Historical Fiction Research

Not a lot sperto (Automatic Translation, Part 2)

2012-02-09T14:56:00.004-08:00

This sign is a good example of why I prefer reading Italian materials in Italian. The churchgoers who speak Italian are treated to a whole list of things not to do, and even the French and German speakers get more detail than English speakers. Although the terse English comment does rather sum it all up, as well as (perhaps) illustrating an Italian attitude toward English-speaking tourists.

But we were speaking of Automatic Translation (A.T.), as opposed to efforts, however inadequate, by a human being. Let's see what A.T. comes up with when translating a bit of literary criticism, in this case Lorenzo the Magnificent's assessment of the poetry of Guido Cavalcanti (below, sitting on the tombstone):

A vague, sweet and weird style

"As the body was beautiful and graceful, like blood very polite, so I 'do not know that his writings more than any other beautiful, kind and resembled weird, shrill and inventions, wonderful, wonderful, very serious in its judgments, and copious detected in the order, composed, wise and prudent, all of which his blessed virtue of a vague, sweet and weird style, as precious as are adorned."

Wonderful, wonderful indeed. Let's try a more modern critique of Guido's work: "...gentle light that may seem trivial... the vocabulary used by engineers drawn from the absence of dicing, pauses, syntactic inversions." One wonders what the critic would have said, no doubt in an engineer's vocabulary, in the presence of dicing.

Lest Guido suffer his weirdness alone, let's also look at a brief discussion of the famous tenzone (an exchange of poetic insults) between Dante and Forese Donati: "In this combat, built according to the Convention and the stylistic comic-realistic poetry of the time, the two poets reproach each other defects and meanness of all kinds, using slang, if not scurrilous. Dante to Forese blames the lack of sexual prowess, debt, greed food, habits, and the violent birth uncertain, while Forese to Dante criticizes a state of poverty and begging, its origins, some with his father kept making mistakes." Dante's dad wasn't the only one.

And one more before we move on from literature. The Sienese poet Cecco Angiolieri's work is described thus: "The woman-angel becomes a creature on earth, even vulgar. Is catapulted into nightclubs... the presence of a father because of his stingy that parsimony does not allow to squander Cecco to win the beautiful women. The protagonists are his wife, gossipy, sullen, and the lover Becchina, sensual and mean..." It is a rather arresting image, the woman-angel being catapulted into nightclubs, don't you think?

Now let's move on to a historical incident, the violent demise of Corso Donati (remember Run Donates to You, from the last post?):

Trying to escape from his horse:
Death of Run Donates to You

"... was pierced by the lance of one of his guards, while trying to escape from his horse and dropping, dropping, he was caught in a stirrup and his body was dragged and torn from the animal in race." This unfortunate incident is compared to "how the sinners in hell were taken directly from galloping horses and the penalty of drag in a ponytail that municipal statues prescribed for traitors." I am now imagining Corso, in drag and with a ponytail mandated by the Commune. I suspect this is not what was intended.

Not only was poor Corso said to be known for his "banter and insult-prone ways," he apparently was thought to be responsible for early computer viruses. This next quote tells us that Corso was "most cruel... body beautiful, pleasant speaker, adorned with beautiful costumes, subtle wit, his mind always intent on malware... many arson and robbery he did a lot to do..."

Corso was said to have plucked his sister Piccarda out of a convent and forced her to marry Rossellino della Tosa, but it was all right, because "...it is said that providentially died of plague before the wedding is consumed, but it is a legend."

A.T. occasionally seems to damn by faint praise, even when the original meaning was much stronger and more laudatory. Thus, Corso's enemy Vieri dei Cerchi (aka Circles, or Wheels) is said to have "had moments of very favorable", and Dante's ethereal Beatrice is described as "most likely a very nice lady."

Most likely a very nice lady

The city of Florence and its chaotic politics come in for their fair share of garbling. The "noble unravelled city" suffers in part because when A.T. doesn't happen to have a word in its dictionary, it simply leaves the Italian word in place, which results in jumbled paragraphs like this one: "The impotent ones were not help you, but the large ones offended to it, and cosi' the fat popolani that that they were in the ufici and become related to you with large: and many for money were defenses from the pains of the Common one, in that they fell. Waves the good popolani citizens were dissatisfied, and blamed the uficio de' Priori, perchu' the Guelfi large were getlteman."

I don't know if you feel any better informed after reading that; I didn't. But I can well imagine that "Then of tornarono with little fruit; because it was consumed to you much, with breathlessnesses of persons." Those breathlessnesses might explain a lot.

Noble unravelled city

A.T. can be particularly colorful when describing medieval warfare. Thus we learn, for example, that "...the war of Arezzo, pel granted favor da' Fiorentini to the Guelfi hunted from that city..." I had no idea that Pell Grants had anything to do with medieval Italian battles. Infantrymen are called "pedestrians," and we get lively descriptions like this one: "The Aretini vigorous attacked the field yes and with much force, than the formation de' strong Fiorentini it recoiled. The battle was much sour and hard one." No doubt it was.

The title of this post comes from a description of messer Amerigo di Nerbona, the young man left in charge of the Ghibelline forces before the Battle of Campaldino: "... its baron and kind man, the beautifulst young person and of the body, but not a lot sperto in facts of arms..." Had he been a tad more sperto, maybe the Ghibs would have won, but it was not to be.

Pedestrians go to war

We would be remiss to omit an example of the kind of stirring rhetoric that led these people to go to war in the first place. Here's Berto Frescobaldi, exhorting his fellows: "And therefore, getlteman, I council that we exit of this servitude. Prendiam the arms, and we run on the piaza: we kill friends and nimici, of people, how many we of it find, yes that already never we neither our boys are not from soggiogati they." As they say, with friends like that...

Who could fail to be moved by such words? Well, maybe messer Self-confident of Tosa, who rose and spoke next: "Getlteman, the council of savio the knight is good, if it were not too much risk; because, if our thought came lacks, we will all be dead men." Messer Self-confident proposed a sneakier course of action, and if you thought the above was confusing, you'll be pleased that I'm sparing you the rest of his advice.

It is sometimes difficult to figure out exactly who is doing what to whom, in A.T. Note, for example, the following: "19 years after his death, the bodies of Farinata and his wife Florence Adaleta underwent a public trial for the prosecution (posthumous) of heresy. For the occasion, their mortal remains... were exhumed for the celebration of the process... So all the property bequeathed to the heirs were confiscated by Farinata." Maybe if Farinata confiscated property from his own heirs, he had been celebrating the process a bit too much.

Even familiar proverbs get mangled. Take "When the shepherd is struck, the sheep will scatter." Logical enough, yes? A.T. renders it "Percosso the dispersed shepherdesses, fiano the sheep."

And the famous line uttered by Mosca dei Lamberti, " Cosa fatta capo ha," which is still in use in Italy, is usually thought to mean that once a thing is done, the matter is at an end. Compare, then, these A.T. versions:

"A deed done lias an end."
"What done is done."
"A thing done has."
"Cape has done what."
or the laconic "Thing done."

I leave you with this last incoherent morsel: "And holding this shape, it was great usefullness of the people: but I toast was changed, but that the citizens who entered in that uficio, not attendeano to observare the laws, but corrupting them."

Images in this post: sign photographed by Tim Heath; Guido Cavalcanti in a miniature from a manuscript housed in Paris, illustrating a story in Boccaccio's Decameron; miniatures of the death of Corso Donati and of the Battle of Montaperti from an illustrated manuscript of Giovanni Villani's Nuova Cronica in the Vatican Library; Beata Beatrix by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1864-70; view of Florence from the Madonna della Misericordia in the Loggia del Bigallo, Florence. The last five are public domain by virtue of expired copyright.

By any other name (Automatic Translation, Part 1)

2012-02-02T07:47:00.001-08:00

Question: What do the following have in common?

1. Dino Similar
2. Lottery of the Best Gain
3. Sniper dei Bardi
4. Moscow Lamberti

Answer: All of them are prominent 13th century Italians, Dante's contemporaries, whose names have been mangled by Automatic Translation (A.T., henceforth).

Some people love their computer games. There's nothing like SIMS, solitaire, or Farmville to serve as an expert time-waster, to abet procrastination, and to keep you distracted. I've managed to resist the siren song of cyber-play for the most part, but I do have a weakness for playing around with A.T.

Not every site provides it. I don't need it, fortunately - I read Italian well enough to get by, and it's Italian history I'm researching. But sometimes, I just can't resist the delicious linguistic loopiness that awaits, and I succumb.

In fact, I've collected so many examples worth sharing that I'm dividing this post into two parts, to fit in as many favorites as I can. This time we'll have a look at what A.T. does to names (and, to a lesser extent, to other nouns); next time we'll look at some longer excerpts, including literary criticism and political commentary.

Sometimes A.T. will read a name as a name and leave it alone, but other times it doggedly tries to translate it, never mind whether it makes any sense or not. This is how the Florentine chronicler Dino Compagni managed to emerge as Dino Similar, or in another instance the somewhat more logical Dino Companions. His fellows in the list above are, respectively, Lotto del Migliore Guadagni (his is actually is not such a bad translation, except for the lottery part); Cecchino dei Bardi; and Mosca dei Lamberti.

Giano the Beautiful

This fine fellow, while attractive enough, is not quite what I'd call beautiful, but his name is Giano della Bella, and there you have it.

The gentleman on the horse, directing demolition operations (they're freeing prisoners to help them overrun the city), is Corso Donati, cousin of Dante's wife Gemma Donati.

Run Donates to You

A.T. has given him the unlikely moniker of Run Donates to You. (Sometimes he pops up as Course rather than Run.) It makes a certain linguistic sense, but somehow it just isn't the same, thinking of him as Run.

It's easy enough to see from the arms of the Cerchi family, shown below, how they manage to come out as the Circles, or the Wheels. To understand how they become You Looking For, you need to know a bit of Italian. This is also, presumably, how a church under that family's patronage became St. Margaret of Looking. And how, when Corso (remember Corso/Run?) married a relative of the Cerchi, she was said to be related to "the father's side wheels."

The Circles (also, The Wheels, or the You Looking For)

If A.T. thinks it is translating from Italian, it is too single-minded to let a snippet of Latin get in its way. Thus, the last will and testament of Folco (Fulk) Portinari, father of Dante's beloved Beatrice, who refers to his daughter in his will by her nickname of Bice, is found by A.T. to have willed "his bike" to the wife of Simone dei Bardi. Simone, by the way, in addition to being Bice's husband, was the brother of that Cecchino known to A.T. as Sniper dei Bardi (but then, these were violent times).

His Bike (with a brother-in-law named Sniper)

His bike? (Photographed from the Casa di Dante)

There are many and more of these, as George R.R. Martin might have said: Lapo di Cambio becomes Lapo Exchange; Sasso da Murli becomes Pebble from Murlo; Baldo dal Borgo becomes Self-Confident from the Village; Salvi del Chiaro Girolami becomes It knows you of the Clear Girolami; and in one that I still haven't quite figured out, Orlando da Chiusi transmogrifies into Bordering from Sluices. (Making sense is optional.)

As a final example of personal names, I give you the redoubtable Farinata degli Uberti, Ghibelline leader and victor at the Battle of Montaperti. "Farinata" is itself a nickname; his birth name was Manente. A.T. managed to turn that into Permanent Uberti, an ironic name which could describe his family's state of exile from Florence once the Guelf party gained ascendancy. In Dante's dramatic account of his meeting with Farinata (A.T. calls him Flour) in Hell, Dante taunts him that while Dante's own ancestors had returned (twice) from exile, the Uberti "had not learned that art."

