ostriches as their throats are cut by Tuareg horsemen. Until now, the birds died invisibly. If their dying moments had crossed my mind, it was quickly and silently. I bethink my own stake – as a milliner – in the life of birds. Literally it’s a stake in their hearts.

 … How many birds have died so I could give the illusion of lightness to a heavy piece of womanflesh? Many, many. To lure the Contessa, I knowingly used the Barbary plume of an ostrich that was murdered for it.

 I think about the puffin-bellies in which Favaloro has always hidden our carboneria before tucking it between cod flesh and its skin. I tell myself those puffins were dead anyway; this way they too made their sacrifice for Venetian liberty. Yet, looking at this living puffin, I fail to believe myself. I despise my own sophistry. Guilt grows worms in my gut.

Still, there’s a road to goodness.

Palabra, my word on it – from this day forth, no bird on this whole earth shall be killed again so I may decorate a hat. Not even for a precious Barbary plume will another ostrich be hunted on my account.

I shall keep faith with feathers. It’s fitting that I do.

Alva’s solution: she stops using feathers and instead makes flowers from fish skins. (Thank you, of course, to Tina for alerting me to this practice.)

MILLINERY IMAGERY

The Puffin is a book built out of hat imagery.

The humble egg iron of the millinery trade is the novel's most visible murder weapon and is used in other ways too, including an attempt to rescue the puffin from captivity.

Perhaps the chief totemic object is a Barbary Plume –  a miraculous ostrich feather –  with a biography that Alva recounts. Both one of the characters (an enslaved boy) and that plume are brought to Venice from one of the famous Livornese feather traders in Tripoli.

A hatbox hides the liberated puffin. Even the milliner’s etui, an ostrich shell holder for sewing implements, comes into play. 

A dragonfly ornament on a hat warns people of a woman who is dangerous, relating to the Venetian superstition that the breath of the insect is fatal to humans. 

Finally, hats are the heroes of a climactic scene towards the end of the book when Venetians gather to watch a poet and his poetry go to the scaffold.

A TALKING HEAD

Another key millinery element is Alva’s marotte or tête à chapeau. A milliner spends a lot of time alone. It seemed to me natural that Alva – who has a lot to say but few who want to listen –  would have an intense relationship with her marotte. I’ll let Alva explain …

When Favaloro was away, I practised the lingua franca on my têtes à chapeau, the life-size busts on which I, like all the sister hood of milliners, displayed my wares. The têtes were modelled in painted cartapesta stuffed with horsehair. Ranked on hollow tree trunks fluttering with silk shawls, these neat bodiless ladies were my own little army. I added one more tête with each year of success, ordering them from Brussels. I myself animated and made singular their bland faces with watercolours, adding highlights to their eyes and character to their eyebrows.

Tommaso once observed that my favourite tête looked like me, with her small mouth, light eyebrows and narrow cheeks. After that, I kept a sharp eye on her pretensions to beauty. Her eyes were equally intent upon me and were not uncritical. It was to this tête that I addressed my most extravagant flights of the lingua franca. I knew what she was thinking. She called me ‘Mistress Tongue’ or, in sarcastic mode after Tommaso visited, ‘Glass of milk-water’ and ‘Afraid-of-your-own-heart.

I have owned an early marotte ever since I became interested in millinery.  I have been known to address a few words to her. She sat on my desk keeping company with the model puffin (and yes, also the skeleton of a puffin) all through the writing of the novel. As a novelist, you need to know what lies beneath ...

Noble ladies in Venice had marottes made in their own likeness. I was delighted to discover one in the background of several Pietro Longhi paintings in Ca’ Rezzonico. The one below is called ‘la scuola di lavoro’ – see the marotte top right . (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

A HAT FOR A SHIPWRECKED MARRIAGE

Here is the exotic millinery that inspired my character Tommaso, the poet. He’s at the centre of two painful love triangles in the book. Although he is passionately loved by good people, he throws in his lot with one of the worst, a hypervigilant narcissist who reels him in and spits him out, as they do.

Tommaso becomes a beggar, a mendicant, in his relationship with his wife. She is deaf to his plea for heart-alms, so he wanders Venice by night with a crude model of ship on crammed on his head. He wants to show the world the shipwreck she has made of their marriage.

