Bees and Brehon Law in Medieval Ireland by Kristin Gleeson

 

Brehon Bee Laws

What would happen if bees from your hive swarmed and then settled in a neighbour’s tree, or if you were stung badly by one of your neighbour’s bees? If you were living in Ireland in the 6^th century, the matter would be very clear. In the first case, your neighbour would be entitled half the yield of honey, and in the second case, you would be entitled to a sufficient amount of honey that matched the severity of the sting.

Old Irish style bee hive

Bees and the honey they produced were an important element in early Medieval Ireland and other parts of Europe. They were a significant source of nutrition for people who lived in a land that in many areas was often wet and difficult to farm. Honey also possessed an antiseptic quality that was important for internal healing, as well as external healing. And of course when fermented, it provided a drink that could make you forget how wet and difficult the land was to farm.

In Britain and the rest of Europe the hives were made of straw, coiled into the familiar cone shape and stitched together with thin branches of brambles/blackberries stripped of their leaves and thorns, called a ‘skep’ from the Anglo-Saxon word ‘skeppa’ meaning ‘basket.’ In winter they would put straw tents over the skeps to keep out the elements, called ‘hackles,’ if they weren’t in little stone nooks, or ‘boles,’ like those of the monks of Lindisfarne. In Ireland, however, where cattle grazed outdoors all year and little straw was harvested, I was told by local historians sedgegrass was used instead, well up until the last century. The hives were then thatched against the rain that fell all year round and kept against the south wall of the ‘lios’ or wall of the home area. 

Bees were kept not only on farms but also at religious communities in early Christian times. Monks (managh) and nuns (cailecha) tended the sick and injured among their community, as well people in the surrounding area. One such cailecha was Gobnait, a woman who settled in West Cork and established a convent, or community of women. She became so well known for her healing, with honey as her staple medicine, that her fame spread and eventually, after her death, she became the patron saint of bees.

6th century ruins possibly of St Gobnait's community

With bees such a vital part of the daily lives of medieval Irish people, it is no surprise that they featured in the Brehon laws. “Brehon” is an ancient Irish term for judge. Over the centuries the judges accumulated a series of laws which they passed down orally from one generation of judges to the next. To qualify to become any one of the various levels of judges and lawyers (which in all likelihood were offshoots of the poets (filidh) required that the person study at one of the nemed schools. It was a period of study that lasted a number of years in which they learned poetry as well as the laws.

Under the Brehon laws there were five paths to judgement: truth, duty, right, propriety and proper inquiries. These paths ensured that each case was considered carefully.  The choices were thrashed out beforehand by the respective lawyers in a process called airthacra, which was akin to hearing of legal arguments in modern court case.  Most disputes, however, were usually settled before they wound up in court.

During the early Christian period, from about the 5^th century to the 8^th century the laws and law cases were recorded by Christian clerics and ‘adjusted’ if it the laws didn’t fit the Christian outlook. Most of our knowledge of early Irish or Brehon law comes from these old Irish law texts, mainly composed in the 7th and 8th centuries. Some of these texts have survived in a complete form in later manuscripts (generally of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries), but many are to be found only in fragments. The best preserved collection of early Irish law texts is that of the Senchás Mar, "great tradition," which is likely to have been organized as a unit about A.D. 800. The texts in this collection are all anonymous, and it is not known where or by whom they were put together. However, most of the place-names and personal names cited in the texts relate to the northern Midlands and southern Ulster, so it is probable that the material derived from this area. It may have been assembled in a monastic law school, such as that at Slane, County Meath.

Much of the Brehon law is founded on the principle of restitution, rather than punishment, so often the judgments involved various types of compensation for any injury done. The cases and laws therefore encompassed much of what mattered in everyday life. The Senchás Mar originally consisted of 50 law texts broken up into three sections. There doesn’t seem to be a strict logic to the arrangements except that similar subjects are grouped together. For example, the law text relating to cats is followed by the law text relating to dogs. 

Ranking of lawyers & other professionals in Ireland

In the first third of the work there is a general discussion of legal topics and a description of St Patrick’s role in its codification. This essay is followed by laws on the formal seizure of another’s property to enforce legal claims against him. There is also a discussion on the acts regarding hostages, laws regarding the “free fief” and fosterage fees, as well as free clientship and base clientship which were two different classes in the highly stratified society that was Ireland. There were also other texts dealing with the laws of marriage and divorce, the arrangement of customary behaviour and the relationship of society to the church.