Permanent Uberti (aka Flour)

Nouns other than proper nouns can also become quite improper in the clutches of A.T. Thus, Florence's powerful Guilds somehow become the Limbs; the Commune itself becomes the Common One; the Grandi, or magnates (the wealthy and the nobility who controlled the government) becomes the Large Ones; and the popolo minuto, or the general populace, becomes The Tiny People. With a cavalier disregard for parts of speech, and retaining in Italian that which it cannot render in English, a phrase meaning "the crime of murder" becomes "one malificio of dead women."

Finally, there is an Italian word which meant something very different in the 13th century than it does today (it may have a different origin; the accents fall in different places, but A.T. doesn't know the difference). What once meant a council (or possibly a single advisor) now refers to a woman providing childcare, and that is why we can learn, thanks to A.T., that the warrior bishop of Arezzo, in the hours before the bloody battle of Campaldino, sought the advice of his nanny.

Next time, whole paragraphs of this stuff. See you then.

Images in this post: Corso Donati and Giano della Bella are from an illustrated copy of Villani's Nuova Cronica, Chigi codex, Vatican Library. Photo of the Cerchi stemma by Sailko, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported. Beatrice by Marie Spartali Still, 1895, and Farinata by Andrea del Castagno, both public domain by reason of expired copyright. Sign at top and bike (seen from window of the Casa di Dante museum) photographed by Tim Heath.

Exercising Your Imagination, Part 2

2012-02-02T07:11:00.001-08:00

Last time, we saw the unfortunate Ricoverino de' Cerchi injured in a street fight in Florence on May Day, 1300. We used the example of this incident to illustrate some of the differences between Florence then and Florence now, and to show how someone trying to envisage the past needs to make a huge imaginative leap to picture things the way they used to be.

We posited that Ricoverino's friends, alarmed at the fact that his nose had been cut off, would have hurried to take him to his home, some distance across the city (the altercation occurred in Piazza Santa Trinita). While his assailants took refuge in the palazzo of the Spini family (now the Ferragamo shoe store), Ricoverino, aided by his friends, would have made his way home, no doubt bleeding profusely. They would have skirted the southern edge of the marketplace (now the neon-infested Piazza della Repubblica) and headed east.

As they approached the home neighborhood of the Cerchi and the Donati (the families that led the two opposing factions involved in the brawl), they would have passed the ancient round tower called La Pagliazza, a women's prison, so named because of the straw pallets the women slept on.

Today, La Pagliazza houses a luxurious hotel - Hotel Brunelleschi - and you could easily pay several hundred euros a night for a room or a suite there, not to mention access to their cocktail lounge and their workout center. A far cry from desolate women sleeping on straw pallets.

Likely they would have passed Orsanmichele, which at that time housed two things of importance: a grain market, and an image of the Madonna which was said to work miracles. Worship and commerce coexisted in this extraordinary space, which at that time was an open loggia, not the dignified building of today graced with statues in niches. Had Ricoverino's nose been saved, a nose-shaped votive offering of wax might have been given to Orsanmichele (or, failing that, his family might have chosen to give a votive offering in thanks for his survival). These wax offerings were the reason Orsanmichele turned into a torch in 1304, when men involved in the same partisan dispute that harmed Ricoverino would set a fire that consumed much of that central part of town. Here we see Orsanmichele then (the grain market) and now:

Perhaps, as this rowdy retinue reached his street, Dante would have come out of his house to watch. His house was probably not the rebuilt structure which houses the Dante museum today, despite its name (Casa di Dante); some claim that he was born in the building that now houses the trattoria Il Pennello:

I've eaten in Il Pennello. The pasta is very good; when I mentioned this to a friend, she observed, "Well, of course it was. They cooked it al Dante."

And what of Dante's love and inspiration, the lovely Beatrice? Her family (the Portinari) had a palazzo only a few steps away from Ricoverino's family's home, in a building that is now the Banca Toscana:

Appropriate, since her father Folco Portinari was a wealthy banker. Those of you who read Part 1 might recall that he was the man who founded the hospital Santa Maria Nuova, which is still in operation today. Beatrice, however, had died a decade before this incident, though some of her many siblings might have peered out to see what was going on.

And what about another woman in Dante's life, his wife, Gemma Donati? She might well have had an interest in Ricoverino's plight. Her family was one of the noble families most involved in the partisan strife, and her cousin Corso was the leader of the Donati faction (which included the guys holed up in the shoe store). She is said to have been born in the building that is now another hotel, the Albergo Firenze:

At long last Ricoverino's friends would manage to get him to his home. The Cerchi owned many palaces and houses in the area, and we cannot be sure that the one shown below was his home, but it certainly belonged to his family and would have been well known to him, and he would have lived either in this building or nearby.

The Cerchi palazzo today houses study abroad programs from Kent State and Penn State Universities, but in his day Ricoverino did not have access to student health services, so his family would have called a doctor in to see to him.

Images in this post: Photos of La Pagliazza, Orsanmichele, and the Palazzo de' Cerchi are by Sailko, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported. Photo of the Banca Toscana released to public domain by photographer (Mattes). Orsanmichele grain market from Biadaiolo Codex. Photos of Il Pennello and Albergo Firenze by Tim Heath.

Exercising Your Imagination, Part 1

2012-01-31T11:20:00.000-08:00

Ricoverino de' Cerchi

I write about Florence, and I've been lucky enough to make several trips to that storied city, for research and for pleasure (and for the pleasure of research). But Florence is not only a city of the past; it is a living, vibrant city of today, as well. And sometimes, even when the little piece of history you're looking for is still there, it has been transformed into something unrecognizable.

When I tried to follow the path of the protagonist in my book about the murder of the knight Buondelmonte and the factional split behind it, I found several ancient buildings still right where they ought to be, but now serving utterly different functions. Two examples: the church of Santo Stefano hosted a turbulent meeting of one of the families involved and their kith and kin in the year 1216, but today it's a library:

Santo Stefano

And the formidable tower of the Amidei family, from which my protagonist witnessed the murder, is still there. Like other defensive towers in Florence, it was truncated by order of law in 1250 to a less threatening height. It now houses a jewelry store, but still has its commanding view of the Ponte Vecchio:

Amidei Tower

The unfortunate fellow shown at the top of this post, one Ricoverino de' Cerchi, was involved in an altercation at the Piazza Santa Trinita on Calendimaggio, 1300. Women had been dancing in the piazza to celebrate the day, and among their audience were roving bands of youths from the two opposing factions, that of the Donati and that of the Cerchi.

Because, as chronicler Dino Compagni says, the young are easier to deceive than the old, the devil made use of them to cause trouble. The two factions came to blows. Ricoverino's nose was severed, and the members of the other faction dashed away to take refuge in the palazzo of the Spini family, one of whose members may have struck the offending blow.

So where is this Spini palazzo? Quite near the piazza - just a short sprint - except that now it's a Ferragamo shoe store and shoe museum.

Were this situation to occur today, the young hotheads would probably be mounted on Vespas, and they would have a chance to do some serious shoe-shopping while they waited for things to calm down.

Pre-Ferragamo Italian shoes

But what of poor, nasally-challenged Ricoverino? (Alas, he seems to be known to history only for losing his nose. At least Tycho Brahe managed to do a few other things as well as lose his.) Where did his friends take him? To the nearest hospital? Was there such a thing as a hospital?

Yes, there was. But a hospital at that time did not mean what it means today. Hospitals at this point in Florence's history mostly existed to serve an elderly or poor population (ill or not), and to accommodate travellers, though one could glimpse the beginnings of our modern concept of hospitals as places for the sick to go. Folco Portinari, the father of Dante's beloved Beatrice, founded a hospital in 1288 at the behest of a servant, Monna Tessa, who according to some versions of the tale used to bring ailing and destitute people home to care for them, thus convincing the wealthy banker Folco that if he wanted his house back, he ought to create someplace else for those unfortunates to go. That hospital is still active today. Here, pictures of the Ospedale di Santa Maria Nuova from the 1430's and from the present.

So, probably not to a hospital. Likely Ricoverino's friends would have taken him home, which meant traversing quite a bit of the city. (The Donati and the Cerchi, bitter enemies that they were, were close neighbors, and also neighbors of Dante.) One possible route would have skirted the marketplace, Florence's huge and chaotic center of everyday commerce, which was razed in the 1800s and turned into a modern piazza, resulting in the loss of many historic buildings in the area. Here's a picture of the market before its demolition, and of the piazza today.

For now, let's leave Ricoverino and his friends making their way past the market and toward home, and next time, we will take a look at past and present in his (and Dante's) neighborhood.

Images in this post: Ricoverino is from an illustrated copy of Villani's Nuova Cronica, Chigi codex, L. VIII.296, Vatican Library; the dancing women are by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, a detail of the fresco Allegory of Good Government on the walls of the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena; the old view of Ospedale di Santa Maria Nuova is by Bicci di Lorenzo (Consecration of the new church of St. Egidio by Pope Martin V in September 1420); the old market is by Fabio Borbottoni, 1820-1902 (View of Ancient Florence). All of these are in the public domain. The photos of the Ferragamo Shoe Museum and the Ospedale are both by Sailko,licensed under the Creative Common Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported; and the photo of Piazza della Repubblica is by Maksim, under the same license. Sailko and Maksim photos from Wikimedia Commons. Other photos by Tim Heath.

Talismans

2012-01-27T12:41:00.000-08:00

Still Life with a Skull and a Writing Quill

Pieter Claeszoon

I'm sure I'm not the only writer who has acquired a talisman or two to help the writing flow. I don't mean a good-luck charm, but rather something to serve as a tangible link between the writer and her subjects.

If you are writing historical fiction that is primarily biographical, it might be a picture of your subject, something that evokes that individual for you. While it could be even better to have an object once owned by the subject (though in the picture above, the writer may have gone a bit too far with this), that often is not possible. Most of us are not in a position to own a necklace of Cleopatra's, or Leonardo's original notebooks (though the facsimiles might serve), nor do we have a Giotto fresco on the walls of our writing room. So, we do the best we can.

For me it's about connecting with a time and place, and pictures are a logical starting point. I keep a file of pictures of medieval architecture, for example. Also, I play - by which I mean both listen to and perform - music appropriate to my setting. But as evocative and atmospheric as these things are, they are not quite talismans. The link is general, not specific.

I wanted something Dante and his family could have touched. Ruling out some sort of daring heist at the Museo Casa di Dante, it seemed that a coin might be the best bet. True, I would never know whether any of my subjects actually had come in contact with a particular coin, but the time and place, at least, would be right, and the possibility that my subjects had held the coin in their hands was a real one.

So I shopped. First I found a replica of Florence's gold florin (first minted in 1252 and historically important to the economy of all of Europe for a long time thereafter). It was in a museum catalogue in the form of a pair of cufflinks. Having little need for cufflinks, I took them into my favorite lapidary shop and had them made into earrings.

The earrings were nice, but I wanted something real, not just a copy. A knowledgeable and interesting numismatist sells his wares at the Medievalist Conference in Kalamazoo, Michigan every year, and since I didn't care about finding something in mint condition, I was able to locate an affordable denaro from Ravenna, minted somewhere around 1300.

Dante ended his life in Ravenna (in 1321), so this seemed a good bet. Good, but not perfect, because I wanted something from Florence.

