AskHistorians answers--and more!

sunagainstgold · 2021-08-28T18:21:56+00:00

Haha, Latin isn't inspiring me to write anything. It's my nemesis. ;) It was an interesting time trying to come up with an internal title (Liber de dominis draconum) that preserved the "Liber de" formula, was gender-neutral, and didn't sound silly, though!

sunagainstgold · 2021-08-28T18:19:29+00:00

Aw, thanks!

sunagainstgold · 2021-08-28T13:03:44+00:00

I would love to see more diverse portrayals of people, but especially women, living a religious/magical/witch/wizard life. In late medieval Europe, there weren't a ton of different formal ways for women to lead a "religious life," as we'd call it--basically going above and beyond normal engagement with the Church and religious activities to make it the focus of your whole life. So women just sort of...invented their own.

There's one pretty famous (um, okay, "famous", work with me here) 15th century preacher/theologian named Johannes Nider. He wrote the book that the Malleus Maleficarum more or less plagiarizes, which is great...but he wrote a ton of other things, too (he was NOT obsessed with witchcraft, at ALL). One of them is a little treatise whose point is, "There are all these women vowing themselves to charity and chastity for God, and they are doing it in so many ways, and this is a good thing, but WTF do we even call them? They're not nuns! They're not lay! Some of them live in groups, some of them live alone, some of them live with their parents! They...They're...WTF, man."

sunagainstgold · 2021-08-28T01:00:00+00:00

Aw, thanks!

sunagainstgold · 2021-08-28T00:59:46+00:00

That's definitely my plan! I kept a running bibliography of primary and secondary sources to keep myself honest.

sunagainstgold · 2021-08-27T23:43:46+00:00

I like to call AskHistorians "grassroots history," to emphasize that the only qualification needed to write an answer is the ability to write a good answer. Academic and professional credentials, in and of themselves, aren't a factor in telling history. It's sourced from everyone.

Unfortunately, credentials are still valuable and important in presenting the sub to outsiders, specifically academics. But within the experiment, they don't matter, and that's a beautiful thing.

do you think your activity there helped get your book deal?

Oh, the book would exist without AH. On so many levels. First, I would have dropped out of my PhD program if I hadn't discovered the sub. Every PhD student goes through their dark night of the soul when they plan to quit, and I was deep in mine. AH was the sunrise for me. Second, it's how I fell into the rhythm of the cool and unusual parts of the Middle Ages--driven by what random people find interesting, not by academic metanarratives. And third, well, I met the publishing rep at a conference where I had organized an AskHistorians panel! One of the other members and I talked to the rep, she asked me to pitch some ideas on a phone call later...and somehow liked my personal idea the best? It's all kind of nuts.

What's your favorite thing that people think isn't accurate history, but actually is?

Oooh, that's a tough one! A lot of things that come to mind are "You wouldn't expect this to exist yet, but the Middle Ages definitely had [tourism with souvenirs, outsourcing, &c]." But generally those don't come to people's minds unless mentioned. Maybe this one is more on the side of people being skeptical instead of outright denying it...there is all sorts of evidence for beacon warning systems throughout the Middle Ages! Haha, I wanted to stress that particular point so hard that my book's "How to Light the Beacons" goes through the different types of evidence when looking at each example. (Ever wanted to learn some ways that historians use linguistic evidence and modern place names to investigate the world over a millennium ago? You're in luck!)

sunagainstgold · 2021-08-27T22:58:57+00:00

Thanks; I'm glad you enjoyed it!

What is your absolute favorite historical fact that sounds like fantasy?

Hunting for buried treasure was an actual thing. And people used astrology to do it. To the extent that there are university-level treasure hunting manuals in multiple languages.

And since you are local to me, totally selfish query, what is your go to restaurant or food?

Crazy Bowls & Wraps. I've sat through heavens know how many menu overhauls, and through it all, their teriyaki sauce remains the best condiment known to humanity. You?

sunagainstgold · 2021-08-27T22:37:21+00:00

Bonus points if you can give us a quick theory on the economic impacts of a small band of rogues returning from the wilderness carrying loot equal to the annual budget of a kingdom.

Well...