The surviving final third, like the first third, is not complete by any means. It does have evidence that suggests it may have contained laws on carpenters, coppersmiths and blacksmiths, sick maintenance as well as trapping deer. It also has medical legal texts “Judgments of Blood-lying” and “Judgements of Dian Cecht” (a legendary physician). 

Included in the middle section, the most complete section, are the judgments dealing with trespass by domestic animals, fencing obligations and other related topics. Here we can learn such interesting judgements such as if an animal is killed in a jointly owned herd and the culprit cannot be identified then a lot is cast across the whole herd. The animal on which it falls is held to be responsible. Whether or not that animal is punished is a mystery. Other interesting aspects discussed in this section include rules for bringing water for a mill across a neighbour’s land. Conflict in a situation like this is easily imaginable. A final section, which understandably gets full discussion is "Judgements Concerning Thefts."

It is in this middle section that the Bechbretha or “Bee Judgements” are found. They include a discussion of trespass by honey bees.  It’s there, for instance, we can learn that a person who is blinded by a bee gets a hive in recompense.  Or that there were penalties for a person who moves a hive not belonging to them. And most reasonably we can learn that if a person shakes or disturbs a hive and the bees should attack that person as a result, the owner was free from liability for any injuries that might result.

The Brehon laws stretched back centuries and through them we can understand the daily life of the ancient Irish. If the laws are anything to go by it shows a society that relied heavily on mediation and compensation, perhaps in attempt to avoid more violent acts of retribution, vengeance and punishment.

Bee laws and the Brehon lawyers of the time come into play in my novel, In Praise of the Bees a USA Today Bestseller set in 6th century Ireland.Buy or find out more here or go to my website

 

Veronica Franco and the Courtesans of Renaissance Venice by Kristin Gleeson

Renaissance Venice

 Travellers who visited in Venice in the 15^th, 16^th and 17^th century never failed to marvel at the number of courtesans in the city. Thomas Coryat writing in 1608 was astonished to note that there were as many as twenty thousand courtesans operating in Venice and said that “many are esteemed so loose that they are said to open their quivers to every arrow.”

Venetian Courtesans

The courtesans often dressed in clothing that had revealing cleavage to the point even where the breasts were completely exposed. Travellers on occasion mistakenly thought these were the ordinary female citizens of Venice. But just as much as they might condemn the numbers and their behaviour, the travellers’ descriptions of Venetian daily life in which the courtesan featured prominently the city is praised as an example of civic and social harmony. Two myths lying side by side. 

Venice in fact was a vibrant and complex city then, filled with merchants profiting from expanded trade opportunities and proud of its republic standing. The government was organized around a multitude of magistracies and councils and ruled by a doge, elected by a closed patrician group, called the Great Council. 

The people were generally a sober lot and the women of their class and the nobility were seldom seen in public. When they did, they too were sombrely dressed, in dark colours.

Venetian widow

Venice was also crowded with people who worked at the shipyards, at the fisheries, the glassworks and other manufacturers in this blossoming commercial centre. Housing was difficult to find, even among the wealthier classes, and few had the luxury (at least in the 15^th and 16^th century) of owning their own palazzo. Most had apartments or rooms in buildings, and some of the poorer classes shared rooms.  These conditions among a booming commercial centre created intense rivalries among the young men of various trades. Such competition often gave rise to faction fighting- sometimes fought desperately over bridges like the Rialto. Enemies of any class could be despatched in a dark alley and tossed in the canal.

Poised between these two sides of Venice were the courtesans. There were two classes of courtesans that existed in Venice. The first, cortigna onesta, honest courtesan or intellectual courtesan and the cortigna lume, the lower class prostitutes who lived near and frequented the Rialto Bridge.

The women from the first class of courtesan, the honest courtesan, were often born into patrician or merchant family they were raised as educated and cultured women. But in a society that dictated exorbitant dowries that could often bankrupt a family, extra daughters were often given no opportunity to marry. They could go into a convent and become a nun, but that still required a dowry, though not as large. They could remain in the household an ageing spinster tending to family member, forever dependent and submissive perhaps to a new mistress of the household if it should pass to a brother and his wife. Or circumstances, like poverty from funding a dowry to an older sister, or failed commercial activities could encourage a young woman to consider the life of a courtesan. Often, in these situations, a courtesan could end up being the sole support of their family. 

Venetian Courtesan

Among the Venetian men generally, courtesans were seen as cultured women who provided entertainment for wealthy noblemen and merchants.  In Venice, a man wouldn’t be expected to marry until well into his thirties and courtesans could provide these young men pleasure and culture and hopefully disease free. An older man might take a courtesan as his mistress and enjoy a less inhibited sexual experience than he would from a wife who had most likely been raised in a convent-like atmosphere.