Tommaso, with his crutch and his ship, casts the shadow of a monster in the moonlight. In fact, there is a real monster on the  streets of Venice, an assassin called the Hyena. (The Hyena is my invention. Extrajudicial murders were not characteristic of the Habsburg regime, which was more focussed on order, censorship, paperwork and taxation).

For the image of the ship hat (courtesy of Wellcome Images)  I am indebted to a contemporary text, Vagabondiana of Anecdotes of Mendicant Wanderers through the Streets of London. Vagabondiana includes a beggar named Joseph Johnson, once a seaman, who in later life walked with a crutch and carried a model of the HMS Nelson on his head to signal his service to this country. Smith characterises Joe Johnson as a creative and ingenious beggar, who knows how to catch the imagination and engage the sympathies of those who behold him.

And that’s the poet’s playbook too, of course.

LANGUAGE OF COLOUR

The Puffin is a book about several different languages – even the puffin has his own lexicon. Alva is obsessed with the lingua franca, the language of the free world, as she sees it – the language of equals as opposed to the pidgin that infantilizes the subjects of empire. Alva smelts brief, shattering poems from the lingua franca. (Who is the better poet, Alva or Tommaso? – the reader will decide).

Alva’s work as a milliner gave me access to another language too, namely the fashionable colours of the day. Again, Tina made me a felt colour chart of the kind Alva would show her customers.

As all researchers of this period know, these hues are codified in a wonderful book Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours (1814) in which each fashionable Regency tint is aligned with incontrovertible values found in the colours of animals or minerals. To revivify those Regency colours in conjunction with the clothes that bore them, there’s Beatrice Knight’s Regency Color Compendium, a painstaking but joyful exercise in research.

I chose the colours in the book for their edible loveliness:

Pomona Green – apple & emerald with a touch of lemon

Drake’s Neck – a cerulean blue mixed with bottle green

Spanish Fly – a rich, blue-tinged green

Barbel Blue – the colour of a clement sky

Celestial Blue – an exalted cobalt

Maiden Blush – pale young flesh like the inside of a shell

Blossom or Rose Pompadour – a rosy pink

Aramanthine – a rich, purplish red

Pomegranate – a simmering terracotta

Coquelicot – poppy or puffin-beak red

Puce – a brownish purple made from blood-fed fleas

Parma Violet – a warm amethyst

Stifled Sigh – a faded despairing lavender

London Smoke – a pale choked grey

Skimmed Milk – the luminous white of the human eyeball

Isabelline – a dirtied cream

Oeil de Mouche – a slick sepia brown

Nankeen – a muddy wolfish yellow

Feuille Morte – a strident pumpkin-flesh amber

Orpiment – the orange of the neck ruff of the Golden Pheasant or the belly of the Warty Newt

Dust of Ruins (or camelopard) – a dull brassy gold

Jonquil – a fresh pure daffodil yellow

Habsburg Yellow – calamine and pus

REAL HATS FOR IMAGINED SCENES

Alva makes hats that carry secret maps and bullets in special compartments. She also makes the death caps for those who appear to have fallen foul of the Habsburgs: the anonymous drowned are rescued by the Company of Christ and the Good Death and given decent funerals. In the novel, the Company is part of the Carbonari conspiracy. 

While Alva is imagined, her most important client is a real woman who was implicated in the brief, disastrous Carbonari uprising that occurred on the Venetian mainland in 1818. Her name was Contessa Elena Cecilia Monti d’Arnaud. She was once lady-in-waiting to Marie-Louise, who was both Napoleon Bonaparte’s second wife and also the daughter of the Habsburg Emperor Francis. Contessa Monti was devoted to her mistress even after she ceased service, speaking of her constantly. Arrested by the Austrians after the uprising was betrayed and suppressed, she was sent into exile but was found dead in Bologna not long afterwards under unexplained circumstances. (For information about Cecilia Monti, I am indebted to Christian Rossi, for his transcription of her interrogation in his doctoral thesis, MAGISTRATURA E GIUSTIZIA PENALE NEL VENETO DELLA RESTAURAZIONE (1813-1819).

Tina recreated two hats for Cecilia Monti that are particularly important in the plot.