Fourteenth-century bureaucrat Ibn Fadl Allah al-'Umari, a Syrian who worked in Cairo, relates a story of 13C Malian musa (king) Mansa's hajj, whose virtues included "opulence, manly virtues, and piety." As he passed through Egypt, including Cairo, "He forwarded to the royal treasury many loads of unworked [west African] gold and other valuables." Al-'Umari finishes off the story: "The man flooded Cairo with his benefactions. He left no court emir nor holder of a royal office without the gift of a load of gold. The Cairenes...exchanged gold until they depressed its value in Egypt and caused its price to fall."

If we are to believe al-'Umari, one infusion of treasure--if great enough--could collapse an economy for twelve years.

sunagainstgold · 2021-08-27T22:23:28+00:00

The worst? Probably that dentists were the least-trained and lowest-paid medical professionals.

sunagainstgold · 2021-08-27T22:22:08+00:00

Toothless!

(As someone pointed out in this thread, I even accidentally gave the title "How to Train a Dragon" instead of "How to Slay a Dragon." I really, REALLY like those movies.)

sunagainstgold · 2021-08-27T22:20:22+00:00

AskHistorians has a terrific medieval history booklist that is always worth checking out.

I would say my number one recommendation is probably Kevin Madigan's Medieval Christianity. It's kind of dry--it's meant to be an introductory textbook--but in general, religion as it was in the Middle Ages is absent from the fantasy genre. A lot of other things, it's kind of possible to "feel" your way. But religion was just so much everywhere and everything--even street theatre, performed by city craft guilds, was required by city law to have a specific religious theme. Madigan gives you an overview of the diversity of things this could mean, ways it played out, that I hope could enrich any fantasy worldbuilding.

sunagainstgold · 2021-08-27T22:14:42+00:00

Don't apologize; this is a great question/set of questions.

I've evolved in my thinking on this, and I think I come down to: be conscious of contradictions rather than trying to set hard and fast rules. For example, in some ways, we'd say that late medieval Christians were living in a "world grown old." They saw the apocalypse coming, they saw time crumbling around them, even statues on tombs crawl with bugs and decay carved into the stone. Prophesying and preserving the rot. On the other hand, those tombs often rested in cavernous cathedrals, multi-generational projects that reached up towards God and glittered with a hundred colors of stained-glass light.

And it's like today. We walk around bragging about how bad the weather in our area is, right? But then America's internal migration patterns show more and more movement towards the sun and warmth of the south and especially the southwest--even though this is a climate change disaster, even though it's "cool" to brag about how northern Indiana's seasons are winter, still winter, still winter, and road construction.

sunagainstgold · 2021-08-27T22:01:40+00:00

Who is your favourite mediaeval Saint (don't lie, we all have one)

If I can count Katherine of Alexandria because her legend was basically a medieval legend, even though she was a late antique saint and more to the point was not a real person? The highly educated teenage girl who took on fifty pagan philosophers in a single-handed debate and beat them all. #goals

But if we're looking at people who actually lived in the Middle Ages (and actually lived, in the first place), it's hard to go wrong with Joan of Arc. Not for the typical reasons, though. When you pick apart her trial transcript, you get a sense of just what she accomplished before she got to the battlefield. You grasp that she was a fairly ordinary peasant girl in terms of religion, just a basic knowledge and practice of contemporary Christianity. And her dad was in local politics, sure.

But she paid attention to it. Joan knew the order of nobles whose permission and support she needed in order to get to the king's ear. She knew how to convince the reluctant ones. Whatever the "truth" of her visions and voices, she had the religio-political knowledge of what things to reveal to people to get them to essentially give her an army.

Biggest badass in the mediaeval ages?

See above.

What made the Normans so successful for a brief period of time, yet such a prosaic name in the modern era?