Successful courtesans could enjoy a luxurious life filled with parties and salons. They often moved in influential circles and had access to artists, poets, politicians and the thinkers of the day. In such circles a courtesan had the opportunity to wield influence if she was skilled enough to do so. Aside from the potential for power and influence the honest courtesan still faced the possibility of contracting a sexually transmitted disease, something that observed no class barriers.

One of the most celebrated and well known Venetian courtesans was Veronica Franco, born in 1546. Born to the courtesan, Paola Fracassa and the merchant, Francesco Franco she also had three brothers.  Her intellectual life began with sharing her brothers' education by private tutors in the family home and while still in her teens she married the physician Paola Fracassa. Probably an arranged marriage, it ended badly shortly afterwards and Veronica was forced to support herself.

Veronica Franco

Franco became a cortigiana onesta (honest courtesan) in the mid to late 1560s and soon became famed for the intellectual and culture entertainments she provided. She continued her education by frequenting literary gatherings of writers and painters in Venice during the 1570s and 1580s and mingled with politicians, poets, artists and thinkers. She captured the interest of Domenico Venier (1517-1582), a Venetian poet and the head of the most renowned vernacular literary academy in Venice, who became her reader and protector. A frequent visitor to his private literary salon at Ca' Venier (the Venier palace), Franco composed sonnets and capitoli in terza rima for exchange with male poets.

By her mid-twenties, Franco was requesting sonnets for publication from male poets for anthologies that she assembled to commemorate men of the Venetian elite. One such volume, the Rime di diversi eccellentissimi autori nella morte dell'Illustre Sign. Estor Marteninengo Conte di Malapaga, in honor of the Count Martinengo, was published in 1575; she was not only the editor but also included nine sonnets she herself had written.

In 1575, during the epidemic of plague that ravaged the city, Veronica Franco was forced to leave Venice and lost much of her wealth when her house and possessions were looted. On her return in 1577, she defended herself with dignity before the Inquisition on charges of witchcraft (a common complaint lodged against courtesans in those days). The charges were dropped. She died in 1591. 

Domestic Manuals and the Perception of Womanhood by Janet Few

 

For more than four hundred years, domestic manuals have done far more than offer women recipes and guidelines for running a household. They have also served to construct and reinforce gendered expectations of behaviour. A review of selected books of household management shows how they underpinned and lauded a woman’s key function in the domestic economy, whilst circumscribing roles and codes of behaviour that conformed to the norms of a patriarchal society.

 In 1615, the domestic manual The English Housewife, was first published. It outlined the expectations associated with that role.

“Our English housewife must be of chaste thought, stout courage, patient, untired, watchful, diligent, witty, pleasant, constant in friendship. Full of good neighbourhood, wise in discourse, but not frequent therein, sharp and quick of speech, but not bitter or talkative, secret in her affairs, comfortable in her counsel, and generally skilful in all the worthy knowledges which do belong to her vocation.”

This was, not surprisingly, written by a man, Gervase Markham. His instructions and the tone is more instructional than advisory, beginning with the need for the ‘good housewife’ to be ‘upright and severe in religion’. Whilst the man is unequivocally the head of the household, the task of moral custodian is that of the women. Markham then writes of the need for her garments to be, ‘altogether without toyish garnishes, or the gloss of light colours, and as far from the vanity of new and fantastic fashions, as near to  the comely imitations of modest matrons; ’ she is being told how to dress.

The essential ‘worthy knowledges’, that Markham refers to, include the ability to treat the household for a variety of medical conditions. Interestingly, this lengthy section comes before those relating to cookery, distilling and preserving. Markham’s seventeenth century housewife is also clearly expected to be proficient in all aspects of spinning, weaving and the production of clothing for the family, as well as dairying, brewing and baking. What is lacking from Markham’s work, is any coverage of cleaning, child-rearing, or the managing of servants. Is this because, as a man, he is focussed on the aspects of household routine that impinge most closely upon him. He expects to be fed, clothed and physicked by his wife but the servants and children are emphatically not part of his sphere.