The first is this bergère, a flat-brimmed straw hat featuring a very shallow, low crown and usually ornamented with flowers and ribbons. It can be worn a number of ways but this tilted view is traditional and flattering. This hat is woven from dense Leghorn straw, which is what Alva uses. The rim is sewn with old French lace. This one has knots in the ribbon round the brim. A musket ball could be concealed in each of those knots. And a map or letter could be rolled up and slotted into each of the stretches of ribbon in between the knots. The flowers are hand-folded. As traditional, the decoration is mostly on the right, and in this case designed to distract from the ‘loaded’ sections of the hat. 

The second hat is a pliable Milan straw. Its brim could be tipped upwards at the back to create a secret compartment for revolutionary matériel. Tina built a secret code into this hat. The colours of the ornaments are those of the Carbonari.

HATS & PUBLICATION

Tina and I have been enjoying ourselves on Instagram, doing a series of stories about our collaboration. Meanwhile, I have also been enjoying contact with the modern community of hat creators in London. I am looking forward to attending a Discovery Event in October as a guest of the 422-year-old Worshipful Company of Feltmakers.

I shall myself be talking about hats, feathers, puffins and revolution at an event at Southwark Cathedral on October 26^th:

Faith, Feathers & Human Skin: introducing The Puffin Tickets, Monday, October 26  •  6:30 PM - 8 PM | Eventbrite

See you there perhaps ...

Michelle Lovric’s website www.michellelovric.com

Instagram @apuffininvenice and @Bea-Evie

Other hattish links:

www.ballardmillinerystudio.com

Feltmakers Today & Our History – The Worshipful Company of Feltmakers of London

Ladakh: Travelling in memory through time and space ~ by Lesley Downer

When does history begin? When does the present slide through a looking glass and emerge as ‘history’? Is yesterday ‘history’? When I was in Kathmandu back in the last century (1971, to be precise), I felt as if I had travelled through time as well as space. I was in the Middle Ages. 

Here is a story of a visit to Ladakh which felt like a journey through time. 

Ladakh's surreal landscape 1981 painted by me 

Ladakh 1981 

In 1981 I travelled through Kashmir and across Zoji la, a Himalayan pass 11,575 feet (3528 metres) high, to Ladakh, on the back of a motorbike. The road was only wide enough for one vehicle so cars, trucks and buses went one way in the morning and vehicles going the other way had to wait till afternoon. 

But that didn’t apply to motorbikes. We’d pull off the road when a line of vehicles approached and wait till they’d passed, then continue on our way. 

The journey can be done in two days but we took our time, clambering up cliffs to explore remote monasteries and camping in fields beside the rivers. Once we woke to find water rising around us and had to pack up fast; we’d forgotten that the fields are irrigated at night. 

Ladakh 2013

We were riding through an otherworldly landscape of dark mauve mountains, pale turquoise rocks and grey green scree, between orange and lilac and pink and dark maroon sand dunes and rocks and hills and mountains. 

At one point I scrambled up a pink hill to have a look at the view from the top. All around were more pink hills, as far as the eye could see. There was no landmark, no village, no little house, nothing to indicate where I had come from or where my friend Chris and his motorbike were, no indication of north or south or east or west. I was completely disoriented. 

I found Chris and the motorbike again and we carried on through more maroon and mauve hills. Eventually we started to see rivers fringed with bright green barley fields and groves of apricot trees.

We passed through little towns of white-washed houses with bundles of hay on the roof and lines of prayer flags fluttering in the breeze. There were stupas - ‘chortens’ in Ladakhi and Tibetan - on the outcrops, white-washed or carved out of the wine-coloured rock, some as big as houses, others small, stretching in long rows. 

The palace at Leh 1981

Leh 

Finally we got to Leh, a small frontier town of Ladakhi and Tibetan people, where the women wore long dusty black dresses and long pigtails and tall stove pipe hats and everyone wore huge beaming welcoming smiles. Wherever you went you saw the palace, a smaller version of the Potala in Lhasa, rising high above the town, deserted and crumbling, virtually a ruin. 

I settled into an inn run by John Page, an Englishman who was installing solar heating in Ladakhi homes. Leh is 11,562 feet (3524 metres) above sea level and dry with very strong sunshine and very cold winters, so solar heating made perfect sense. John’s girlfriend was Helena Norberg-Hodge, the only westerner who could speak Ladakhi, a dialect of Tibetan. 

Besides me there was a young British couple staying there called Zee and Theresa. Ladakhi food was unappetizing, mainly dry tsampa (barley meal) with a little bit of curry. So we took over the cooking, using a primus stove and charcoal burner, and used our ingenuity to turn out all sorts of delights. 