But so does everybody else, so it was hard to find. I did, however, manage to acquire a Florentine quattrino (a coin worth four denari) from somewhere between 1300-1422. A little late, but not bad. It has the traditional Florentine emblems of a fleur de lis on one side and John the Baptist on the other (hard to see, and he's not upright in this picture, but he's there).

Again I got one in cruddy condition (technical term...) and didn't have to spend much. Just as well, because I intended to handle these things - a numismatist's nightmare.

Then I found myself wondering what these coins were worth, and what Dante might have spent them on. This turned out to be a mind-bogglingly complex question (who knew?). Florence's system of actual, physical money existed alongside a roughly parallel system of money-of-account, used for computations but not actually represented by coinage. These systems diverged, sometimes wildly, at different points. And the smaller coins were devalued - silver was mixed with base metals - to different extents at different times. Sometimes the coinage was linked to that of certain other cities, sometimes it wasn't. Nomenclature was confusing, surviving records incomplete. The new (in 1252) gold florin was originally equal to the lira, which was worth 20 soldi, each in turn worth 12 denari (hence the quattrino is worth one-third of a soldo), but by 1279 it was already worth 30 soldi. Between 1252 and 1321 (the year of Dante's death) the value of the denaro (penny) fell by about 50%. Rich people - let's call them the 1% - thought and spent in florins, but poor people (the 99%) were at the mercy of the unkind fluctuations of the soldo and the denaro.

But what would these coins have bought? Is it possible to look at a snapshot in time and get an idea of prices? Because of all the complexities, it is hard to be exact, but it is probably safe to say that during Dante's adult lifetime a quattrino would have bought, for example, a loaf of bread.

Of course, though the government could and did regulate the price of a loaf of bread, its size and weight would fluctuate with the price of grain.

A few points of reference: for the years 1289-93, an unskilled worker might earn a monthly wage of 50 soldi (600 of those little denari, or 150 quattrini). For that same period, his food costs would be about 35 soldi, and lodging, clothing, and other necessities added up to about 8. He
comes out ahead to the tune of 7 soldi. If, however, he has a wife and two children, his food costs rise to 83 soldi and other needs to 16, for a total of 99 soldi, or almost twice as much as he earns. A staio of grain
(16.9-17.6 kilograms) would cost him 7 soldi and 5 denari; a baril of wine (40.7 liters) purchased in 1286-7 would set him back 6 soldi; he'd pay 2 soldi 3 denari for an orcio (28.86 kilograms) of olive oil.

These coins were small change. They wouldn't have bought much; they were probably the sort of "spare change" Dante might have dropped into a beggar's bowl. And yet, they take me back to a distant time and place and give me a tangible, physical link with the people I write about, and to me, that's worth many a gold florin.

Images in this post: all Wikimedia Commons images (still life, four illustrations from the Tacuina sanitatis) are in the public domain. Coin photos by Tim Heath. The Tacuina sanitatis is a medieval handbook on wellness, based on an 11th century Arab treatise by Ibn Butlan of Baghdad.

Contractions: We Use Them, Do We Not?

2012-01-17T11:38:00.000-08:00

14th century manuscript of Dante's Commedia

This post addresses one of my pet peeves in historical fiction. It is a sort of compositional caveat, or a stylistic stricture, or perhaps a grammatical grump (or grouse, or gripe, raising the question of whether there's something onomatopoetical in that "gr" sound).

It's about contractions. I see so many books set in the more-or-less distant past that eschew the use of contractions, as if no one had invented them yet, or as if our ancestors had not been clever enough to abbreviate their discourse in this way, or were too exalted and dignified to do so.

Take, for instance, this snippet of dialogue, as one might find it in a contraction-free historical novel:

-Why will you not answer the question I have asked you?

-I do not know. Methinks I am afeared that I will lose your good opinion and you will not esteem me more.

-Do not worry. It is surely wisest always to speak the truth.

-And yet I cannot but fear you will be angered.

-Cannot you see that I will not rest until I learn the answer?

-Still I fear you will become wroth. Perchance you will also become wroth if I do not give you the answer you are seeking.

-Think you so?

Now try this version:

-Why won't you answer the question I've asked you?

-I don't know. I believe it's because I'm afraid I'll lose your good opinion and you won't esteem me any more.

-Don't worry. It's surely always best to speak the truth.

-And yet I can't help fearing you'll be angry.

-Can't you see that I won't rest until I learn the answer?

-Still, I'm afraid you'll be angry. Maybe you'll also be angry if I don't give you the answer you're seeking.

-Do you think so?

Of course, one could go further:

-Why won't you answer?

-I dunno. I guess I'm afraid you won't like me any more.

-Not to worry. It's best to just say the truth.

-And yet I can't help thinking you'll be mad.

-Can't you see that I won't relax until you answer me?

-Still, I'm afraid you'll be really pissed off. Maybe you'll be pissed off anyway, if I don't answer you.

-Ya think?

To be fair, I do admit I've changed a little more than the presence vs. absence of contractions, and yet contractions are a major part of the effect. (By the way, I usually tend to prefer the second version, but once in a while I'm tempted by the third.)

We have only to look at a modern transcription of a medieval or early Renaissance song text, for example, to find it bristling with apostrophes. Elisions are more the norm than not - at least this is true in Italian, which is the language I work with most. Perhaps if you're writing in English about English history, it is possible for you to use the exact words your characters would have spoken. But I maintain that if you write in Chaucerian English, you are not going to make it to Amazon's Top 10 anytime soon, so maybe some translation is in order, to keep the sense and flavor if not the exact wording.

My characters are speaking 13th century Italian to one another. No matter what I do, I'm translating. So why would I assume that jugglers and leatherworkers and wool carders and maids would be speaking in florid and unabbreviated phrases without contractions?

We know that people elided their speech. Descriptions of spoken dialogue survive; plays and poems survive; legal records can be particularly illuminating (She said what about her landlord?!?). Let's look at a couple of examples in late 13th century poetry.

Here's a three-line excerpt from a poem ("Gli occhi di quella gentil foresella") by Guido Cavalcanti, whom Dante called his "first friend":

...sì che ciascuna vertù m'abbandona,

in guisa ch'i' non so là 'vi' mi sia:

sol par che Morte m'aggia 'n sua balìa.

(...thus every virtue abandons me, such that I do not know where I am, except that Death has me at his mercy.)

Guido Cavalcanti (the one sitting on the tomb) in an illustration from Boccaccio's Decameron

Seven elisions in this short sample. This poem in its entirety has 24 lines and 25 elisions, of which 9 would probably still be present if it were written in modern Italian.

And what about Dante himself, who was the architect of the Italian language as we know it today?

From "Poscia ch'Amor del tutto m'ha lasciato":

... ell'è verace insegna

la qual dimostra u' la vertù dimora;

per ch'io son certo, se ben la difendo

nel dir com'io la 'ntendo,

ch'Amor di sè mi farà grazia ancora.

(...it is the true sign that shows where virtue resides; for I am sure, if I defend it as well as I intend to, that Love will grant me grace [or pardon] again.)

Dante, by Sandro Botticelli

Only six in this longer excerpt, not counting the title (which is the incipit). Where Dante really pulls out the elisions is in his rather scurrilous exchange of poetic insults with Forese Donati, a set of verses so coarse that scholars in the past sometimes refused to believe in Dante's authorship. Perhaps that fascinating Tenzone will be the subject of a future post.

Translations are mine, though no doubt influenced by those of others.

A caveat here: I was about to quote a delightful poem by Cecco Angiolieri, the supremely irreverent and outrageous Sienese poet (a contemporary of Dante), a poem which is liberally sprinkled with elisions in the transcription I was reading, until I had a chance to look at a manuscript facsimile and saw that all of the supposedly elided words were in fact written out.

Oops. Did that skewer my theory? Were the elisions modern changes, to make the poems scan? Not necessarily.. In the first place, it was not an autograph manuscript, and if Cecco didn't write it himself, and if it was penned perhaps as much as a century after he wrote the original, he can hardly be held accountable for the results. Also, I then went back to facsimiles of manuscripts of Dante's work and Guido's (also not in their own hands), and sure enough, the elisions were there. Not in the form of apostrophes, which are a more modern device, but with the elided words written exactly as they would have been spoken, in this most oral of literary forms.

As you see, it is possible to find documentation for the use of elisions in meant-to-be-spoken medieval Italian. Yet I think my preference for what I consider a more natural dialogue style is not so much because of the poetry or the songs, but because my gut tells me that our medieval predecessors were capable of being just as lazy, crude, casual, imaginative, and in-a-hurry as we are today.

The illustrations in this post are all US-Public Domain by reason of expired copyright.

At the Sign of the Bedbug

2012-01-12T09:17:00.000-08:00

Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims, by William Blake

Having recently spent some time reserving lodging in several cities for an upcoming research trip, I found myself wondering how the people of Dante's time would have managed the task of finding places to stay while travelling. I had some ideas of the rigors of the road ca. 1300, but it was time to find out more about what sort of respite was available.

So many aspects of medieval travel are fascinating, and deserve blog posts of their own, but the amount of material is vast, so I decided this time to limit myself to public inns in Europe, particularly Italy. True, many travellers had the good fortune to stay in private quarters, with friends or friends of friends, and many more took advantage of the hospitality of religious houses along their route; merchants may have been able to stay in guesthouses specific to their nation and/or trade, at least in the cities. But some people had to depend on inns all or most of the time, and others may have sometimes found themselves in places where an inn was the only thing available.

San Giuliano l'ospitaliere

One thing Christian travellers likely would have done was to pray to Saint Julian the Hospitaller (San Giuliano l'ospitaliere) for good lodgings. This very old tradition sprang from a story (probably legendary) of considerable misfortune: Giuliano returned from a hunting trip to find two people sleeping in his bed. Enraged at the thought that his wife was unfaithful, he slew them both, only to find his wife standing there looking appalled. Giuliano's parents had arrived unexpectedly for a visit, she had given them the conjugal bed, and Giuliano had just killed his mother and father, in a scene best described as Lizzie Borden meets the Bates Motel. Horrified and repentant, Giuliano and his wife dedicated the rest of their lives to hospitality, housing and feeding strangers at considerable sacrifice to themselves.

A character in one of Boccaccio's stories in the Decameron says that when he travels, the first thing he does in the morning before leaving his inn is to say an Our Father and a Hail Mary for Giuliano's parents, and then to ask the saint to give him good lodging for the night to come.

Inns in the middle ages varied considerably, anywhere from private houses renting out a room or two to large complexes built specifically to house travellers, the latter probably including stables and quite possibly a courtyard to protect the carts, wagons, and other goods of travellers. Inns served rural areas along the most travelled roads, and also clustered around the main roads in cities. Northern Italy, an area with a lot of merchant traffic, had many inns in the middle ages, while Spain was notoriously deficient in them during the same period. Another hot spot for inns was Avignon, at least during the years the papal court was based there. Florence was said to have 235 registered innkeepers in 1353, and as many as 622 by 1394 (though that latter figure included the surrounding area).

Urban inns were subject to a city's laws and regulations. In some cities, innkeepers were among the people not allowed to form guilds (a distinction they shared in Bologna in 1288 with, for example, cheesemongers and barbers). They were generally exempted from laws requiring businesses to close on religious holidays, as they were providing an essential service. (Perugia in 1342 also exempted butchers, spicers, bakers, and smiths. I can understand the emergency need for horseshoes, and maybe even bread, but I'm guessing the spicers and the butchers had a good lobby.) City laws also sometimes dictated the minimum number of rentable rooms an establishment had to have to call itself an inn and serve travellers.

