History keeps changing - writing The Fortune Keeper

 By Deborah Swift

I was really interested to read this week, that the coded letters of Mary Queen of Scots have just been deciphered by modern computer scientists and decoders. Undoubtedly this will give us hitherto unknown insights into what we know about her and her life. Historians and historical fiction authors may need to change their views depending on the new evidence.

A similar thing happened to me when was writing the last book in the trilogy of books about Giulia Tofana, a woman who was renowned for inventing the poison Aqua Tofana, and was supposed to have poisoned six hundred men in Renaissance Italy. (See my Aspects of History article Poison and Power) I had already uncovered through my research that Giulia Tofana was probably an amalgam of three women, and not the single entity of legend.

Three women, not one

The mother, Theofania d’Adamo was executed for the crime of poison on 12th June 1633, but her daughter, Giulia (known as Tofana) survived. The third person in this triumvirate of poisonous women was Giulia’s daughter, known as Girolama Spara. Until recently very little was known about the daughter so as historical novelists do, I fictionalised her birth, assuming she was a blood daughter of Giulia Tofana and her (also unknown) husband surnamed Spara. I wrote about this before for Aspects of History

About half way through writing the third novel in the series, from the point of view of the daughter, new evidence arose about the women in Giulia Tofana’s family. In an old library archive in Italy, an American academic had unearthed the real-time transcript of the murder trial of Giulia Tofana’s daughter, Girolama Spara, (also known as Gironima Spara) and published it. The document was originally kept under lock and key by the Pope at Rome’s Castel Sant’Angelo, and from there ended up in the State Archive where it lay uncatalogued and undiscovered for generations. You can find the document translated by Monson at the end of this article.

History evolves

Of course I trawled through the new information, discovering with growing concern that my fictional view of events differed widely from this new evidence. I was shocked to discover that Girolama Spara was a step-daughter, and not a blood daughter at all, and that Giulia Tofana had been married twice.

The ledger was in a poor state of repair, but Professor Craig A Monson had painstakingly resurrected it and translated it into modern English. The truth is less glamorous than the plot I had in mind for these characters, so what should I do? The past is both fixed and mutable. The two previous books were fixed, already out on shelves and readers were enjoying the story. The new information meant that I would need to be open to bending, or changing, the third book.

Would readers care? There are many schools of thought on this – on how accurate historical fiction should be, and it is debated endlessly by historians and novelists. From my point of view I was obligated to finish the story I had set up with the characters remaining consistent within the series, yet also to incorporate the new information. The rules I set for that world needed to remain in place so that the reader feels they are in a real and secure locale, no matter where the story went.

Whatever character I create can never be the real person. Anne Boleyn has had hundreds of interpretations of her character. The events I describe can never be ‘true’, just as contemporary witnesses to any crime will have different views. A novel can’t be ‘accurate’, just as someone trying to depict my life of yesterday could never be accurate, even with all the iphone technology and photography available now, and if my diaries were in front of them, because life is too complex to render completely. What I hope to achieve in my novels is a tantalising whisper of what it might have been like to inhabit another era.

History continues to fascinate

It is exciting that at last we know more about the actual trial and details of the life of Girolama. She is nicknamed Mia in my book, because having a similar name to her mother Giulia, she was often confused with her, and this led to many errors of attribution. Many of the crimes assigned to Giulia actually belonged to Girolama and vice-versa.

I used maps, academic articles and transcripts of primary sources to complete the book, as well as the translation of the trial documents by Professor Monson, and I like to include historical notes at the end of my books to make it clear where (for the moment) the historical evidence is pointing.

Is The Fortune Keeper a true re-telling of Girolama Spara’s life? Definitely not. Will it take you on a journey into the heart of a young woman in Renaissance Venice? I hope so. 

You may be interested in:

The Black Widows of the Eternal City: The True Story of Rome’s Most Infamous Poisoner by Craig A Monson

Coded Letters of Mary Queen of Scots https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-64568222

THE FORTUNE KEEPER


Buy the Book – https://mybook.to/AquaTofana

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Website www.deborahswift.com

Pictures of 17thC Venice, The Ridotto gambling hall, and the fight on the Bridge of St Barnaba in Venice, all from Wikipedia.

Historians and History in Fiction, by Gillian Polack

 

Right now, I’m not in the Middle Ages. I’m in the seventeenth century. An important part of my research is looking at whether one novelist in particular frames her seventeenth century story so tightly within genre, that a lot of history simply doesn’t belong there. I’ll talk about this novel somewhere else or some other time, for I’m still in the early stages of analysis. One thing I am certain about: the genre we choose for our fiction informs the type of history we use for it. I am certain about it because it was a part of my research a few years ago.