For a female perspective, let us consider Hannah Woolley’s Compleat Serving Maid, first published in 1677. Although, Woolley writes as if she is the addressing potential servants themselves, at this time, the adult female literacy rate is thought to have been ten to fifteen percent and the vast majority of those women would not have been of the servant class. It is more likely therefore that her manual would have been read by the employers of servants, rather than those seeking the various roles that she describes. Here the tone is still instructional but somehow gentler than Markham’s diktats. Having outlined the precise duties of various grades of servant, Woolley briefly mentions the finer points of laundering and creating ‘beautify waters’, before turning to physick. She too prioritises this over the many tasks associated with feeding the family.

Her suggested menus, for different times of the year, are very far removed from those that working families might have been likely to afford. In her appendices, she address penmanship and ‘arithmetick’, before giving advice about how to identify the best produce at market. The early modern woman was required to master diverse, key skills like pharmacology, culinary expertise and household management. The housewife’s position as a key player in the domestic economy was legitimised and her specialist domestic knowledge and skills were valued.

Eliza Smith’s The Compleat Housewife or Accomplish’d Gentlewoman’s Companion, published in 1727, specifically addresses, as the title suggests, ‘accomplished gentlewomen’. This concentrates on recipes, rather than other aspects of the housewife’s role. In a similar vein, The Experienced English Housekeeper, published by Elizabeth Raffald some four decades later, provides advice on pickling cockles, making a porcupine of the flat ribs of beef and making tansy fritters. Raffald was the former housekeeper to an aristocratic family. By this time, literacy rates were increasing and it would be expected that an upper servant, such as a housekeeper, would be able to read. Although this tome runs to over four hundred pages it is devoted entirely to recipes, conventionally the role of the cook rather than the housekeeper. There is no advice on the traditional responsibilities of the housekeeper, such as managing servants.

In contrast, by the time Isabella Beeton was editing The English Woman’s Domestic Magazine  in the 1850s and publishing her book of household management in 1861, the expectation was that women would be at the centre of domestic administration, commanding servants and tradesmen and overseeing the upbringing of the next generation. Mrs Beeton famously likened the mistress of the house to the ‘commander of an army’. Yet, this elevated status was accompanied by stricter behavioural constraints. The ideal perception of womanhood encompassed  an inflexible etiquette and moral  custodianship in a society that was uncompromisingly demarcated by social class.

Victorian values imposed a rigid strait-jacket for women striving for respectability and Mrs Beeton was there for the aspirational middle-class women, who were keen to reinforce their position in the social hierarchy. By providing women with the tools for successful household management and a blueprint for female agency and expertise, Mrs Beeton’s work might be regarded as elevating domesticity to a highly skilled, respected science. Yet, at the same time, that very agency became a vehicle for oppression, confining women to the restraining depiction of womanhood that was proscribed by the patriarchy.

Jane Ellen Panton published From Kitchen to Garret in 1895. In the aftermath of the industrial revolution, the forerunners of the conspicuous consumerism of the later twentieth century were apparent in embryonic form. Mrs Panton sets herself up as the moral arbiter of good taste as regards interior design and retail choices. Going from room to room, in the middle-class household, she defines what is necessary for good taste and refinement. Her emphasis is on creating and showcasing a home full of carefully curated possessions, chosen as much for their aesthetics as their practicality.

Interestingly, this volume is not specifically addressed to women and as the keeper of the purse strings, one would expect  the man of the house to have had the final veto on which house to rent or buy and how it should be furnished. In fact, Panton addresses both ‘Edwin’ and ‘Angelina’ throughout. Nonetheless, women are clearly expected to have a subservient role, ‘women’s true work’, she says, ‘is that of a helper’. ‘Angelina’  is cautioned not to, ‘plunge head-first among the bread-winners with pen or pencil  ……  the profession of wife and mother being quite as much as any one woman can manage satisfactorily.’

By the nineteenth, century, many of the domestic tasks of the early modern housewife had been outsourced. The home was no longer a hub of productivity, textile work or medical care; instead, it was a stage on which the family’s middle-class status could be displayed. The broader economic responsibilities of the seventeenth century housewife had been eroded; gender roles were no longer different but equally valued, as they had been in the early modern era. Femininity was increasingly characterised by the consumer choices that she made.

These manuals and works like them, served to engineer and delineate women’s role in society. They reinforced patriarchal ideals, upheld a strictly gendered division of work and restricted women to the domestic sphere. As these books of household management illustrate, womanhood is concept that was constructed, not merely physiologically derived. From distilling herbal remedies in the seventeenth century to dithering over wallpaper choices two hundred years later, books of household advice allowed women to claim authority, expertise and an arena of their own, albeit one fashioned by men.