News of our cooking spread around and every night an unpredictable but large number of Ladakhi intellectuals - monks, poets, professors, students - would show up at meal time. We’d sit around talking, with Helena interpreting where necessary, into the night. 

The palace at Leh
with prayer flags 2013

In the daytime I’d walk out of town, climb the pink hillside and sit on a rock, watching the women scything the barley fields far below with the sound of their whistling drifting up through the thin clear air. It was magical. 

Walking through Leh’s alleys I drew and painted pictures. 

Thiksey 

I also hitchhiked out to see some of Ladakh’s beautiful white-painted monasteries, which crown virtually every hill. Thiksey’s temples, sub-temples, libraries, monks’ quarters and stupas rambled across an entire hill like a medieval castle. They were dilapidated but I could see that the lower buildings were white-washed and the higher ones were brick red or yellow ochre. 

Little house in Leh 1981

At the time I spoke a little Tibetan and was (and still am) fascinated by Tibetan Buddhism. I could recognise many of the sages and Buddhas and benevolent and fierce deities portrayed in the wall paintings and thangkas. So while other tourists strolled in, took a quick look round and strolled on, I would chat to the monks. 

Then they would invite me round the back for butter tea. Butter tea is the national drink. It’s an acquired taste; it’s helpful to imagine that you’re drinking soup. The key thing was to be as enthusiastic as possible, to drink with gusto and to be even more enthusiastic when offered another cup. 

So while other tourists ‘did’ several temples in a day, I ended up spending all day in just one. 

In the end I spent two months there. I ended up going back by bus, which was a lot more frightening than going by motorbike. 

Little house in Leh 2013

Back to the Future 2013 

I went again in 2013, over an even higher pass, Taglang la, 17,480 feet (5328 metres), the second highest motorable pass in the world. (Mount Everest is 29,031 feet (8848 metres). 

Ladakh had changed but not as much as I’d feared. There were roads, traffic, hotels, restaurants and rows of shops offering thangkas, Tibetan jewellery and Pashmina shawls as well as markets where Tibetan refugees sold handicrafts. 

The palace was still there, brooding over the city, now cleaned up and restored. There were steps and a footpath up the rocks, even a motor road. And the food had miraculously improved. 

I was happy to be back and looked for the places I had painted in 1981 and took photographs. 

All paintings and photos are mine. 

Lesley Downer is a Japanophile and inveterate traveller. She had two books out in 2024: The Shortest History of Japan (Old Street Publications) and her first ‘real’ book, On the Narrow Road to the Deep North, reissued by Eland. She is now working on a history of Tokyo and plotting ways to get back to both Japan and India. 

For more see www.lesleydowner.com

The Development of Medicine in 17th Century Italy

 Deborah Swift

My fourth book in the Giulia Tofana series, The Cameo Keeper, focuses on medicine and healing in the 17th Century, a time of significant transformation in Italian medicine. As Europe shifted from the Renaissance towards the era of scientific exploration, Italy became a key centre for medical thought and innovation, blending ancient traditions of healing and herbalism with new discoveries. The old medicine and the new were less-than-happy bedfellows, and the advent of printing meant that men’s version of remedial medicine was more often promoted in written texts than the women’s traditional remedies. Men’s thought was widely disseminated in printed books, whereas women’s cures were left in the kitchen notebooks.

The Old Tradition

At the dawn of the seventeenth century, Italian medicine was still deeply rooted in the classical theories inherited from Greek and Roman scholars such as Galen and Hippocrates. Universities such as Padua, Bologna, and Pisa were renowned for their medical faculties, teaching aspiring physicians from these ancient texts. In my novel, Jacopo has studied at Padua University, but he is now intent on a career in the Santo Spirito Hospital in Rome. Medical education was still emphasising the balance of the four humours—blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile—as the foundation of health and disease.

Above: Early Italian Pharmacy

Below: Anatomy Theatre

But in the new age of medicine anatomical dissection became increasingly important, with doctors such as Giovanni Alfonso Borelli and Marcello Malpighi leading the field. Malpighi, celebrated as the "father of microscopical anatomy" for his pioneering use of the microscope, was able to observe capillaries, organs, and tissues, thus advancing the study of physiology.