One of the new things this project is teaching me is rather important for all fiction: when we write novels, we are making stories come to life for readers.

Simple, really. Except it’s not at all simple. Most branches of history (as in the discipline studied by historians) do not include this in their desired outcomes. As historians we’re learning about the past, testing hypotheses, finding out what other historians know, trying to understand our small specialisation and trying to interpret our small specialisation. Very few of us are trying to bring history to life for general readers.

To my mind (and I have strong biases on this!), the historical disciplines that come closest to what novelists do are ethnohistory and living history. The focus in these disciplines is on ethnography and culture and changes over time (ethnohistory) and how real people lived their everyday (living history). They overlap with each other.

My own disciplines are ethnohistory and historiography, which is my very weak excuse for giving you a truly oversimplified description of ethnohistory. Most of my writing, fiction and non-fiction, is informed by ethnohistory, in fact. I have two new novels in the last eight months, and both of them use it, even though one of them doesn’t look as if it should. Let’s start with the other, then, because it’s easier. (I ought to talk about my previous novel, Poison & Light, because it’s all history, even though it’s set in the future. The whole premise is about how we try to bring history into our present, so it’s complicated. It has, I must say, fine costumes.)

Poison & Light

 

The Green Children Help Out is a fantasy novel, but everything in it rests on history. The history is not solely ethnohistory, but ethnohistory is the wheel that turns everything in the story. The villains are villainous because of how they interpret what has happened to themselves and to others in the past. The heroes are terribly heroic because they don’t want the past to happen again. Every step my characters take is on land I’ve researched and using history I know. This is the novel I went to Amiens to research in 2018. 

The Green Children Help Out

 

I have pictures of old land use and new land use, of land affected by war and land affected by building over hundreds of years. The ethnohistory embedded into the novel doesn’t shout “Look! History!” it simply informs the characters, giving each of them complex pasts and real lives. It also informs the plot, for the Australians and the British and the French and the sole Singaporean all have quite different national histories and those histories can push individuals from those backgrounds towards certain paths and make certain choices inevitable.

Borderlanders is quite different. It’s set in a house with no clear history. A magic house, settled somehow in the middle of a mountain range not too far from where I live. There’s a gale blowing from me to there, as I type. 

 

Borderlanders

The ethnohistory is still so much part of Borderlanders. Some parts of culture go with us everywhere and those things have history. Folk beliefs, food preferences, belief in magic or even caring to think about magic: all these things can be written without ethnohistory in mind, but in my case… ethnohistory is always there. My reminder to my readers that it’s always there is the library in this very special house.

My thoughts about ethnohistory are not the only ones. In fact, I’m at one of the edges of the spectrum of ethnohistorians because of how I entered the discipline and because, honestly, not many ethnohistorians write novels. This means I can teach writers how to use ethnohistory, and I do, when they need it as a tool.

What about living history? Every historical fiction writer uses living history in their work, whether they intend to or not. It’s the stuff that brings a scene from the past to life. When you read about someone walking down a muddy street and they wish they had worn pattens and their feet hurt from the cobbles and… that is living history.

There are some amazing places to learn living history. Museums, for example, will create displays that are not simply objects in a cabinet, but objects that make me want to pick them up and use them. Some fairs (and also many museums) bring experts in to not only show everyday life, but to talk about it. I have a friend who’s an archaeologist and who is expert in textiles. You can see her work at museums in Germany. You can ask her questions and understand what spinning means and what it is in the life of an ordinary woman in the Middle Ages.

When a scholar is studying living religion, they look at the part religion plays in the lives of people and how religion is expressed. It’s not the theory of religion. It’s ordinary life. How does their religion inform their world view? What religious customs do they bring into their everyday?

Obviously there’s large overlap between ethnohistory and living history. In fact, as disciplines, they inform each other. And both of them inform fiction writers.

Reading historical fiction, by Gillian Polack

The interesting papers of colonial Australia have to wait a bit for my life is suddenly full of the relationship between fiction and history. I’m teaching it, in fact, and am embedded in reading things I already knew and rethinking them. That’s what I love about the history end. There is always rethinking. This is why it’s possible to read twenty different novels on the exact same subject and, if they’re all good novels with thought behind them, discover twenty ways of reading that part of the past.