Urban inns also provided long-term accommodations at times, for example for university students, and for construction workers employed in cathedral-building or other long-term projects. Some inns specialized in serving a particular nationality (or at least a particular language group). Many were located near a major market or government buildings, and in Rome they clustered around the Vatican. Inns also could be found just outside the city gates, there to serve the unfortunate travellers who arrived too late to find the gates open.

As for planning ahead, that presented some difficulties. Guidebooks did exist, and word of mouth could give more or less accurate information about distances and the quality of lodgings, but one couldn't just make a reservation over the internet - it was a matter of showing up and seeing if there was room. And since the traveller might well be part of a large group, his own companions might well overwhelm a modest inn's capacity. Of course, in a slow-moving group, with some persons on foot or slowed by heavy carts or other impediments, someone might ride ahead and alert the innkeeper to the customers soon to arrive.

Some inns employed agents to go out and persuade perspective customers to come to their establishment. One of my research sources, a book entitled Travel and Trade in the Middle Ages by Paul B. Newman, tells a story of a pilgrim travelling by boat to Venice. An agent in another boat tried to persuade him to lodge at the inn he (the agent) was promoting, and when the pilgrim said he had already made other arrangements, the agent became so agitated he fell out of the boat.

But suppose you were a medieval traveller, on the road and without any special contacts or affiliations that would take care of your lodging needs. What sort of place could you expect?

Inns provided, at a minimum, a room and a bed and (probably) sheets, someplace to park your horse, a kitchen, and a common room for meals and drink. The room and the bed would probably be shared. If you were lucky and if you could afford it, you might also manage to obtain covers and pillows, cooked food, drink, a fire or brazier, bed curtains to retain warmth and provide a modicum of privacy, food for your horse or other accompanying animals, and maybe even a candlestick. Some innkeepers made loans, rented horses, stored property for travellers, conveyed messages and correspondence, and offered assistance with business if the traveller did not speak the local language. If you were really lucky, the food and wine would be good, the sheets recently washed and relatively vermin-free, and good fellowship and entertainment might lighten your stay.

Chaucer's pilgrims at table

You'd be paying a la carte, and the candle to put in that candlestick - as well as the food, the drink, the firewood, the stabling - would be extra. You might well be carrying your own food with you, to prepare yourself at the hearth fire or in the kitchen, or you might buy local ingredients. The cost of stabling and feeding your horse could easily double your bill. And how would you pay? In a city, the innkeeper could direct you to a moneychanger, and for whatever fee that moneychanger could get away with charging, you'd be able to convert your coins to the local currency. In rural areas, however, the sheer diversity of European coinage (and the fact that it was not standardized by weight or metal content) must have been daunting, for innkeeper and customer alike.

And if you weren't so lucky? The food would be meagre or inedible, the room crowded, several strangers sharing your bed, sheets not washed in recent memory, no fire, no covers, you'd be plagued with bedbugs, fleas, and lice,
some of your fellow guests (never you, of course) might become drunk and belligerant, your belongings were at risk
from thieves, and you might be in a position of having to either pay the innkeeper whatever he demanded or sleep outside, with all the discomforts and dangers that entailed. All in all, it probably paid to talk to as many people as possible and learn all that you could about the lodgings along your route before you ever left home.

Images in this post: Chaucer's Canterbury pilgrims by William Blake, San Giuliano l'ospitaliere by Taddeo Gaddi, Giovanni Boccaccio by Andrea del Castagno, the woodcut of Chaucer's pilgrims, and Filippo Bonanni's flea are all US-Public Domain because copyright has expired. The bedbug and the louse have been released into the public domain by the artist, Pearson Scott Foresman (sounds a bit alarming, doesn't it?).

Was There a Florence Before the Renaissance?

2012-01-05T08:39:00.000-08:00

Florence. Could this iconic picture be anywhere else? This is how people think of Florence, the dazzling city of the Renaissance: its cathedral crowned with Brunelleschi's dome, the militant-looking Palazzo Vecchio, the shop-laden Ponte Vecchio spanning the Arno, museums full of glorious art, and magnificent churches and palazzi of gleaming marble facing spacious piazze.

But what if you're writing of an earlier Florence? What if you want your readers to erase from their mental picture that vast dome, the ornate marble facades, and those open spaces and replace them with smaller medieval churches, rusticated stone, houses in wood and brick, and tight urban spaces with everything crammed together and little space to get around? What if you want them to replace those dignified palazzi in their minds' eyes with buildings crowded together and bristling with jetties and balconies that jut out over the street, blocking out the light?

What if you want them to see the city not as the postcards show it, but as Dante would have seen it?

Here's a little exercise: Look at the following pictures of Florence, and try to guess how many of these sights Dante would have seen. Ready? Here goes.

The Duomo

Palazzo Vecchio

Giotto's Campanile

Ponte Vecchio

Loggia dei Lanzi

Michelangelo's David

Schlock shopping

All but that last one look pretty old, don't they? So how many of them would Dante have seen, before his exile in January 1302?

None. In fact, a market stall full of *stuff* might well have been the image that would have been most immediately recognizable to the poet. To be fair, he would have seen earlier versions of some of those structures. He probably saw the earliest beginnings of the Palazzo Vecchio (started in 1299) and of the cathedral (built, beginning in 1296, around the much smaller existing cathedral of Santa Reparata), and he certainly walked across an earlier version of the Ponte Vecchio. But to show you an example of how different Florence was then, here's a schematic comparing Dante's cathedral (Santa Reparata) with Arnolfo di Cambio's plan and with the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore as it is today.

Santa Reparata (red), compared to planned Cathedral (orange)
and actual Cathedral (yellow)

As for the others, he missed the campanile by 32-35 years, the current version of the Ponte Vecchio by 43 years, the Loggia dei Lanzi by 74-80 years, and The David (which, by the way, is nothing at all like The Donald) by 200 years. And that dome atop the Cathedral wasn't finished until 1436, or 134 years after Dante's exile.

So Dante's Florence wouldn't have looked like the picture at the top of this post. What would it have looked like? Here's an earlier picture:

Madonna del Bigallo (ca. 1342)

But even that is too modern. The cathedral is in place (though not the dome). Perhaps these earlier illustrations from Villani's Cronica capture the mood, if not an accurate representation:

And finally, we can gaze upon a building that was in place in Dante's day, and well before: the Baptistery, his "bel San Giovanni." (You can see it in the first Villani illustration above, as well as in the Madonna del Bigallo.) Here it is as it appears today:

Baptistery (San Giovanni)

Dante's Baptistery was surrounded by a graveyard, including many recycled Roman sarcophagi, and of course the buildings nearby were very different, most especially the neighboring cathedral. But this last image is one he would have recognized.

But how do you get readers to shake loose those firmly-ingrained images of Florence in the Renaissance? Put the Author's Note first and hope they read it? Preface all with a banner reading "Abandon all preconceptions, ye who enter here"? If anybody has any ideas on this, please share them. Are you writing about a place people know better from a different time? If you are, how did you deal with that?

Images in this post: Madonna del Bigallo, photo by Sailko, is US-Public Domain because it represents a two-dimensional image whose copyright has expired; Villani illustrations are US-PD (expired copyright); the schematic of the cathedral(s), also by Sailko, is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported; all other photos are by Tim Heath.

Genealogy software: A research tool?

2011-12-29T06:45:00.000-08:00

Domenico Ghirlandaio, Old Man and His Grandson

I have an off-again, on-again interest in family history. All history fascinates me, but I am not a notoriously patient person, and once in a while when I am attempting to track my forebears I run up against a brick wall and get disgusted. (That's an odd mixed metaphor, chasing my forebears into brick walls, but never mind.) Usually it's when I hit a period when all the guys are named William, none of the women are named at all, somebody apparently got married at age 5, somebody else died two years before his first son was born, and yet another was born, lived, married, and died on one coast and is supposedly buried on the other. At those moments, I generally decide I'm going to be an ancestor, not a descendant, and I pack away the family history stuff and wait impatiently for my son to produce offspring, who can then (all in good time...) look me up.

During one of my descendant periods, my husband gave me some family history software. It's a sort of specialized database that allows researchers to enter facts about their family members and organize the information in a variety of ways: charts of descendants, charts of ancestors, reports of relationships, timelines, and many other useful things. I poked away at it for a while, found another of those irritating conundra, and quit. But I was working on my first novel, set in 1216, and I had a lot of people to keep track of, and it occurred to me that perhaps this software could be pressed into service to produce useful charts and reports about my characters.

So I entered them. But not without problems: although this software is remarkably openminded in many ways and will tolerate all manner of unusual relationships, not batting a cyber-eyelash at multiple simultaneous marriages, children born out of wedlock, or families with multiple surnames, it balked at what I was trying to do. It wasn't thrilled with the fact that in 1216 lots of people didn't have surnames (you have to list them somehow, it whined), and it certainly wasn't gruntled about names like Dino del fu Giovanni detto "Il Rosso". It kept throwing messages that gently suggested I might possibly not have been entirely circumspect about my capitalization, for example. And all those little extra words just farbled it more. I could (and did) override, but it was an uphill struggle.

If you want to try this, by the way, do profit from my errors: learn enough about your own software that you can figure out a way to code entries as to whether they are historically accurate or whether you made them up. This goes for specifics of names (all those unnamed wives...), or dates (not a whole lot of certainty about birthdates in the 13th century, for example), or entire people (my characters needed cousins; I made them up). You think you'll remember what's historical and what's your own invention, but if you're anything like me, you walk away from it for a week and suddenly you will have no clue as whether the afore-mentioned Dino really died in 1308, or whether you just decided that might be convenient.

What will this do for you? It will give you a visual output that makes certain things jump out and grab your attention, for one. Faced with all those birth and death dates in a family, you will see which children died young, you'll get a sense of the ages of the oldest children when the younger were born (or when specific incidents in your story occurred),
and the relative ages of people who may well be part of overlapping generations, given the large size of many medieval families (like the family of Martin Friedrich the Younger, a Northern Bohemian glassworks master, shown here in a painting probably done by Eltas Hille in 1596, showing the entire family present at the Crucifixion - not an unusual thing for art patrons to require of their artists).

If there are gaps - periods where no children are listed, although they were appearing fairly regularly before and after - it would not be unreasonable to guess that children were born but did not survive infancy, given the alarmingly high infant mortality rate. In the period I'm working with, such children often would not be mentioned in the surviving records. Also in this period, it is not unusual to find sons listed but no daughters. I have one character who has a dozen sons by three (sequential) wives, all dutifully documented. I am hard-pressed to believe that he never had daughters, so I gave him some.

If there are discrepancies, this will help you to see them. A historical figure often described as the grandmother of one of my characters would have to have had a child-bearing span of about fifty years, for example, so we're back to the drawing board on that one. You will also note naming patterns: Corso Donati, one of my historical characters, is often described as being called "Il Barone" by the people of Florence because of his pride and arrogance, but a look at his family history shows the recurrence of nicknames like Baruni, Baroncione, and other variants of "Barone". One could conclude that Corso wasn't being egotistical; he was just using a family nickname. And I've named characters whose names are not recorded (generally women) by looking carefully at the naming patterns in later generations of the family.