Surgeons were often required to show off their skills in public demonstrations, and anatomy theatres were popular entertainment for the rich. Some of these were experiments on the dead, but there were also ‘trials’ on the living. These took the form of ‘competitions’ or ‘trials’ where those competing for a surgeon’s position would have to demonstrate their abilities before a hospital board.


The 17th century was also marked by recurrent outbreaks of plague. The outbreak in Rome in 1656 led to stringent quarantine measures – isolating affected neighbourhoods and the fumigation or burning of infected items. City states established boards of health, enhancing the management of infectious diseases. Quarantine hospitals on city outskirts became a hallmark of the new Italian public health strategy, and in Rome one of the quarantine hospitals that features in The Cameo Keeper is one run by monks, and isolated on an island in the middle of the Tiber.

Herbalism and Pharmacy

During this period, women’s role in healing changed. The old tradition of herbal remedies persisted, but influenced by the new science of chemistry, apothecaries began incorporating chemicals and metals into their preparations. Paracelsian ideas, which promoted chemical remedies over traditional humours-based treatments, began to gain ground. Italian pharmacists and physicians experimented with compounds such as antimony and mercury. (see picture below)

Although women were largely excluded from formal medical education, they played crucial roles as midwives, herbalists, and caregivers. Some women, especially in religious orders, managed hospital wards and contributed to nursing and patient care.

The common people still relied on the cheaper, more available care from the women in their households, and care in hospital depended on how much you could afford to pay.

The seventeenth century in Italy was a time of great experimentation, with the three kinds of treatment offered intersecting - herbalism, pharmaceuticals and surgery. For the first time, documentation existed because of the invention of printing and the ability to disseminate the results of experiments more widely.

The Cameo Keeper takes this experimentation as one of its themes and I thoroughly enjoyed researching the 'new' medicine of the era.

Spying during the Napoleonic Wars - by Rosemary Hayes

 

Researching for my second book in the 'Soldier Spy' trilogy, it’s been quite a journey to learn about the extent of spying, on both sides, during the Napoleonic Wars. Not only at a diplomatic level, through overseas embassies and through the Alien Office, in London, and highly placed double agents, but there were networks of ordinary people who passed on maps and documents, letters, money and even arms. Agents smuggled intelligence sewn into clothing or hidden in hollowed out walking sticks. Both sides employed complex codes and ciphers to protect their communications. Codebooks and cipher wheels were standard kit. One captured French codebook was worth its weight in gold to the British Intelligence Service. A British officer, George Scovell, a gifted linguist, famously cracked the French ‘Great Paris Cipher’ which was pivotal in the Peninsular War.

 

In Paris, there were underground networks of those spying for the British. Royalists, Bonapartist defectors and even double agents moved in secret, often under the noses of Joseph Fouché’s secret police (more of him later). Many were caught but a few key figures were never unmasked.

 

Both British and French agents used disguises, posing as merchants, priests, artists or diplomats. Some even used travelling theatre troupes as cover to move behind enemy lines. The more mundane the cover, the more convincing. Fishermen and smugglers took agents and documents to and fro across the Channel. One Jersey fisherman made nearly 200 trips across before he was caught and executed.

Women played an important role in Napoleonic espionage. Rachel Charlotte Biggs was an English writer and spy. Between 1802 and 1816, she repeatedly visited France and Napoleon controlled Europe. She corresponded with British politicians and reported her observations about military strength, industry and agriculture and the political state. Her extraordinary story is told in the novel ‘Georgian Heroine’. Another was a countess who allegedly passed secrets to the British via coded embroidery patterns. Femalespies came in many guises and used imaginative ways in which to move intelligence across borders, including hiding micro letters in hatpins! 

Fishermen’s wives and daughters also put themselves in danger by passing on information and giving shelter to royalist spies.

But among the many women spies, the one who really caught my attention was Arabella Williams, originally from Liverpool. Her handler was William Wickham. Wickham was a British diplomat who used his position in Bern as a cover to gather information and coordinate royalist organisations against France. Arabella became known as ‘le petit matelot’ – the little sailor – as she had acted as a courier passing papers between France and England for a number of years disguised as a sailor, without being caught. Arabella had her own property in France where she had lived for some years, which she also used as a safe house for other agents. One of her contacts was Abbé Ratel. Early in the war, Abbé Ratel organised a network of royalists to keep watch around the port of Boulogne and provide early warning of any invasion. Reports were sent to England through fishermen recruited by Ratel – who was reputed to have a very beautiful mistress.