For today, then, I thought I’d give you a list of five things (only five out of hundreds, so you can expand the list until you run out of thoughts) that help make the history in a particular novel thoughtful and unique. Another way of saying it is five reasons why many people enjoy the history in historical fiction.

1.        A good novel gives a voice to the past. That voice isn’t a still, small voice speaking to the soul, that voice is the novel itself. 

2.        A good novel can make us feel as if we’re walking down the street or eating a meal with the characters. Or even that we are one of the characters. That use of telling detail in an historical novel reminds us that we use five senses every day and that people in history, likewise, walked down streets and ate meals. It reminds us in a visceral way: we live in that moment at that moment in our reading.

3.        A good novel shows us what our current culture or what someone else’s culture thinks of a place and of a time and of people. I’ve just read a book that changes Judaism to make a Jewish character fit into the novel in a way that suits the writer: this is a reminder that the past may be immutable but the way we see it is ever-changing. The relationship between the fiction and the history is negotiated by the writer for us, for readers. That negotiation shows us a lot about the writer, but also about the culture the writer takes for granted. It’s a snapshot of two moments in time and is absolutely beautiful.

4.        A good novel also negotiates between scholarly history and the reader. Before the novel is written, while the novel is being written and often even while the novel is being edited, there is a conversation between the writer and between researchers. One of my favourite moments in this is when the writer asks a book about King John’s household what evidence there is for something they want to put in the book. “None” says the book. “Do I invent this,” the writer then has to ask, “Or do I find another way to tell this part of the story?”

5.        A good novel makes us forget all the negotiations and all the invention and the fact that it’s a one-off depiction of a place and time. It may drag us in or it may pull us in gently or it may lure us, but it gets us in and it says to us, “This is real.”

Culpeper and Writing, by Gillian Polack

I often ask people “What would you like me to write about in my articles?” They want me (mostly) to write about people. 

My fiction is about people, but my historian side isn’t that kind of historian. I’m an historiographer and ethnohistorian. I think about cultures and about books and about books in culture and about stories.

Today, when I thought “I want to write about Nicholas Culpeper” because I was thinking of my own past, not because I’m interested in the seventeenth century nor in his life. At high school we were allowed to choose our own books for the end-of-year prizes. My English prize was Culpeper’s herbal. It combined so many of my interests. I chose it because I wanted a copy of my own, so that I could learn to decode the entries and know how Culpeper thought of herbs and used herbs. My kind of history. I had it even when I was seventeen.

I’ve used my volume of Culpeper so often since I was seventeen, but it’s been a while since I sat down and questioned how I use it. These days I use it as a reference for my fiction, but also as an historian. I know a lot more about the historical context of the book, and theoretically whenever I look at a page, that automatically kicks in. This makes my fiction quite different to what I wrote when I was eighteen. Around then my first short story was published and it was a very precise description of working at a rubber glove factory. If I had included Culpeper, it would possibly have been the main character going home and reading the book herself, for my writing was often very literal and everyday back then.

I’m not certain that we talk enough about what fiction writers do when they read a book to use in their fiction. I have a new short story to write soon and Culpeper is a useful source, since the story is set in a strange and wonderful shop. If the shop assistant had an array of herbs for various uses and only a single reference volume to consult, what would she know, and how do I read an entry to interpret it in this environment? Is it as simple as my response would have been when I was a brand-new writer with little life experience and only the beginnings of an understanding of what history is and how to use sources?

I want to begin with the second question. In fact, I have to begin with the second question.

What my character would know depends wholly on how I would read an entry for the place and time that character lives in. There’s a big difference between how I read Culpeper as a seventeen year old to how I read Culpeper forty years later, so let’s start with that.

The entry I’ve chosen to play with is that on the cherry tree, mainly because it’s a short entry. You can find it here: http://www.complete-herbal.com/culpepper/cherrytree.htm

When I was seventeen I read it literally. When I read ‘sour cherries” I thought ‘Morello’ and I looked for where a tree could be grown and how it could be eaten. I tasted uncooked sour cherries and I tried drying them to match what the entry described.

The health side of the entry I noted, but pushed aside, for a couple of my relatives were health professionals (doctors and dentists) and had given me strict warnings on health issues and old herbals. I used more modern herbals to test some medicinal properties, but Culpeper was of a period that, I was told, had dangerous medicine.