If you are tech-savvy (and I am the antithesis of this), you might find you do better with a powerful database program, not specifically configured for genealogy. It would, for example, enable you to run reports that state how old everyone is in a particular year, something I had to go to a spreadsheet to track. But for those of us who need something quick and fairly easy, the family history software has certain advantages. For writers working in periods where pictures are available, they can be included; links to documents can be made, and extensive information about individuals can be entered. Your reports and charts will probably never be as lovely (or as loopy - see the one with descendants perched on the tree branches) as some of the charts shown in this post, but they should be clear and informative.

So, is it a good tool? I find it to be, though like anything else it has its limits. What I like about it is that I can use it not only to see what's actually known, but to see where I may need to invent something. It's oddly satisfying to be able to churn out a genealogy chart for someone who lived hundreds of years ago. If it sounds like it might be useful, or even just be kind of fun, I'd say give it a try.

Family tree images, in order of appearance: Page from a Portuguese Renaissance songbook; Ahnentafel von Herzog Ludwig (1568-1593), painted by Joachim Lederlin nach Jakob Zuberlin in 1585, in a Stuttgart museum; page from a 15th century manuscript in Paris. All images in this post are US-Public Domain by reason of expired copyright.

Off Topic

2011-12-18T14:15:00.000-08:00

Ho, ho, ho!
(from the Christmas Boar of San Gimignano)

I had the best of intentions. I was going to do the research and come up with a description of how Dante and his family would have celebrated Christmas. But - as some of you may have noticed - this does tend to be a rather busy time of year, so realistically I was forced to conclude that it wasn't going to happen, at least not this year. (What was I thinking?!)

Instead, let me veer off topic and wish all my readers a wonderful holiday, whichever day or days you celebrate, and share with you a couple of our traditions. For example, at our house Christmas wouldn't be Christmas without Plato dropping his usually serious demeanor and becoming festive:

Plato, festive

There's one ornament that always has a place on our tree, in honor of the late lamented Robin.

And here's the original:

Robin (aka Brave Sir Robin, or Robbitybobs)
"I don't care what you do with it, I'm not chasing that string any more."

And here's Robs on the Italian peace banner we use as a tree skirt:

Music is always a big part of the holiday. I'm attaching a link to the Bukkene Bruse song whose title translates to "A Child Is Born in Bethlehem." This wonderful Norwegian group has absolutely zilch to do with Dante or my research or medieval music (though the words are translated from the 14th century Latin), but it has an ecstatic quality that I never tire of. We also provide our own music, though, and when we do, I am happiest playing my portative organ, a replica of a 15th century instrument, made by a brilliant Dutch organ maker named Winold van der Putten.

The instrument, which spans almost three octaves, sits on a table perpendicular to my body, my right hand on the keys and my left hand pumping the bellows. At first, it was sort of like patting my head and rubbing my stomach at the same time, but I've gotten the hang of it now.

On our last trip to Italy, we spent much time sitting in front of the cathedral in Siena, waiting for those magical moments when the setting sun turns everything gold. Since our Christmas card is based on a detail from the facade of that cathedral, I thought you might like to see one of the sunset views as well.

Siena Cathedral, sunset shot

And finally, our Christmas card to you, from the Siena Cathedral:

Our very best wishes for the holidays and for the coming year!

Why White? - A Puzzle, Part 4

2011-12-17T10:59:00.000-08:00

We've made progress. As you may recall, in the first Puzzle installment I stated the problems (would Buondelmonte's opponents really have killed him on Easter in 1216, as some chroniclers suggest? Would he in fact have gotten married on Easter? And why does everyone state that he was wearing white?). In the second, I managed to convince myself that he would not have been killed precisely on Easter, partly because there was too much else going on, and partly because it was considered a time of peace and forgiveness. (As Augustine Thompson, O.P., writes, "Cities enforced peace pacts and truces with special rigor during this sacred time." And in the third installment I convinced myself that Buondelmonte was unlikely to have been married on this day, for logistical reasons. (In fairness I must mention Florentine historian Richard Trexler's comment that Gregorio Dati, born in 1362, wrote that marriages were often postponed so that they could coincide with major feast days of the church. But Easter? I still don't think so.)

So why would contemporary (or near-contemporary) chroniclers have written these things if they weren't so, you may ask. Trexler again: "On whatever date an important communal event might have occurred, the historians made it happen on the day of a saint near that event." In other words, liberties were taken. Mistakes were made. Stories were improved. And the murder of Buondelmonte was definitely an important event to the commune of Florence.

So. Why does practically everyone say that Buondelmonte was wearing white? Was it because it was Easter (or near Easter)? Probably not - I've seen mention that people in Florence switched to "lighter" clothing for Easter, but I do not know whether that means lighter in color or lighter in weight. Either way, it's not white. Was it because it was his wedding day? No - white was not a wedding color in Florence in the early 13th century.

In fact, the one mention of people wearing white that I had been able to find was the white-clad Courts of Love that occurred in the spring of 1283, where the Rossi family led Florence's nobles and wealthy families in a two-month-long series of parties, feasts, and dances, supposedly with everybody wearing white. (My current theory is that it was a plot on the part of Florence's laundresses, to drum up business.) But we're exploring 1216, not 1283.

(This white gown, on display in Boccaccio's house/museum in Certaldo and used for festivals, might have been appropriate for Buondelmonte's fateful day, given the blood-red streak down the middle. Perhaps his new bride could have worn something like it.)

But wait! There was an occasion where Florentines wore white, and that was baptism. The infants wore white, and so did their parents and godparents. And it just so happens that in Florence, mass baptisms occurred on Saturday, the day before Easter, at Florence's ancient and well-beloved Baptistery (Dante's "bel San Giovanni"). Here's a photo of the Baptistery from around 1897:

It doesn't look very different now; I just like this picture. (Photochrom print by Photoglob. Zurich, public domain; Flickr administrator or reviewer BotMultichillT verifies Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.)

My original plan was to digress here and discuss the interesting phenomenon of mass baptisms in Florence, but I've decided to save that for a later post, as it gets somewhat involved. I will indulge myself to this extent, however: though Florence's 13th century baptismal font is no longer in place, it was probably very like the octagonal font still found in the cathedral in Pisa, pictured here:

(Font by Guido Bigarelli da Como. Photo by Jojan, under Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)

This type of font accommodated several priests, standing inside. The font contains hollow columns of stone, impossible to see here, and there is some controvery over whether the priests stood inside the columns to stay dry and dunked the infants in the water which filled the rest of the font, or whether they stood in the dry center area and dunked the infants in the columns, which were filled with water.

Be that as it may, I had found my answer. Buondelmonte had only to be a godparent, and there he would be, close to Easter, wearing white. But what about the strict prohibition on violence in Easter week?

A little further reading gave me this: During the mass baptism, each infant's forehead would have been wrapped in a band of cloth (called the corona) to protect the chrism, or sacred oil. And it would remain so, unwashed and unchanged, for eight days, at which time the godparents and parents would take the infant to church, where a priest would wash the child's forehead and also the cloth, which would then be returned to the parents.

Eight days. Which might, depending on how you looked at it, be far enough away from Easter itself to allow Buondelmonte's scheming enemies to carry out their plan and get away with it. And Buondelmonte, as a godparent, would have to be in Florence to complete the rites of baptism by returning the infant to church to have the chrism cloth removed. He's in the right place, at the right time, and now he's wearing white. Bingo.

All I needed to do, then, was to create a young widowed cousin of Buondelmonte's new wife, late in pregnancy when she's first introduced, and have her give birth in time for her infant to be part of the Holy Saturday baptisms. No problem; one's fictional characters are usually happy to cooperate.

Of course, in Florence at that time godparents were rarely chosen from among family members; rather, the very important godparent relationship more often cemented friendships or alliances, or recognized them. But I decided to let my characters be a little eccentric in this way. After all, if they had done everything "just so," I probably wouldn't be writing about them.

A convoluted puzzle, but one that had an answer. Not necessarily the One True Answer, possibly not even the possible answer, but a plausible answer, and one I could live with. In threading my way through to it, I learned more than I realized I needed to about life in Florence in the early 13th century, and you know what? I enjoyed every bit of it. May all our puzzles be as satisfying.

He was only mostly married - A Puzzle, Part 3

2011-12-11T13:06:00.000-08:00

Last time, as you may recall, I had managed to persuade myself that Buondelmonte's foes would probably not have murdered him on Easter day in Florence in the year 1216, for various religious and logistical reasons, though the attack probably did occur close enough to Easter to be associated with it in people's memories. But there are still those chroniclers who state that he was married on Easter (to the Donati girl, thus jilting the young lady of the Amidei to whom he had been betrothed as a peacemaking gesture). Was he?

I doubted whether all of the Easter ritual would have left any time to celebrate a wedding, especially a wedding between wealthy Florentine nobles, with all the pomp and circumstance such an occasion would have demanded. I had visions of wedding processions clashing with religious processions, mystery plays coexisting with shawm players, elaborate displays of trousseaus contrasting with freed prisoners in penitential garb. It just wasn't going to work.

The many paintings of the marriage of the Virgin and Joseph give us some idea of what medieval Florentines might have expected to see when a wedding was celebrated, as in this fresco by Giotto in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua.

Even the Virgin, in all her holy simplicity, had a wedding procession, with attendants and musicians. And check out this Bolognese wedding - it must have been pretty noisy.

Just how binding was Buondelmonte's reluctant betrothal to the Amidei girl? There's no doubt that he committed a serious offence by failing to honor his contract, risking a city-wide conflict so he could marry a different woman. (My husband's pithy description of the good knight was, "He was a goofball of a major order.") Breaking the contract was enough to call forth a vendetta against him, and yet his marriage to the Donati girl was legal. Although he had made a legal contract with the family of the other girl, betrothal was not yet marriage. To paraphrase The Princess Bride, he was only mostly married. Maybe we need to understand some things about weddings and betrothals at this time and place.

Marriage in early 13th century Florence was seldom as simple as running down to the Palazzo Vecchio, grabbing a notary, and getting hitched, and yet its essential element boiled down to mutual consent. It was not even necessary to have a priest present. Speaking the words of consent, even without witnesses, could be interpreted as a legal wedding, though doing it in this way would have been very unusual. It was more likely to be a multi-step process, and those steps could span anywhere from days to years, sometimes leaving couples in legal limbo for an excruciatingly long time until a dowry could be paid in full, for example.

After the initial arrangements were made between the two families, probably through the efforts of intermediaries - and neither bride nor groom had to be present for this - the heads of the two families clasped hands (the impalmamento), and soon afterwards the prospective groom brought a gift to the home of his bride-to-be and was a guest of her family at dinner. The couple were now considered to be betrothed.

Next, usually fairly soon after the impalmamento, came the giure, also known as the giuramento grande or the sponsalia or sponsalitium. This was both solemn and public, and involved males only, with kinsmen of both spouses-to-be and male friends of their families. The woman's father (if living; otherwise whichever male kinsman spoke for her) promised to obtain her consent. (One wonders about the definition of "consent" under these circumstances...) The groom promised to take her within an agreed time period and according to any stated conditions. A notary recorded the details and the dowry, which had been agreed to during the impalmamento. The bride-to-be may not even have been named in this document; if she was listed simply as "daughter of X", it was legally possible for X to substitute a different daughter, under certain circumstances. If an impalmamento was binding, the giure was even more so.