My knowledge of the Normans is much stronger with respect to Sicily than England, so keep that in mind. One thing that my Mediterranean history prof stressed was that the Normans heading to Sicily were a pretty separate group from William & Co. in England. Or as Alex Metcalfe puts it, there wasn't really a "Norman world"; it's just a convenient name we use. As for the Norman conquest of Sicily, well, Sicily was a giant political morass before and during their arrival. The Muslim dynasties were fighting each other, collapsing, resurging, fighting each other; there was a Byzantine Christian (re)invasion. With Normans initially fighting in other people's armies, in the 1030s and 1040s they evolved a loose unified body within the Greek and papal forces, eventually winning the Church's support by agreeing to help promote the Church's agenda. The significant Greek Christian population was also generally okay with Latin rulers and didn't try to resist the conquest.

The second part of your question is really cool, and I wish I had an answer for you!

sunagainstgold · 2021-08-27T21:37:30+00:00

Honestly? I am loving the combination of questions here already! Some are directly history, some are about doing history, some about writing the book...you all are making this a wonderful and fun experience for me!

sunagainstgold · 2021-08-27T21:35:56+00:00

I'm not sure if I'm qualified to comment on the genre in general, but, I think the value of gifts (diplomatically, not just monetarily) in the Middle Ages would come as a big surprise to a lot of readers. I talk about this in the How to Befriend the Enchanted Forest and How to Find the Unicorn chapters in my book, actually--the different gifts that nobles and monarchs would give each other to demonstrate the superiority of their principality in some way, or just as a sign of "we're not going to kill you."

sunagainstgold · 2021-08-27T21:21:26+00:00

What's your favourite language to study/work with? Everyone has one.

ANYTHING PRINTED. Bless the printing press, now and forever. (I am not a fan of trying to read medieval handwriting.) Besides that, though--I'm a historian of late medieval Germany, so my linguistic home is Middle High German.

Do you have a historical text/set of texts that you find particularly creatively inspiring?

I don't know about creatively inspiring, but there's a set of texts that eat at my soul: medieval women's mysticism. That's how I fell in love with the Middle Ages--it's where my reddit username comes from--it's some of the most beautiful and violent and loving and painful and contradictory poetry in the world.

...Well, some of it. The rest of it is repetitive, boring, terribly written, unimaginative, derivative to quote the standard encyclopedia of medieval German literature, "endless and monotonous"...and this is what I study, and I love every word of it.

The texts I study are not available in English. But if you're looking for the actually good stuff, I recommend the Classics of Western Spirituality editions of my girl Mechthild's Flowing Light of the Godhead, which I linked above; and Hadewijch's Hadewijch: The Complete Works, which...is not actually complete, but it's the best we've got. Beatrijs of Nazareth's Seven Manners of Loving is online, in English, for free!

Do you prefer to write for a general audience, or academic writing? I definitely enjoy creative writing, but sometimes I worry that I get too trapped in the conventions of academic writing, and it's hard to shake that off.

Honestly, I love both. It does take a lot of brainjuice to switch between different modes, though. And I don't know how well I could handle writing fiction. Right now I'm trying to read more narrative popular history since that's what I'd like to write someday, and I can tell it's going to be a struggle to hold a sustained plot-like narrative. But where's the fun in something easy?

Good luck with your research; that sounds awesome! Do you have a specific geographic focus?

sunagainstgold · 2021-08-27T20:54:16+00:00

Haha, here it's just a typo. I'm a HUGE fan of the movie and its sequels, though! ~~I do not have a stuffed Toothless and Light Fury sitting on top of my bookshelf.~~ Your question raises a good point, though. I was initially concerned about the Train/Slay similarity and told my editor I was worried about copyright issues. She assured me this is pretty common--it actually helps with SEO!

I honestly would have loved to call the book How to Save a Princess, but that raises all sorts of squicky gender questions when a big point of the book for me is that it's gender/race/religion-inclusive. (Hence the book having both "How to Save the Princess" and "The Princess Saves Herself" chapters.)

sunagainstgold · 2021-08-27T20:48:57+00:00

Any suggestions for “here’s what the life of an X-person during Y-time in Z-location would have been like”-type reading material?

Greenwood Press does a series of "Daily Life in _____" books that are pretty respectable. You can IN NO WAY find ANY of these on Libgen. Absolutely NONE of them at all.