Now, in this day and place, I read it for the physical qualities Culpeper describes, for it’s a medical herbal, not a culinary one and I know far too well how few medieval medicines have actually been tested. I would check to see if Morello cherries are the same type of sour cherry as Culpeper describes, and if the change in cherries over time has been documented by specialists. I’d check sites like Brogdale to see what they tell me about fruit in general and about cherries in particular. Then, and only then, I’d play with the fruit itself, knowing more about the relationship between a modern cherry tree and Culpeper’s.

The next thing I do is look for the qualities of a plant in relation to the structure of the universe. 

This sounds big. It isn’t. It’s quite simple. In the case of cherries, they are of Venus. Culpeper tells us so. He always tells us so. This informs me how the cherry might work in relation to other plants if I were a doctor and finding suitable medicine for an ailment. Medicine back then didn’t operate along the same lines as modern medicine (it had to balance the humours, for instance) and knowing a plants qualities meant that the heat, the cold, the wet and the dry could be deduced. That sentence “It is a tree of Venus.” is a coded explanation for the long paragraph that follows and that describes different types of cherries, how they work fresh and how they work dried. 

It’s not a complete list of ways cherries might be used in medicine: it’s a guide to how cherries fit into the world of remedy.

This leads to something important. The shop assistant in my story would not be able to prescribe using Culpeper alone. She would need other references, or medicinal products already packaged, or someone she could ask for help. She could sell the dried fruit as dried fruit and helpfully explain that Culpeper lists it as ‘being cooling in hot diseases, and welcome to the stomach’. She would find it harder to create  prescription for a particular illness: medieval medicine required a lot more training than access to a herbal, no matter how wonderful the herbal is.

My short story, however, is a fantasy short story with historical elements. Can’t I use Culpeper any way I want, then? The answer to that is, sadly, “Only if I want historians to find it comic or sad or simply badly done.” Taking historical sources from a given time and lifting out fun facts and putting them into a context where those fun facts are distorted lead to such reactions. The reason for that is one of the things I’m researching right now, because it’s seriously cool.

Every single novel has certain attributes that readers pick up on. They’re the reason we choose to read this novel over that other one. Historical fiction tends to keep historical material in stronger historical context than historical fantasy does. Within a given novel, a certain level of historical accuracy is more or less appropriate and this fits very closely in with the genre of the novel. (This is my older research – if you want to explore it, History and Fiction is the place to go.)

All novels have an invented world. Some invented worlds look very much like ours (historical fiction) and some go in interestingly wayward directions (historical fantasy) and some borrow from history but deviate in even more ways. Other world fantasy is a good illustration of this description, but it applies to a range of genres. My short story will be part of a series of stories that are ‘portal’ – the shop door can lead from the shopfloor into a range of places. This means that the historical accuracy of the Culpeper really doesn’t matter, in one way. There is nothing medieval about this shop except… 

When we (writers) build a world for a novel, it has to contain a certain level of credibility for the reader. The need for credibility in the story itself applies to almost all novels. It even applies to short stories, but because short stories contain so much less detail, credibility is easier to achieve. A few bits of detail that give the right feel and all is good. When someone writers a linked sequences of short stories (as I am, now) that sequence has about the same credibility requirements as a short novel.

How does Culpeper relate to credibility? I need a reason to have cherries on that medicinal shelf. I need a reason to have Culpeper on the reference shelf (the door leads to our word sometimes, perhaps). I need someone who can read the book (ie speaks English) and knows what cherries are. Then come the questions about how those dried cherries are used, why they are being bought, why the book is picked up at all…

My decisions on all these things might make or break the short story, even if they are merely two paragraphs in twenty pages.

Every single bit of historical information in historical fiction carries such weight. This brings me to my endgame: I am not writing about Culpeper today. I’m using Culpeper as an example to show you the weight of the research behind the work of the History Girls and other writers. Evaluating every single element of history in a novel is part of the novel-writing game. Making sure it fits the kind of novel we’re writing, the place, the time, and even the characters in the novel is not easy. It is, however, what brings history into fiction in a way that more readers can enjoy.

History in the everyday, the importance of community cookbooks - Gillian Polack

I collect cookbooks produced by communities. Sometimes they’re big volumes, stuffed with recipes from every single family that attends a primary school, sometimes the recipes are full of healthy ingredients to reflect the interests of a life-saving organisation. One book is full of recipes from tins and packets. A whole group of books are simply copied from a stock source, with the names of the organisations changed. 

Last year a hundred of my community cookbooks were stolen and this week a friend posted a few replacements as a gift.

This is why I’m writing about them today. The changes in my collection and the emotions behind them – the sorrow of losing so much and the joy of friends remembering me and sending me more – brings the history of cookbooks into the forefront of my mind.