Next came the anellamento (ring day). The festivities took place at the bride's home, this time there were women present, including
the bride. A notary would again be present to record the legal details, and it is he who posed the questions prescribed by the church to obtain consent from both parties. The husband gave his bride a ring. His gifts to his bride's household were distributed (often they included edibles for the feast to come), and a supper, hosted by the bride's family, followed. At this stage the couple was considered to be man and wife, but under normal circumstances the marriage would not yet be consummated or publicly celebrated. The anellamento could follow the giure by a long or a short time - days, months, even years, especially if the pair had been pledged to one another as children.

And finally, the nozze. This was the public aspect of the wedding, including a procession, in which the bride and her belongings were public transferred to her husband's home. The bride was said to be "led" by a group of her husband's friends. The nozze could take place a long time after the anellamento, and often, payment of the dowry was an issue. Thus, a woman could be technically married, yet still living in her father's home, for a long (and potentially awkward) time.

Note, in this Marriage of the Virgin by Nicciolo di Buonaccorso, from the late 14th century, the man standing behind Joseph, about to give him a good clap on the back. This gesture, complete with the blow, was repeated in medieval Florentine marriages, to bring luck - it represented the anger felt by Joseph's unsuccessful rivals for the hand of the Virgin, and was usually performed by the groom's close friend, a sort of early Best Man.

So, when the chroniclers suggest that Buondelmonte got married on Easter, exactly which part of the marriage were they talking about? It probably would have been the nozze, since a procession was involved, or it could have been all of them - however unusual, it was not impossible to combine all major stages into a single day. But I still find it hard to believe that all of this was going on while Florence was celebrating Easter.

Why did the chroniclers (some of them, anyway) say that Buondelmonte was killed and/or married on Easter? I'm a writer; I understand the urge to make a story a little more dramatic by tweaking a detail here and there. I believe that's what they did, especially since the chroniclers, in almost every case, were trying to make a political point by how they presented this story. Even writing two or three hundred years after the fact, those historians were living in a world shaped by the conflict which began with this incident, and their own Guelf or Ghibelline sentiments were reflected in how they allocated blame for what happened to Florence in 1216.

But it still leaves me with a problem. If I've decided that these things didn't happen exactly as related, what, then, did happen? Come back for Part 4, the final piece of the puzzle, in which we explore why Buondelmonte was consistently said to have been wearing white, and what conclusion that led me to draw about both his marriage and his murder.

All images are US-PD (public domain because of expired copyright).

Easter? Really? - A Puzzle, Part 2

2011-12-08T09:11:00.000-08:00

In my last post, I briefly described the events surrounding the murder/assassination/honor killing of messer Buondelmonte dei Buondelmonti in Florence in 1216, citing the reports of near-contemporary and later chroniclers. The earliest reports stated that the killing occurred on Easter, which makes for a dramatic story indeed, but something about it gave me pause.

Death of Buondelmonte

Would Buondelmonte's opponents really have enacted their vendetta on Easter, of all days? The Easter message stressed in those days was one of peace and forgiveness, so much so that I thought it unlikely that such a gesture would have gone down well with the Florentine people. Much less would it have resonated with the bishop, one Giovanni da Velletri, who was no slouch at controlling heretics, consolidating church property, and wrestling with Florence's powerful Calimala (cloth-merchants' guild) for tithe money, when the latter wanted the revenue from Florence's churches to go toward the maintenance of the cathedral, which the guild oversaw. I found it hard to believe that this redoubtable man, friend of popes and emperors, would have tolerated armed knights killing other knights in his city on the holiest day of the Christian year.

Sarcophagus of Giovanni da Velletri
Baptistery, Florence
Photo by Sailko

(And speaking of popes and emperors, here are the ones the bishop was dealing with at around that time: Otto IV and Pope Innocent III, shaking hands. By 1216, Otto was more or less on the way out, but Frederick II, his successor, had not yet been crowned in that year. Given the rather turbulent history of these two, which included things like excommunication, handshakes probably didn't happen too often, so think of it as a rare painting-op.)

Otto IV and Pope Innocent III

Bishop Giovanni also had the responsibility for enforcing the dictates of the recent Fourth Lateran Council, which reiterated that Christians must make their confession at least once a year. And Easter was the time to do it. Augustine Thompson, O.P., writes that "failure to confess at Easter brought automatic excommunication."

Fourth Lateran Council

Further, Easter was the time for pardoning prisoners, who would then walk in penitential processions, wearing special hats and carrying candles, to the Baptistery to rejoin the congregation in time for the Easter rites. Priests were enjoined to prevent usurers, withholders of tithes, criminals, known trouble-makers, and those who held hatred in their hearts from taking communion unless and until they confessed, did penance, and harmony had been restored.

Holy Week and the days leading up to it and following it were all-consuming in Florence. With vigils, processions, reenactments of Christ's entry into Jerusalem, mystery plays, special music, pardons, confessions, communion, veneration of the cross, the annual baptism of infants, sermons, blessing the lambs, the passage through the streets of the cart of holy fire, the silencing of the bells and later their triumphant pealing, fasts and then feasts, all the Christians in Florence took part in the celebration.

This processional banner, by Spinello Aretino from around 1395-1400, was commissioned by the Confraternity of Saint Mary Magdalene in Borgo San Sepolcro, and is an example of the elaborate preparations medieval Italians made for the major religious festivals.

With all of this emphasis on peacemaking, confession, and reconciliation, I couldn't convince myself that the chroniclers were right about the killing taking place on Easter day, or even in the days just before or after. It is true that "pasqua" could refer to any religious feast, not just Easter, at that time, but certain of the chronicles gave specific dates suggesting that the incident did indeed occur in the early spring.

However, when they spoke of Christmas, the early chroniclers were referring to an entire season, not to a single day. Could the same not be true of Easter? And if it was, how soon before or after Easter would the assailants have been willing and able to carry out their vendetta? And would the many public rituals in the city perhaps have even given them their opportunity? I thought it possible, and I could see how chroniclers could have legitimately described such an attack as occurring "on Easter."

Come back for Part 3 to answer the question, "Did Buondelmonte really marry the Donati girl on Easter?"

Images are all US-PD (public domain because copyright has expired), with the exception of the photo of Bishop Giovanni's tomb, which is by Sailko and is used under the Creative Commons Attribution - Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

A Historical Puzzle (and a Possible Solution) - Part 1

2011-12-04T11:24:00.000-08:00

When I set out to write my first book, I didn't have much to go on. The story of Buondelmonte, the 13th-century knight whose hot temper and headstrong behavior set in motion the chain of events which resulted in the split between Guelfs and Ghibellines in Florence, existed only in fragments, in the works of medieval historians who were writing - at the earliest - seventy years after the fact. Yet this split had long-reaching implications for all of Italy. To this day, you can look at castles and public buildings and know instantly whether their builders were Guelf or Ghibelline: just look at the crenellations.
Squarish crenellations mean Guelf, and swallow-tail mean Ghibelline. (The short and oversimplified version is that the Guelfs supported the Pope and the Ghibellines supported the Emperor, but in point of fact, more often than not people simply sorted themselves out along the lines of local conflicts, and those labels were often rather arbitrary.)

The most detailed version of Buondelmonte's story we have was written by a chronicler known as the Pseudo-Brunetto Latini (because, as you may have guessed, for many years scholars believed it was written by the real Brunetto),
in the very early 13th century. In it we hear of how a jester, entertaining at a feast to celebrate a knighting, angered a knight by snatching away the knight's plate of food. The knight (messer Uberto degli Infangati) responded furiously, and was reproved by another knight (messer Oddo Arrigo de' Fifanti). The conflict escalated, turned into a fight, and finally messer Uberto's dining companion, messer Buondelmonte dei Buondelmonti, knifed Oddo in the arm.

In the ensuing hubbub, Oddo's family and friends decided that they would offer a niece of Oddo's as a bride for Buondelmonte, to restore peace. Buondelmonte agreed, but was later persuaded by a lady, monna Gualdrada Donati, to wed her lovely daughter instead. This he did, and the family of the jilted girl and their allies came together to decide what to do to restore honor. Finally they decided to declare a vendetta against Buondelmonte, and on Easter morning of the year 1215 they enacted it, slaying Buondelmonte on the Ponte Vecchio at the foot of the statue of Mars.

Other chroniclers took up this story, changing some details, leaving out others, adding still more. Most start with Buondelmonte's betrothal to Oddo's niece and omit the underlying reasons for that marriage contract. Some said that Buondelmonte was murdered on his wedding day, some said it was afterwards. Most mention Easter. Some say that Gualdrada simply flagged him down on the street and proffered her daughter, others say that she sent for him, still others suggest that there was already an informal arrangement in place between them. Some say that Gualdrada was the wife of Forteguerra Donati, others that she was a widow. Some say that Buondelmonte's Donati bride was with him when he died, some say he was alone. Some imply that the great rift was one side's fault, others attribute it to the other, depending on their own politics, for this conflict had a long half-life.

Dino Compagni, Dante's contemporary, wrote his version around 1310-1312 (and Dante also alluded to the story, though he assumed his audience already knew the tale well and gave no details). Giovanni Villani, writing around 1330-1340, gave a fairly detailed account. Marchionne di Coppo Stefani (aka Baldassare Bonaiuti) wrote about it in the mid-1380s, and the earliest brief mention (of the surviving chronicles, anyway) may have been that of Ricordano di Malispini, writing in the 1280s.

Machiavelli gave his version, too, writing in the 1520s. Later Florentine historians have included the tale, and it even crops up in a short-lived Donizetti opera (though the music was actually from his Maria Stuarda, refitted to a new libretto after the King of Naples decided he didn't want to see anybody royal getting beheaded on stage).
Donizetti was committed to his original story, so Buondelmonte only got one performance.

So what's the puzzle, you may wonder? Seems fairly simple. But certain things in the chronicles gave me pause, and to learn what they were and how I chose to resolve them, you'll need to come back for Parts 2 and 3 (and maybe 4) of this series. More soon, as we explore the question of "Easter? Really?"

Portraits, tombstone, statues, in order of appearance: Brunetto Latini (the real one), Dino Compagni's tombstone, Giovanni Villani, Niccolò Machiavelli, Gaetano Donizetti. Dino's tombstone and the statue of Villani are photographed by Sailko and available under Creative Commons license; all others are US-PD (public domain because copyright has expired).

What's in a Surname?

2011-11-30T09:02:00.000-08:00

Status, if you're a medieval Tuscan. As late as the catasto (tax records) of 1427, one historian estimates that only a third of the families listed (and those were just the property-owners) had surnames. Another historian, speaking of the same records, states that only about 16% of the surnames listed were "stable," i.e. consistent among generations and not still in flux. My research takes me back 100-200 years earlier than that, when surnames were even rarer. Men were more usually identified by adding their father's name (and, if necessary to avoid confusion, their grandfather's), like this: Giovanni di Ugo di Neri. If a man's father was deceased, he would be Giovanni del fu Ugo (absolute past tense: Ugo's finished and done). A woman was identified first by association with her father, and then, once married, with her husband.

It is fascinating to watch surnames emerge during a period of several hundred years, and to try to trace their derivation. Quite a lot of Florentine surnames were taken from the given name of an ancestor, often the ancestor considered to be the founder of the lineage. Thus, the Donati were descended from a Donato, the Gondi from a Gondo, and the Baldovinetti from a Baldovinetto.