Wellcome Library https://archive.org/details/b20392  

Image used under Creative Commons

Ten Years of Being a History Girl by Sheena Wilkinson

I’m going on holiday very early tomorrow morning, and tonight we have sixteen people coming for supper and some music. In retrospect, this may not have been the wisest scheduling. And in the middle of cleaning the house, packing and making supper for sixteen I have just remembered that my History Girls pots is due while I’m away! I don’t want to take my laptop on holiday, I need to post NOW. And there is NOTHING in my head to write about. At least nothing to which I can do justice in a short space of time. 

But looking back for inspiration through the HG archive, I see that it is, conveniently and unbelievably, ten years since I became a History Girl, and so I am going to reprise that first post, from October 2016, with some brief updating where appropriate. I trust readers will forgive me! 

Me in August 2016

As historical novelists we have the benefit of hindsight. In 2016, I could have had no idea that I would go on to write exclusively historical fiction, or indeed that my personal life would change drastically, from being a confirmed spinster to a wife and stepmother. That I would move to a very different part of the country, and acquire both grey locks and a greyhound. 

Me last week (August 2026)

 

In 2016 I wrote:

 

I have been a History Girl in waiting all my life. I was a swot who loved school, and from the start what I loved most, apart from English (I was a writer in waiting too) was finding out about the past. Like most children at primary school in the seventies, I did a project on the Vikings, which happened to be an interest of my history-loving father too. I don’t suppose my P4 teacher relished being told by me that there was now evidence that the Vikings may have voyaged as far as America, as that wasn’t in her textbook. 

2026 note -- This year I did an eight-week residency in that same old primary school where, fifty years on, they are still doing the Vikings. 

 

The best things weren’t in the books. When I got to secondary school, encouraged by a wonderful teacher (to whom I have paid tribute in another blog post https://authorallsorts.wordpress.com/2015/08/19/a-letter-to-my-o-level-history-teacher-by-sheena-wilkinson/) I continued to love history, but not just in the classroom. That school, Victoria College, a Belfast girls’ grammar founded in 1859, had its own history that enticed me much more than the too-long-ago Vikings.

 

Many break-times found me in a certain little hideaway under the stairs, looking at an exhibition about the school’s evacuation to the north coast during the Second World War. There were photos and letters and old essays on display and for the first time I discovered the joy of the everyday artefact, and the power of old photos to evoke a vanished, but not terribly distant world. I never saw another pupil even glance at the exhibition – I think I’d have been very indignant; it had become my private place.

 

What made it all the more inspiring was that by then I’d also begun on another long-lasting love – that of old school stories, and the world conjured up by those serious bobbed, gym-frocked girls in black-and-white was closer to the world of Malory Towers and the Chalet School than anything else in my Belfast upbringing. Just belonging to a school that had such photos on the walls was a thrill to me. 

 

2026 note – if I had known, in 2016, that I would be asked to write novels in the classic girls’ school story tradition (First Term at Fernside and True Friends at Fernside) I would have been beside myself with joy. 

 

I had the best history teacher in the world, and romped through the Anglo-Saxons, the Tudors and the Plantation of Ulster. I have especially fond memories of the bubonic plague; then as now I adored anything gruesome about disease and pestilence. (As long as it was safely in a book and preferably now extinct.) I was told off for describing (and drawing) my plague victims with too much verisimilitude – but I like to think that a historical novelist was born in that first form exercise book. 

 

In 2016 I had no idea that Name upon Name would be the first in a trilogy 

2026 note – I am, in real life, the most squeamish of people, but that second historical novel, Star by Star, which has just been reissued) centres, along with the end of WW1 and the 1918 General Election, in which women voted for the first time, on the ‘Spanish’ influenza pandemic. When I wrote it – and the words above – in 2016, it was with no idea that I would shortly, like the rest of the world, experience a pandemic at first hand.) 

 

But it was modern history, which we studied for O Level, which captivated me most. This was history I could almost touch, history my granny could remember: suffragettes and the Great War and the partition of Ireland, and then another war.  This was a world I knew from those old school stories, and from the war poets I’d fallen in love with in English Lit. This was a world that seeped through the Victorian and Edwardian streets of my home city, and those black and white photos in the school corridors. A world evoked by the neatly-wound balls of nylon string, made from old clothes, in my waste-not-want-not granny’s Utility sideboard, and by the snaps of her and her friends on Sunday School outings in the twenties, looking exactly like Angela Brazil heroines.

 

2026 note – my 2020 novel, Hope against Hope, is set in Belfast 1921, in the very streets where my gran and her sisters lived and played. I always liked to imagine that they could have made friends with my heroines. 