Arabella was described as being petite, very pretty, lively and immensely busy. The group she belonged was extremely successful and despite the gendarmerie’s surveillance they managed to escape detection for many years. Sadly, I can find no portrait of Arabella though we do know that she was an English widow, the daughter of David Mallet, the poet and joint composer of ‘Rule Britannia’!

David Mallet

In France, all those spying for Britain or sympathetic to the royalist cause had to evade the clutches of Napoleon’s Minister of Police, the notorious Joseph Fouché. He was ruthless in his pursuit of British spies or those in France with royalist sympathies, torturing and executing them. He was dubbed ‘the most feared man in France’ and even Napoleon was quoted as saying ‘I fear Fouché more than all the armies of Europe’.

 

Fouché began his career as a maths teacher and evolved into a moderate and then radical legislator. He cultivated every political movement of the day. After preaching clemency for Louis XVI, Fouché voted to send the King to the guillotine. After writing "The first Communist Manifesto of Modern Times" he became a multi-millionaire. He led the brutal repression of an anti-revolutionary movement, earning him the nickname ‘The Butcher of Lyon’. After serving Robespierre, Fouché engineered his overthrow and rose to Minister of Police under the Directory, which he then helped to overthrow before putting his network of informants in Napoleon’s service. After turning against the Emperor, Fouché served the new King Louis XVIII – whose brother he had helped send to the guillotine. Thus, Fouché served the Revolution, the Directory, the First Empire and the Restoration. His face was said to resemble a weasel – and his less flattering portraits bear this out!

 

The threat from spies in France and those with royalist sympathies was very real. There were several attempts to assassinate Napoleon, the most famous being in Paris on the evening of December 24^th 1800. Almost certainly funded by the British, this very nearly succeeded when a cart exploded just after Napoleon’s carriage had passed, killing bystanders.

 

Malmaison, Empress Josephine’s country chateau, was the site of others, including the poisoned snuff put into a replica of Napoleon’s snuff box and placed on his desk there.

 

Although I have changed some of their dates and locations, many of the characters mentioned in my book ‘The King’s Agent’ are based on real people including ‘Le Petit Matelot’, Pipette, the fisherman’s wife, Abbé Ratel (disguised as Father Jacques) and, of course, the infamous Joseph Fouché.

 

‘The King’s Agent’ is the second novella in the ‘Soldier Spy’ trilogy, following the fortunes of the disgraced soldier, Captain Will Fraser and his wounded sergeant, Duncan Armstrong, recruited by the Alien Office to spy for King George’s government.

 

 

 

 

 

Would you like to learn some Ancient Greek? by Caroline K. Mackenzie

Following the bumper box office success of Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey this summer, online searches for ‘Learn Ancient Greek’ have soared and students of all ages are signing up for classes offering entry to this magical language.

Reading Homer’s Odyssey in the original would be my number one reason for learning Ancient Greek. But a close second would be the joy of recognising Greek everywhere in the English language. Therefore in this blog, for fun, I shall share with you fifteen of my favourite Greek words, together with their English derivatives. You may be surprised by how much Ancient Greek you already know!

Each word is introduced by an illustration by Barbarann Lang. The Greek word is given first, followed by a transliteration, i.e. a simple conversion of the Greek letters to their English equivalents, and then the meaning. Underneath each entry I have included just a few English words which owe their etymology to the Greek - you can probably think of many more - and some of the English words have a brief note or explanation. 

Fifteen of my favourite Greek words

1.    ἀγορά (agora) market-place

agoraphobia (cf. φόβος ‘phobos’ = fear)

2.    βασιλεύς (basileus) king

basilica, basilicon, basilisk

basilicon = an ointment of various kinds, as being of sovereign virtue.

basilisk = a harmless crested lizard of tropical America (with a crownlike crest).

3.    δοῦλος (doulos) slave

douleia /dulia, doulocracy, dulosis

douleia /dulia = in the Roman Catholic religion this is an inferior veneration accorded to saints and angels, as opposed to ‘hyperdulia’ that is accorded to the Virgin Mary, and ‘latria’ accorded to God alone.

dulosis = enslavement practised by certain ants on other kinds of ants.