Often the ancestor chosen by later generations to provide the family name was distinguished in some way: the Pazzi took their name from Pazzo di Ranieri, the first to enter Jerusalem in the first Crusade (1088); the Anselmi took theirs from Anselmo Fighineldi, who was knighted by Charlemagne (and who appears to have had a different surname of his own); and the Pandolfini from a notary named Pandolfino. The Pucci had a thirteenth century ancestor, Puccio di Benintendi, who was a cabinetmaker, but it appears that the name didn't stick as a surname until the more distinguished Puccio di Antonio, who served Florence as gonfaloniere di giustizia sometime later.

A family name could be derived from a nickname (the Canacci, from Lapo di Dino, known as Canaccio). It could stem from a profession or office, as the Visdomini, descended from one Davizo who had served as vicedominus, or episcopal caretaker, from 1009-1054. (An interesting sideline about this family is that Davizo's nephew Davizino married a woman called Tosa, and a future branch of the family adopted her name as their family name and called themselves the della Tosa, or the Tosinghi.)

The Pecori family took its name from Dino il Pecora (Dino "the Sheep"), the "Big Butcher" of Dante's day, a man prominent in the Butcher's Guild who was active in Florentine politics (and seems to have annoyed most of the contemporary chroniclers, who describe him in some unsavory ways).

A name could also be taken from a place: Buondelmonte dei Buondelmonti, the knight whose turbulent marital situation resulted in the split between the Guelfs and the Ghibellines in the early 13th century (and in my first book), came from a family which took its name from its castle at Montebuoni.

The Buondelmonte device, sketched on a wall

Incidentally, their coat of arms reflects all this emphasis on "good" and on "mountains": it consists of a stylized mountain, which looks like a gumdrop stacked on top of two other gumdrops, with a cross on top.

Even a product or commodity associated with a family could result in a name. The Rucellai were originally known as the Oricellari, because they imported the dyestuff orchil (oricello in Italian) from the Levant.

Women of the upper classes in medieval Florence were considered part of their fathers' lineages, not their husbands'. Women widowed during their childbearing years often rejoined their birth families after the death of their husbands and were given to new husbands, as their fathers (or brothers, if the father was no longer living) chose; sadly, they often had to leave their children behind, because the children, in their turn, were part of their own father's lineage, and therefore they stayed with their father's family. These kinds of marital politics had much to do with dowries and property, but that will be a post for another day.

Many women married into prominent families were identified only by given name and husband's name, but others, like Gemma Donati, who married "down" socially when she married Dante, are always referred to by their birth surnames. The Blessed Umiliana dei Cerchi was born into the wealthy Cerchi family and returned to them after her husband's death, and is always known by the surname she was born into. It appears that if a woman's birth name was the more prominent, she continued to be associated with it during her married life.

Thus, medieval Italian surnames can hint at lots of other things: affiliations, social status, whether one's parents were living or dead. They can be colorful - were the Infangati really covered with mud? were the Pazzi really mad? - and they can point to what a family takes most pride in. And, when the politics got really nasty, they could be changed to sever one branch's ties with another. I enjoy studying a time in which families were beginning to define themselves according to their own sense of history, and their own familial pride.

Stalking the Wild Historian

2011-11-26T08:26:00.000-08:00

There I was, face to face with one of my heroes. No, not a figure from the news of the day. Not a famous musician, actor, or artist. Not a respected statesman, not a wealthy philanthropist, but - a historian. The unassuming gentleman in question, who stood there blinking at me in alarm, is an expert on church history in the Italian communes in the 12th and 13th centuries, and I have found his work extremely lucid, insightful, and helpful for many years.

And there he was, clutching his briefcase, about to walk into a room where he would join a panel that included another of my heroes, the woman who wrote the definitive book on the Florentine magnates. To top it off, in the audience was a woman who has spent years studying domestic law in medieval Lucca.

Okay, so it's not exactly the equivalent of cornering Bono somewhere and getting your picture taken with him. For me, it was better. That one session alone would have been worth my trip to Kalamazoo for the International Medieval Conference, despite the dorm room and the cafeteria food.

And I couldn't stop babbling: "I have all your books! They're wonderful! You're wonderful! I should ask for your autograph!"

It was at that point I finally noticed the panicked expression on his face and realized I'd better back off. Note to self: historians tend not to think of themselves as rock stars. Many of them probably harbor a secret fear that not even their doctoral committees actually read their dissertations. They are simply not prepared for adulation from an aspiring historical novelist.

He mumbled something polite and scurried into the room, and I gave him a decent head start and then went in myself, sitting discreetly in the back. The session was every bit as absorbing as I had expected - my heroes did not disappoint. I spent the rest of the conference attending most of the same sessions he did, carefully avoiding eye contact. I didn't want the poor man to think I was stalking him.

Historians can be extraordinarily generous with their time and their knowledge, at least when one's approach is a little more sane than mine was on that occasion. I've had delightful email exchanges on topics ranging from doing laundry in the middle ages to how late the Cathar heresy survived in Florence (though that latter exchange was forwarded to the historian's graduate student under the heading "Best email of the year!", which I still wonder about). A woman who gave a presentation on medieval baptism rituals was gracious enough to field my questions afterwards and then to follow through with quite a bit of additional information via email, after the conference. A Dante expert, who was planning a Kalamazoo presentation in a year when I was unable to attend, was kind enough to send me a CD of his talk, complete with all illustrations.

Kalamazoo is a wonderful place to observe medievalists at work and at play. Kathleen Norris, in The Cloister Walk, describes the Conference's Saturday night dance thus: "... dances that provide a spectacle worthy of Chaucer--hundreds of tipsy medievalists, some of whom are evidently let out of the library once a year, abandoning themselves to a tape of 'Born to Run'..."

One year, while I was waiting with others for the bus to take us to the medieval concert, I watched an eager graduate student charge up to a distinguished professorial type. Pumping the older man's hand, the student rattled on familiarly for quite a while about an Anglo-Saxon manuscript he'd had the opportunity to examine. The older gentleman nodded, smiled, and murmured an occasional polite response. When at last the bus pulled up (its destination was proudly announced as "Medieval"), the graduate student said an effusive goodbye to the professor and moved on to his next target.

The older gentleman turned to his wife and asked mildly, "Who was that?"

I'll write more about the Kalamazoo conference another time. This post, though about modern historians, is illustrated with pictures of earlier historians, in this order: Herodotus and Thucydides (image released to public domain by the photographer); Bede (the Venerable Bede), Notker of St. Gall (Notker the Stammerer), Snorri Sturluson, and Matthew Paris (all U.S.-PD: expired copyright); and Niccolò Machiavelli (public domain in the U.S.).

Dante's Offspring, or, The Internet Has Its Limitations

2011-11-21T12:18:00.000-08:00

I enjoyed reading in Gillian Bagwell's guest post about how she used the internet to recreate a journey as part of her research for The September Queen. The internet is indeed a tremendous resource, but I find it has its risks and problems, too.

Often when I'm reading about a period I have not studied in depth, I'll do a quick Google search, or I'll glance at Wikipedia, and then I consider myself better informed than I was mere moments before. But once in a while, I test out the process by asking a question I know the answer to (or am pretty sure no one knows the answer to), and the results can be sobering.

Recently I decided to check with the all-wise aggregate intelligence and see if it could tell me how many children Dante had. Simple, right? How hard could it be? Well, harder than you might think, actually, for various reasons. But here's what my search turned up (first page of search results only):

1. Dante had four children: Iacopo, Pietro, Giovanni, and Antonia.

2. Dante had five children, names and sexes not specified.

3. Dante had six children: Iacopo, Pietro, Giovanni, Gabrielle, Alighieri, and Antonia.

4. Dante had three children: Iacopo, Pietro, and Antonia.

5. Dante had "several" children, including Iacopo, Pietro, Giovanni, and Antonia.

6. Dante had four children: Pietro and Iacopo and two daughters, one of them named Beatrice.

7. Dante had three or four sons and a daughter (Iacopo, Pietro, Giovanni, Gabrielle [maybe], and whoever the daughter was).

8. Dante had five children: Iacopo, Pietro, Giovanni, Antonia, Gabrielle.

What struck me most forcefully about this search was that in each case, the answer given was presented as absolute truth. With the exception of the "three or four sons", not one indicated even the slightest uncertainty. (Although I suppose "several" does leave some wiggle room.)

Then I checked the Dante-related books on my shelves (and lo, they are many...). Still no definite agreement, but here, at least, people admit to doubt, lack of proof, or the existence of other possibilities. We have very little information about Giovanni; some speculate that he could have been an illegitimate son, possibly born prior to Dante's marriage. Or was he the son of a different Dante Alighieri, perhaps a cousin? And what about Gabrielle? Another cousin, or possibly a child of Dante's who died young? At least one writer seems to believe that Gabrielle (sometimes Gabriello) was female.

We do know that Iacopo, Pietro, and a daughter reached adulthood, and we have some information about their lives. We do not know birth years, birth order, whether other children were born and died early (which is statistically likely), whether other children lived to adulthood and left no historical record, or why exactly this fellow named Giovanni signed a legal document in Lucca in October of 1308, calling himself the son of Dante Alighieri, and was then never heard from again.

As for Dante's daughter, it's now widely believed that Antonia took the name Sister Beatrice when she entered a convent, which would account for some of the confusion over the number of daughters and their name(s).

Does the order in which names were listed suggest birth order, at least of Dante's sons? If so, who came first, Iacopo or Pietro? And where does Giovanni fit in?

Will we ever know for sure? Probably not, but you'd never know it from the internet.

(My thanks to Tim, my husband, for the slightly irreverent illustrations.)

The Next Best Thing to Being There - Recreating a Journey by Internet (Guest post by Gillian Bagwell)

2011-11-18T13:50:00.000-08:00

I'm delighted to introduce a guest post by author Gillian Bagwell, whose acclaimed novel The Darling Strumpet is subtitled A Novel of Nell Gwynn, Who Captured the Heart of England and King Charles II. Her readers can attest that Gillian's warm and delightful Nell has captured our hearts, as well.

Now we also have her recently-published second novel, The September Queen, to enjoy, and Gillian has graciously offered to share with us some of her research, in the form of a recreation of the journey taken by King Charles II and Jane Lane in 1651.

The Next Best Thing to Being There - Recreating a Journey by Internet

I was thrilled that when my agent sold my first novel, The Darling Strumpet, she also sold my second book, as yet unwritten, and was very excited to have the opportunity to write the first fictional account of Jane Lane, an ordinary Staffordshire girl who risked her life to help the young Charles II escape after the Battle of Worcester on September 3, 1651.

I wanted to retrace the path Jane had taken in her travels with Charles, and as some of the places associated with my story would be closing soon for the winter, and traveling around England wouldn’t get any easier as it got colder, wetter, and darker, I immediately planned a research trip. My friend Alice Northgreaves and I set out from London on October 26, 2009, making our way to Worcester, the site of the battle, from which Charles had fled to Staffordshire, where Jane became involved in his desperate flight.

Charles’s six-week odyssey covered more than 600 miles before he was finally able to sail from Shoreham near Brighton on October 15.
After he was restored to the throne in 1660, the story of his escape became known as the Royal Miracle, because of the numerous times he narrowly eluded capture. He told the story to Samuel Pepys, and others also recorded their parts in it, so that the route of his travels is well known. The Monarch’s Way footpath can still be followed.