Aunt Annie, Aunt Sadie (who died at 16) and Gran, in about 1917

 

When I started to write historical fiction – short stories at first and then, last year, a novel set in Belfast 1916 – it was this period to which I kept returning. As I write my second historical novel, due next year and set in November 1918, I’m looking forward to sharing some of those enthusiasms here with the History Girls.

 

And I promise not to make my plague victims too gruesome. 

 

2026 – I have indeed shared all sorts of enthusiasms, from houses visited, to old books read or rediscovered, to family history, all with a focus on the early twentieth century, and a leaning towards the experience of women. Since 2016, all my output -- seven novels -- has been historical, including my first two for adults. 

My most recent adult novel, set in 1936

I wonder what I shall write, in and out of the History Girls, in the next ten years? 

Revolution! non-fiction for 8-12 year-olds by Joan Lennon

Like many of us, I grew up in a time of protest. In Canada, we marched against the war in Vietnam (I carried a placard with the catchy slogan END CANADA’S COMPLICITY!), for women’s lib, against racism, and for CND. My parents were part of the underground railway, getting kids out of the States to defy the draft. We lived just across the river from Detroit, and in the long hot summers you could see the smoke rising from the downtown race riots. Meanwhile, in primary school, we were taught Duck and Cover. The people who influenced me the most were busy saying No to different injustices and stupidities.

I think it was inevitable I would want to write a book about revolutions, though it’s taken a while!

Different kinds of revolutions. Different stories about change.

A bit of a blurb:

What does it take to change the world?

Sometimes it’s toppling systems and finding new ways to govern that give people a better chance.

Sometimes it’s challenging long-held beliefs and finding the courage to think differently.

Sometimes it’s coming up with ingenious inventions that transform our everyday lives.

The world we know today has been shaped by exceptional events, ideas and inventions. Revolution! tells the stories of ordinary people who made the extraordinary happen.

The constraints in writing history for this age group are … interesting. (If by interesting you mean frustrating and a right royal pain.) There wasn’t a chapter where I didn’t think, ‘What I really want to do here is write a book.’ A whole book – not just four pages which also had to accommodate a paltry maximum word count, illustrations, and enough space for some of the lengthier languages we hope it’ll be translated into. But always I needed to remember that this was a book to pique the reader’s interest, not to tell all. Teo’s illustrations helped with this so much.

One of the parts I particularly enjoyed writing were the slightly sideways questions at the end of each chapter. Questions like:

What use is music in a revolution?

Why is this revolution not talked about more? [Haiti]

Might India, Pakistan and Bangladesh reunite some day?

What makes something truly green?

I tried to answer in a way that might lead the reader to think again, and to ask MORE questions.

Which was always the take home message.

Revolution! written by Joan Lennon, illustrated by Teo Georgiev, published by Templar Books, due out 27 August 2026.

Other non-fiction books for 8-12 year-olds published by Templar Books:

Great Minds: 2500 Years of Thinkers and Philosophy written by Joan Haig and Joan Lennon, illustrated by Andre Ducci

Talking History: 150 Years of Speakers and Speeches written by Joan Haig and Joan Lennon, illustrated by Andre Ducci

Joan Lennon website

Joan Lennon Instagram

The Myths and Deities of Ancient Egypt by Rachel Louise Driscoll

The Ancient Egyptians worshipped a pantheon of well over 1,400 gods and goddesses – possibly as many as 2,000.  Each deity was believed to have its area of power in life or in death, and would often be in human-form, or a therianthrope (a human with an animal head).  Sometimes, these mythical figures were supposed to be able to change between the form of a human and that of an animal, which is seen in the case of Isis and Nephthys morphing into kites.  Occasionally, there might be no human features at all, such as the dead-devouring deity Ammit, who was said to claim the head of a crocodile, the hindquarters of a hippopotamus, and the forequarters of a lion. 

Priests would serve at temple sites to perform rituals which they believed appeased these gods and goddesses, and certain areas in Egypt often formed particular cult followings of favourite deities.  Interestingly, these deities also had connections with those of Ancient Greece, something which is known as syncretism.  In his work Moralia, instead of using the Egyptian name Set or Seth, Plutarch speaks of the goddess Nephthys marrying ‘Typhon’ – who, according to the Hesiod, was the son of Gaia and Tartarus – and he also claims that Nephthys was also known as Aphrodite.  This was common as the Greek Empire expanded, religions blending and borrowing from each other.