This post is dedicated to those kind friends who are watching out for community cookbooks for me because of last year’s loss. I want to talk about why it matters to me so very much. As well as what I talk about here, I use my collection to build foodways for characters in my fiction, but that’s a different story. It’s just as important: fiction rings out to the reader more clearly when the food is the right food for the place and time and when a character has their own interpretation of it. If the interpretation is sound then a simple cooking scene will resonate with every single reader who has a share in such a foodway. A different story, but a fascinating one.

This type of volume is a by-product of printing. It never has been a major part of the industry, but it’s been around for a while.

The reason for a community to order a cookbook are varied. Some are to raise funds and some are to commemorate a big event and some are ‘because we felt like it.’ My own recipes are in several of the volumes that survived the theft. One of the volumes (Homemade, 2009) raised money for bushfire victims, and another (Scary Food) is part of a horror anthology edited by Cat Sparks. The first is all recipes, dense and rich. Half the copies printed were given to those who lost everything in the 2009 bushfires, which means some of us who contributed gave important family recipes, in the hopes that we might replicate recipes that had been lost in the fire. Scary Food is mostly short stories, with just a sprinkling of dark recipes.

This kind of book, like the seventeenth century chapbook, a form of cultural ephemera. While a few volumes may be treasured for years or may enter collections, most fade. Some of the volumes are foodie treasures and some of them echo the worst food of a time and place, or the idea (when the book is pre-packaged and just the name of the organisation is changed) that there is a shared cuisine in a given place at a given time.

These books are fragments of our foodways. 

If I were making a time capsule, I would include a community cookbook. It would tell the person who opened the time capsule so much about the people who buried it. What recipes were worth including in the book? What group of people does the volume’s creation tell us about and what background do they share? 

What does it tell us about the foodways of the group that published it? If the book is laid out according to courses, as many are, it tells us a lot about the way food was served. How much fat/spice/sugar do recipes have? It tells about eating habits and dietary preferences. There’s a lot of information scrunched between the covers of a community cookbook.

Sometimes I pull out volumes from a single geographical region and arrange them in time order and discover what has happened over time to a given place. Sometimes I pull out the volumes published in a five year period and arrange them geographically. Sometimes I pull out the volumes shared by sports teams and sometimes primary schools. Each time I do this, I learn more about the culture and history that underpin our food. I also learn about people.

Edited and professional cookbooks have a different focus. They share just as much wonderful information, but they share it differently. Even the ones that are published to represent a group or who are from a food writer who is lovingly detailing the family’s past read differently to most community cookbooks. Professionalism changes the context of a cookbook and that book tells us a different story because of it.

Sometimes I think that the community books are like seventeenth century chapbooks. I still love seventeenth century chapbooks and my volumes of reprints are fewer, too, because of that theft, but this isn’t the parallel I’m making today. Nor is the obvious one: that both are printed ephemera. The audience is the interesting bit for me. Chapbooks have a different audience to bigger volumes because they wee cheap and more disposable. They also have a different audience because they were often brought into lives by peddlers and on streets rather than being the stuff of up-market bookshops. The peddler and the community stall at a fete have overlapping social roles.

The other book that has something important in common with the community cookbooks is the handwritten record of family histories. They linked to the other end of the market, during their earlier days, because literacy was not even close to universal when individuals started writing down their family recipes. Household notes, or detailed recipes - some families kept them. They cover some of the same functions as the community cookbook, preserving local foodways.

Although there is overlap in the writing down of foodways, these handwritten collections often don’t reflect quite the same aspects of culture as appear in a community cookbook. An individual writing recipes (Martha Lloyd, for instance, in Jane Austen’s family) makes personal choices about what part of the family’s food experience need preserving. It’s not the same as a “We have two weeks to collet your favourite recipes. Ready, set, go!” 

What they share is that need to define what’s valuable to the family, to the community. Many of the recipes In the bushfire cookbook are nothing like those in some of the community cookbooks lost in the fires. Most of those parts of rural Victoria had very Anglo cuisines in its community books for many years. Recipes for dishes such as scones were consistent across space and even time in that region. Homemade, the bushfire book, has three scone recipes, and none of them are for plain scones. One is for ham and cheese (in pinwheels) and the others are lemonade scones and pumpkin scones. Scones are still a recipe that helps heal, but the type of scone has changed just as the culture of the community has changed over time.

That’s why I love these cookbooks so very much. I can read the foodways over time and those foodways are magic.