4.    εἰρήνη (eirene) peace

eirenic, eirenicon, Irene

eirenic = tending to create peace.

eirenicon = proposition for peace.

5.    ἐκκλησία (ecclesia) assembly

ecclesiastical, ecclesiology

ecclesiology = study of ecclesiastical traditions and of church architecture and decoration, study/knowledge of the church.

6.    Ζεύς Zeus

deification, deity (cf. ‘deus’ meaning ‘god’ in Latin)

7.    θεά (thea) goddess

atheist, Theobroma, theology, theomachy

theobroma = a genus (group) of flowering plants including the cocoa tree, ‘Theobroma cacao’, the beans of which are used to make chocolate. Theobroma means ‘food of the gods’.

8.    ἄγγελος (aggelos, pronounced ‘angelos’) messenger

angel, angel-cake, angelshark

angelshark = shark with winglike fins.

9.    λιμήν (limen) harbour

limen, liminal, liminality (cf. ‘limen’ meaning ‘threshold’ in Latin)

limen = threshold of consciousness (a term in psychology).

liminality = a literary term which means the use of location, especially the threshold of a doorway, to symbolise a significant moment, e.g. Medea, in the eponymous play by Euripides, makes her dramatic entrance onto stage with the following words, ‘ “Women of Corinth, I have come out of the house” ’ and proceeds to deliver possibly her most powerful speech.

10.    μάχη (mache) battle

logomachy, theomachy

logomachy = contention about words or in words.

Theomachy = a war among or against the gods in Greek mythology, such as the gigantomachy. Book 20 of Homer’s Iliad is traditionally known under the title Theomachia; it opens with a scene on Olympus in which Zeus permits the gods to take part in the battle.

11.    οὐρανός (ouranos) heaven

Urania, Uranus, uranic, uranium

Urania was the Muse of astronomy in Greek mythology. 

Uranus/Ouranos or 'Heaven’ = the father of Kronos , whose mother is ‘Ge’ (γῆ) or ‘Earth’. ‘Uranus’ is also the name given to a planet discovered in 1781.

uranic = of the palate, lit the roof of the mouth.

12.    πύλη (pyle) gate

Propylaia, pylon, pylorus

Propylaia = the monumental entrance, or gateway, to the Acropolis in Athens, built 437-432 BC.

pylorus = the opening, or gateway, from the stomach to the intestines.

13.    χείρ (cheir) hand

chirograph, chironomy, chiropractor, chiropodist, chiropteran, chiropterophilous

chirograph = a written, or signed, document.

chironomy = the art of gesticulation or mime.

Chiropteran = a member of the Chiroptera, an order of mammals comprising bats.

chiropterophilous = flowers which are pollinated by bats.

14.    κεφαλή (cephale) head

cephalalgia, cephalopod

cephalalgia = headache.

cephalopod = a member of the Cephalopoda, or molluscs. They are exclusively marine animals (including cuttlefish, squid, octopus, etc.) with a prominent head and their ’feet’ have become modified into arms or tentacles.

15.    ξίφος (xiphos) sword

Xiphias, xiphoid, xiphophyllous

Xiphias = the common swordfish genus (group).

xiphoid = sword-shaped

xiphophyllous = plants with sword-shaped leaves.

***********************************

If you have read this far, thank you! I hope you will agree that Ancient Greek is not a dead language, as often claimed, but indeed is very much alive and kicking. If you have enjoyed the Greek, you may also enjoy my recent publication, Pocket GCSE Greek Etymological Lexicon. This book is not just for GCSE students - it's for anyone who would like to learn some Ancient Greek and/or fun facts about Greek theatre, art, music, pottery, statues, temples, archaeology, philosophy, religion, literature, history, mythology and culture. If you are a Hellenophile, philologist or indeed etymologist, there is plenty for you too!

P.S. I shall be giving an online illustrated talk A Taste of Greek for The Hellenic and Roman Societies on Wednesday 18th November at 6pm, and again on Saturday 21st November at 11am. Whether you are a complete beginner or wish to brush up on existing knowledge, you will be very welcome! Please contact me for further details via my website: www.carolinetutor.co.uk

With many thanks to Barbarann Lang for her beautiful illustrations.

Pocket GCSE Greek Etymological Lexicon by Caroline K. Mackenzie is available from Bloomsbury