Over time, different myths have evolved regarding these figures.  Some are less known, others more common, and many have multiple versions.  Perhaps the most famous myth is that of Osiris, the god who was murdered, but it begins before the infamous events of his death, and these stories are perhaps lesser known.

It was supposed that Nut, goddess of the sky, was in love with Seb or Geb, god of the earth.  She conceived quadruplets by him, but Ra, the falcon-headed god of the sun, knew that one of the deities in her womb would surpass even his powers, and he forbade her to give birth on any day of the 360-day year.  Thoth, the ibis-headed god of wisdom who also loved Nut, gambled with Khonsu, the moon god who was often depicted as a youth with a sidelock of hair.  Thoth won the game of Senet – an ancient board game said to be similar to backgammon – and with his winnings of some of the moon’s light, he fashioned 5 extra days, which both extended the calendar year and also enabled Nut to give birth.  First came green-skinned Osiris.  Then Set was said to pierce her side when he came out, choosing not to be born the usual way but proving his violent tendencies already in those first moments.  He had the head of an animal which is still unidentified.  Next came Isis and then, finally, Nephthys.

The siblings grew and Isis and Osiris formed a natural pair, as they had in the womb, and thus were married.  Nephthys married Set, but had no children by him.  One day, Osiris and Nephthys slept together.  The circumstances are hazy, some claiming that Nephthys seduced him, others than Osiris mistook her for Isis as the sisters looked so alike, but she conceived and gave birth to Anubis, the jackal-headed god, whom she hid in a cave.  After this, Set sought a way to kill Osiris, perhaps because he had heard of the affair, or because he was jealous of his brother’s power.

Set constructed a box and said that the god who could fit inside could have it.  Osiris fell for his trick, and was nailed within where he suffocated.  Isis went in search of his body and eventually found it, but Set realised this and cut his brother into fourteen pieces which he scattered across Egypt.

Isis and Nephthys worked together to reclaim those pieces.  One was swallowed by a fish, but Isis formed a replacement with clay, and the sisters joined their brother’s body back together so that he would be whole to enter the afterlife.  At this stage, Isis conceived a son by Osiris posthumously, and he would go on to be the falcon-headed god, Horus.  Meanwhile, Anubis mummified Osiris, and this was supposed to be the first case of mummification, setting a precedent for the dead in Ancient Egypt.

Nephthys went with Osiris to the afterlife where he now became the ruler, and here she found her place as a guide through the underworld.  Because of this and the part the sisters played in Osiris’ restoration, she and Isis are linked with funerary rites, and women would often dress as the sister goddesses at funerals, quoting The Lamentations of Isis and Nephthys.

For more on the myths and deities of Egypt, I would highly recommend checking out translations of Ancient Egyptian texts, and Plutarch’s Moralia.  There are so many books on Egyptian mythology, and the Egypt Exploration Society also provides information and courses which explore these subjects more.

In the well-known myth of Osiris, Nephthys is probably the least remembered character, despite playing such a pivotal role.  Because of this, I wanted to explore her more in my debut novel which is entitled Nephthys in the UK, The House of Two Sisters in the US, Les Sœurs Du Nil in France, and La Custode Delle Anime in Italy.  My novel tells the myth of Nephthys alongside a 19^th century Gothic tale of Egyptomania and archaeology.  You can find it here. 

Finding the Past, by Gillian Polack

 

I’m thinking about historical sources. Not just any historical sources, but ones that give us access to everyday lives. There are sources everywhere, but some sources are special. Let me start with the Middle Ages, and then end up in this precise moment in time. Before I can time-travel, however, I need to explain why the sets of sources I will introduce are so very special and why they’re amazingly useful to writers of historical fiction.

Writing is filtered. Every single type of writing we use to find out about the past has particular limits. Customs records tell us what was imported into, say, an English port in 1150, but not who sold it after that, what their lives were like, or what happened to the final imported good. It helps when we combine sources.

Let me begin with cinnamon, imported into that English port in 1150. It began its life in what is now Indonesia. It travelled as far as Egypt, where a Jewish merchant sold it to an English customer. The Egyptian woman who sold it had no idea that the customer was English. She called him a ‘Frankish knight’ (who I will henceforth refer to as ‘Frank’) and was really annoyed that he didn’t know old spice* from new. He overpaid and she didn’t respect him and life was normal. These things are recorded (though not the date, nor that the customer was English) in material from the Cairo Genizah.