Some of the sites associated with Charles’s adventures are well preserved. It was thrilling to visit Boscobel House and Moseley Hall and to see the actual priest holes into which the fugitive king curled his six-foot-two-inch frame when hiding from Cromwell’s cavalry patrols. These lovely houses are beautifully maintained by English Heritage and the National Trust respectively, and we enjoyed very informative tours. Whiteladies, where Charles arrived and was hidden at about three a.m. on the morning after the battle, is now a ruin, but is only a short walk from Boscobel, and easily found. Jane’s home, Bentley Hall, is unfortunately no longer standing, but thanks to directions from the staff at Moseley, we were able to find the site.

Following the path of Charles’s travels with Jane Lane, and in particular finding the places where some of the events on the journey had taken place – the inn and the smithy where Charles had to have a horse re-shod, for instance – was a little more complicated. Contemporary accounts provided their general route, through Bromsgrove, where Charles’s horse threw a shoe; to Stratford-Upon-Avon, where they had to ride among enemy soldiers crowding the street; and down to Long Marston, where they stayed at the home of Jane’s cousins John and Amy Tomes. They spent the next night in Cirencester, and reached Abbots Leigh near Bristol the following evening.

Finding that no ship would leave Bristol for France or Spain in less than a month, Charles and Jane then made their way southward to Castle Cary and then to Trent, in Dorset, where they stayed at the home of the Royalist Wyndham family.

When Alice and I weren’t sure about the location of some of we had very good success by popping into a pub to ask the locals, and in this way we were helped by the staff and patrons of the Red Lion in Bromsgrove, the Crown in Cirencester, and the George in Castle Cary.

Jane left Charles at Trent and returned home when it appeared that he would shortly be able to find passage on a boat from the southern coast of England. As it turned out, Charles spent another month in England before he was able to make his way to France, traveling to Charmouth, back to Trent in Dorset, then spending several days near Salisbury before sailing from Shoreham. But that part of his ordeal takes place offstage in The September Queen (titled The Royal Exile in the UK), which tells Jane’s story. Very little is known about what happened to her after she parted from Charles.

From the preliminary research I had done before embarking on my trip to England, I learned that when Jane’s part in helping Charles escape was discovered, she fled with her brother and walked to Yarmouth, hoping to reunite with Charles in France. As one book identified Yarmouth as a small town on the south coast near the Isle of Wight, I believed that her travels took her through much the same country through which she had journeyed with Charles.

It was only when I got home to California that I learned to my dismay that she probably sailed from another Yarmouth – on the east coast of England, and so in a completely different direction and through vastly different country than where I thought she had walked. This part of her story was very important, and I needed to know what she had experienced. But it just wasn’t possible for me to go back to England for a second trip.

I would have to reconstruct Jane’s journey some other way. From a book on historical maps, I learned that in 1686 John Ogilby had published a book of road maps of England – 35 years past Jane’s date, but close enough that not much would have changed.
I was overjoyed to find online and be able to buy a 1939 facsimile of the book, which shows the routes between major cities, laid out on parallel strips across the page. It’s a little hard to get used to looking at a map like that, but it gave me an idea of much of the route that Jane would likely have traveled to get from Staffordshire to Yarmouth, and just as wonderfully, depicted the roads and the country surrounding them in great detail, showing the kind of terrain, and features such as villages, bridges, and even large houses and windmills.

But the book didn’t provide guidance about some of the routes Jane must have taken. Another difficulty to surmount. Fortunately, a writer today is blessed with the vast resources of the internet, and I was able to accomplish forensic travel research in a way that wouldn’t have been possible even a few years ago. Google Maps and Google Earth to the rescue! I used Google Maps to ask for directions from one major town on Jane’s route to the next, and then zoomed in close enough to discover the names of the roads, which provided major clues. Unlike many roads in the U.S., which are named somewhat haphazardly or fancifully, old roads in England are frequently still called simply by where they led. So, for instance, finding a road labeled Norwich Road let me know that it was likely that was the path Jane would have followed to reach Norwich. Then I could soar along above the road to see what the landscape was like – and again fortunately for me, even now much of England is rural, and the countryside hasn’t changed substantially from what it had been like in 1651.

So miraculously, I was able to write the long sequence in which Jane and her brother walk from Bentley to Yarmouth accurately describing what they would have seen on their travels.

I was able to use up-to-the-minute technology to help me with this very old story in another way, too. When Alice and I were where we thought should be the site of Jane’s home Bentley Hall, just off the Wolverhampton Road near Walsall, we weren’t sure we had found it. There was a muddy building site that we thought might be where the house had stood, but the area is sadly very run down and not at all like what it would have been in Jane’s time. We asked in a shop if anyone knew about Bentley Hall, and were directed to the home of a local lady, Pauline Gibson, who we were told knew a lot about the area’s history. But she wasn’t home, and the neighbor with whom we left a note didn’t know when she’d be back.

We had to press on in order to get to our appointment to tour Packington, where Jane lived in later life. But having come so close, I was reluctant to leave without knowing we were in the right place. On an inspiration, I pulled out my iPhone and Googled “Bentley Hall Staffordshire.” Bingo! Up popped Michael Shaw and Danny McAree’s article “The Rediscovery of Bentley Hall, Walsall,” originally published in West Midlands Archaeology Vol. 50 (2007), pages 2-5.
It told me that we were very near the site of Jane’s home. We still couldn’t find the cairn that was supposed to mark its location, and it wasn’t until I spoke by phone with Pauline Gibson later that I learned we should have continued another hundred yards or so south, but still, I had been able to find the place that Jane had lived, to see the horizon at which she would have gazed, and to feel the cool October breeze she would have known in that spot.

Still other parts of Jane’s story took place in Paris and The Hague, and to a lesser extent in Breda, Spa, Aix-la-Chapelle, Dusseldorf, and Cologne. It was just as impossible for me to visit those place in person as it had been for me to return to England. But once more I was fortunate in being able to find online old images and descriptions of these places, which, with modern images and descriptions, and help from my friend Kirsten Shepard, who was fortuitously in Paris at the time, I could conjure the backdrops for scenes from my book without ever leaving home.

Not as much fun as traveling for research, but as Jane might have said, “Needs must when the devil drives!”

Gillian, thank you so much for this glimpse into your research journey. May you make many more, each more fascinating than the last.

Gillian Bagwell’s second novel, The September Queen was released on November 1. Please visit her website, www.gillianbagwell.com, to read more about her books and read her blog Jane Lane and the Royal Miracle www.theroyalmiracle.blogspot.com, which recounts her research adventures and the daily episodes in Charles’s escape after Worcester.

What's In a Name? (Fictional Characters)

2011-11-15T08:43:00.000-08:00

Naming fictional characters in historical fiction requires adhering to the usual rules: avoid multiple names beginning with the same letter, try not to pick something unpronounceable, vary the rhythms and number of syllables. But the name must also be right for the time and place, and it's surprisingly easy to get this wrong. I keep two lists of given names that I find in period sources, one for males and one for females. I've been lucky enough to find two lengthy journal articles analyzing naming patterns in Tuscany in this time period, which alerted me to some things I would not have expected, such as the scarcity of saints' names in the early part of the 13th century.

Origins of names can matter, too. I almost made the mistake of naming a character Francesco in a book set in 1216. But Francis of Assisi was still alive at that time, and the glut of Francescos who were named after him and who would appear in future generations had not yet been born. (Similarly, Luigi becomes a common name after the canonization of Saint Louis in 1297, but not before.)

Cimabue, Saint Francis of Assisi

Guillaume de Saint-Pathus, Saint Louis

When I use placeholder names in a draft, usually for minor characters, I make sure the names stick out, so I won't inadvertently leave them that way. I don't use modern Italian names, lest I fail to notice their inappropriateness; instead I have people like Tiffany, Muffy, Irving, Jared, and Brad running around in medieval Florence until I assign them better names.

With Italian, pronounceability is not the issue it is for many other times and places, but the reader unfamiliar with the Italian language can still encounter pitfalls. An example (historical, not fictional): Beatrice, Dante's beloved, is a character in my work in progress, but everyone calls her (and this is historically true) Bice. Some readers might look at that and hear BEE-uh-triss and Bice (rhymes with mice), but what I want them to hear is Bay-ah-TREE-chay and BEE-chay (rhymes with eBay). I know of no way to make this work except for a brief pronunciation note at the beginning.

Dante Gabriel-Rossetti, Beata Beatrix

What's In a Name? (Historical characters)

2011-11-15T07:54:00.000-08:00

Lately I've been pondering some of the difficulties involved in naming characters. The problems are different, of course, for invented characters than they are for historical characters, but each presents certain challenges.

How can there be any difficulty in naming historical characters? Perhaps for some times and places there isn't any, but my area of interest is medieval Italy, and there at least I can attest that discrepancies are rampant.

Historical characters' names can appear in many different forms in contemporary chronicles and history books. Several characters in my first book, set in Florence in 1215, illustrate this: Oddo Arrigo dei Fifanti has also been called Odarrigo, Oderrigo, Oderigo, Oddo d'Arrigo, and Oddo Arrighi, and Gualdrada is called Aldruda in some near-contemporary accounts. A relatively minor but necessary character in the first chapters, Uberto degli Infangati, had an unambiguous name, but he was onstage at the same time as members of the powerful Uberti family, and that confused my beta readers. After all, if messer Buondelmonte was a member of the Buondelmonti family, wasn't Uberto a member of the Uberti? Sort of like John Johnson or Pete Peterson or Ed Edwards? Well, no. Actually, Uberto was on the opposite side politically, and the Infangati would not have thanked us for linking one of their own with the hated Uberti. But the confusion was understandable, so I stuck the poor guy with the nickname "Berto," and he'll just have to live with it.

In my work in progress, I was flummoxed to discover that I was dealing with no fewer than four women named Tessa. Two of them are prominent, the other two not so much, but they all need to be there. What to do? It's not as much of a challenge as the one Kate Quinn took on in Daughters of Rome, where her four Cornelias were all present at the same time, but a challenge nonetheless. (And even more of a challenge for Corso, one of my main characters, since one of the Tessas was his mother and two others were Wife #2 and Wife #3.) What to do?

Beatrice's nurse is known to history as monna Tessa, the woman who inspired Beatrice's father, Folco Portinari, to found the Ospedale di Santa Maria Nuova. I decided to just go ahead and call her monna Tessa. Corso's mom is something of a regal grande dame, so I expanded her to Contessa, which is where the name Tessa comes from. I'm still not sure what to do about Tessa1 and Tessa2, the wives, but I'll figure something out. Actually, for all I know, Corso's first wife might also have been a Tessa--her name is not recorded--but let's not go there. I called her Margherita.

Monna Tessa, Ospedale di Santa Maria Nuova, Firenze
Sailko, Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons license

(You may be wondering why Italian girls were given a name that means "Countess," yet you don't see "Principessa" or "Marquesa" or "Duchesa" as given names. It's because all those Tessas are not named after just any old countess, but rather La Gran Contessa herself, Matilda of Canossa.)

Matilda of Canossa, Vatican Library

"Maria" was a particularly rare name for girls in the records, with one exception: Florentines were baptized on the Saturday before Easter in a huge communal baptismal ritual that claimed the infants for the church and for their city at the same time, and it was custom for the bishop to perform the first two baptisms, naming the first boy Giovanni (for John the Baptist) and the first girl Maria. Since the main character of my work in progress has a mother named Maria, I am surmising that she (Maria) came from a distinguished family, as it seems unlikely that this honor was awarded randomly in such a hierarchical culture.