biweekly links 6-1-2016

Welcome to June! For your perusal this week:

    • Think history’s all boring dates? Try social history – a former history class-hater turned historical fiction writer because of her love for the ‘real lives behind boring dates and wars’. I never disliked the big names but the food, clothing, hygiene, tools, and other minutiae of every day life provides a sense of place and time that larger events just don’t.
    • New research maps in unique detail the devastation of the Black Death on medieval England – Over two thousand square meters of plague burial pits excavated between 2005 and 2014 reveal such a sharp drop in pottery fragments that they estimate the “population of England remained somewhere between 35 and 55 per cent below its pre-Black Death level well into the sixteenth century”. The article links to the University of Lincoln’s announcement and it links to the original paper, which is, alas, password protected.
    • Call to save nude Tudor murals on old brothel site – renovation of a former clothing shop in Buckingham UK reveals murals with “lots of naked people in them and…several explicit images” dating from the 1570s-80s. Only one rather tame image at the link, though I suppose the curious could always try contacting the professor quoted in the article.
    • Work from 1616 is ‘the first ever science fiction novel’ – I’ve never thought of the Rosicrucian text “The Chymical Wedding” as proto-science fiction, but given that it’s about alchemy and adventure and flying women, I can see it. But is it really the first? The article cites works by Kepler and More as possibilities. What do you think?
    • Margaret Cavendish, the long-ignored godmother of science fiction, gets her due in Margaret the First – “The Blazing World” is novel in 17th century literature for including alternative worlds and talking animals, but it seems the author was at least as interesting as her story. Privately ambitious but publicly apologetic for it, this review suggests a tale of female frustration at dreams thwarted that’s maddening in its familiarity – and therefore looks like a cracking good read.
The Description of a new World, called The Blazing-World, written by the Thrice Noble, Righteous, and Excellent Princesse the Duchess of Newcastle.
Cover of Cavendish’s “The Blazing World”, courtesy Wikipedia

you’ll never walk alone (even when you need to): servants in Elizabethan households

I don’t think I’d have lasted 24 hours in the Dee household without tearing my hair out.

Paging through his personal and spiritual diaries I catch glimpses of people who, while colorful, I’d never want to meet: Dee’s cranky alchemical apprentice; two maids who accidentally set fire to their room twice in one year; the manservant he fired for getting drunk and cursing out the rest of the staff. That’s just a sampling and while there’s no full list it seems Dee had at least nine servants and probably more during my 1583-9 time frame.

The Dees weren’t unusual. Almost everyone of middling rank or higher had live-in staff. If you didn’t have servants you’d likely be one because up to a quarter of the population was in service. And even if everyone was nice as pie there was never, ever a break from their company. Servants worked in all parts of the house and some slept on their masters’ bedchamber floors (dedicated servants’ dormitories were rare). Houses were often designed with linked rooms so even if your maid or man had a private bedchamber they probably passed through yours to get there. Decorative elements like wooden screens and bed curtains compensated for this lack of privacy, but only just.

Great Bed of Ware
The Great Bed of Ware from the V&A website. A representative Elizabethan bedstead in all but size.

More on the Great Bed of Ware with photos and videos of assembly.

In short it was damn near impossible to be truly alone*, a fact that makes my inner introvert blanch while my writer’s mind reels at the potential mayhem.

Pro: lovely opportunities to endanger my characters! Dee and Kelley were into so many questionable things that any sudden walk-ins could easily create panic and rumors of Dee’s “conjuring” that Jane would struggle to explain away. Hours of amusement!

Con: a massive narrative hurdle. I’ve got to get the servants out of the house for their infamous “crossmatching” incident, which the Dees and Kelleys swore to keep secret on pain of death. Dee’s spiritual diary offers no details beyond a terse “pactu factu” (pact fulfilled) so I have free rein, but how do I empty the house believably? Send everyone to a market fair (if there was one)? Hide in an unused wing (ditto)? Bribe everybody (though they’re poor)?

I’m almost done with the first draft (!) and am still unraveling this snarly plot knot.

*Even more so if you take children and visitors into account.

Selected Sources:

Cooper, Nicholas. Houses of the Gentry 1480-1680. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999.

Dee, John (author), Stephen Skinner (editor), and Meric Casaubon (Preface). Dr John Dee’s Spiritual Diaries (1583-1608): Being a reset and corrected edition of a True & Faithful Relation of what Passed for many Yeers between Dr John Dee…and Some Spirits.
 Woodbury MN: Llewellyn Publications, 2012.

Orlin, Lena Cowen. Elizabethan Households: An Anthology. Washington DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1996.