A genizah is a safe storage place for documents that should not be destroyed, mostly religious, and mostly using Hebrew script. The Cairo Genizah is one of the most famous surviving, The holdings of the Cairo Genizah are amazing and strange and you can read about them in the famous many-volume study by S.D. Goitein (the easiest place for historical fiction writers to begin) or online (the best place for a quick overview). The 400,000 pages, with dates ranging over 1300 years are a marvellous selection of random documents. From them we know more about how the cinnamon was handled in Fustat (including that the sellers there had no respect for Europeans, who they called ‘Franks’) than we know about any other stage of its journey.

Customs and tariffs are another handy set of sources. They are consistent about imported spices that attract tariffs, but don’t tell us how fresh they are, nor what herbs and spices are grown locally. They contain much useful material, but it’s quite specific in nature.

Recipes tell us a little about what happened to that cinnamon, since it was bought by a knight and he would have lived among more literate people than, say, a peasant. Frank may have donated it to the Church, in which case we know how incense was used, through Church records and other sources. It may have been for gifts or for his own household. 1150 is at least within a generation of the first written cookbooks in Old French. We can see some of the uses of that cinnamon in cooking from the earliest twelfth century cookbooks. We’re reliant on random mentions in sermon literature and related materials for anything else.

Add all these sources together and we can trace that cinnamon.

Not everything is equally traceable. Cinnamon was a luxury spice, so it attracts more records than many other things. Wine also attracts records (including a poem in Old French), as does wool.

If we want detail and exciting information about the past, however, some sources are better than others. One of my favourite sources for England last century is that from the Mass Observation project. But that’s a story for another day. Let’s return to the Middle Ages.

One set of sources (also begun in the Middle Ages but not yet closed) has more information about the everyday than the Cairo Genizah: the records of the Inquisition.

The Inquisition’s archives start with the Albigensian Crusade, and their consistent use by historians begins with the French Annales school of history in the twentieth century. The work I always recommend to introduce the extent of material the Inquisition archive holds is E Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou. Le Roy Ladurie used the work of the Inquisition to find out how people lived. That’s the good part. The bad part is that the reason we have such detailed information about lives is because the Church was trying to stamp out heresy: they’re archives resulting from persecution.

In the thirteenth century the heresy was that of the Cathars. After 1492, it was “New Christians:” converts who were still too Jewish. If someone was proven to be a heretic and unable to return to a fold or found to be ‘Judaicised’ beyond redemption, they were burned alive. The price paid for these records is awful. Two scholars re-created the food history of the once-Jews in Spain, and also told us the fate of the person whose food was documented by the Inquisition. Th Inquisition records are a major historical source, and also a terrible one. They record peoples’ lives, and also peoples’ deaths.

I promised we’d end in contemporary Australia, and there is a reason for this. Right now, Australia is creating an archive similar in levels of detail to that of the Inquisition (though covering a very short time) through its Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion.

An Australian Royal Commission is the highest level of inquiry, and it, like the Inquisition, asks many questions to find out what is happening in an area of immense importance and urgency. The trigger for this Royal Commission was the shootings at Bondi, although much of the work of the Royal Commission is on events and issues in the lead-up and after the shooting. Because of the broad focus and detailed question, the Royal Commission is developing deep documentation of the lives of Jewish Australia and their haters and the workings of government at all levels. It is unintentionally creating an immense archive of how Australians see themselves and others and what their lives are like.

Normally I see these things hundreds of years later, but in this case, I’m in the middle of it. I submitted material and every week of the hearings I learn about my own life. It’s quite intense.

This Royal Commission demonstrates just how much work and how many people it takes to create the Cairo Genizah, the Inquisition trial records, or Mass Observation. Even in the age of computers, 20,000 public submissions and week-long testimony into a given subject (all transcribed) is an immense amount of information that has the potential to create some amazing historical fiction… when it is in our own past. Right now, its creation allows us to peek into this kind of vast and detailed records, and helps us interpret them.

Let me give an example. I interpret police records quite differently to even two weeks ago. Before this week, I had to trust narratives about police work, often fictional. This week’s testimony by very senior officers (which is not fully webbed yet, so the link I gave you last paragraph leads you to another week, dealing with universities) showed me how they operate and what frustrates them and how they work alongside other public bodies. My greatest moment of insight was when they tried to explain that they wanted to deal with antisemitism. Their frustration was so clear.

My biggest reminder from these last few weeks, as an historian, is that the past always contains human beings. If we don’t see those humans and can’t hear at least a little of what they’re saying, we need to look further or more deeply.

*This is not a pun, but ought to be.