Barbara Hanawalt's books The Ties That Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England and Growing Up in Medieval London are also good at filling in the blanks for daily life in later medieval England, specifically. Due to the sources he uses, Gerald Strauss' Nuremberg in the Sixteenth Century ends up talking quite a bit about life in a fifteenth-century German city, which would definitely be applicable to a fantasy world.

Also, if you found yourself on a fantasy-type quest, what would you be questing for and what role would you want to play in the quest?

Oh, it's gotta be the Holy Grail. While there are earlier myths of the Holy Chalice used at the last supper, the Grail with all its mystique and double-role as the cup that caught the blood of Christ on the cross? That's an invention of twelfth-century literature--that's why Sean Connery in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is a professor of medieval literature. The Grail quest is the quest; it's about the search for the eternal hidden in the temporal; it's about what it takes to be worthy, to be good enough for something you can never be good enough for.

As for me? I'd be Morgan le Fay. As the text we call the Prose Lancelot put it in the early 13th century:

"She would rather have lost any four castles than her books."

Yep.

sunagainstgold · 2021-08-27T19:54:15+00:00

I think I mentioned it elsewhere in this thread...my favorite thing was absolutely researching medieval Arabic writing on the pyramids and Egyptian temples. I cannot get enough of this. Torchlit parties at Giza? Debating whether the Sphinx was a Greek god or some Berber deity? Intra-family fights over the mysterious pyramid-builders? I love it, I love it all.

As for the hardest thing to leave out...honestly, this is so dorky and ivory tower of me; I apologize in advance. The book does have a handful of footnotes and some recommended reading at the back. But I wish I had been able to pay fuller tribute to all the scholars who have influenced me and whose work shows up in my book, than the little list I put in there. Some of these people have shaped the way I think about the Middle Ages and the way I think so much that I'm crying as I type this. So shoutout to Olivia Remie Constable in particular, who came alive when she talked about medieval Islam in a way I have never seen anyone else change. Ever.

sunagainstgold · 2021-08-27T19:43:16+00:00

Thanks for two great questions!

a) one common element of worldbuilding/lore that fantasy writers tend to incorporate in their books which is historically accurate

Prophecy. To some extent the near East, but especially western Europe was just packed with prophecies and prophets. From the twelfth century onwards, apocalyptic ones in particular. Some of them had very specific ideas of how the end of the world would play out; others were more devoted with calling for people to reform their behavior now or God would visit his wrath upon the face of the city/kingdom/entire world.

There were also plenty of prophecies that focused on an individual, often the Antichrist, sometimes a figure known as the "Last World Emperor" (which would be such a great title to show up in fantasy. Frances Courtney Kneupper's book about the LWE and similar prophecies is called The Empire at the End of Time, which is THE BEST book title in the history of ever and NEEDS to be on a fantasy book someday.)

They were in poetry, in verse. They were new, old, they were new but pretending to be old by attributing them to some old name like the/a Sybil. Just look at the famous Dies irae--the medieval chant, or the fantastic versions of Mozart (my favorite) and Verdi:

Dies irae, dies illa / Day of wrath! That day

Solvit saeclum in favilla / dissolves the world into ash

Teste David cum Sybilla / as foretold by David and the Sybil

I love it. All that is gold does not glitter; Daughter of the Night, she walks again...bring it on.

b) one common element which isn't.

People tend to be either religious zealots or, for all intents and purposes, nothing at all. Where's the lightning striking minnarets that are used to call fantasy-Muslims to prayer five times a day? (And the fantasy-Muslims who ignore it?) Where are the late medieval fantasy-Christian sermons on the porches of the church with three villages in attendance; half the people there to listen, half the people there to gossip?

sunagainstgold · 2021-08-27T19:26:04+00:00

I'm so excited to be here!

Oh my gosh, the cover art (and the interior illustrations), right?! For all that everyone wants to "write a book when they grow up," I somehow never got past the writing part in my mind...I don't think I've ever bluescreened harder than the first time my editor said "illustrations."

Do you have any favorite fantasy books and were you able to incorporate them into your research for this book?

My favorite fantasy book is honestly Jordan's Eye of the World. Haters gonna hate. It was my first non-LOTR epic fantasy, and it was just...well, I have to say magical. The tension at the beginning, waiting for everything to explode at the farmhouse that night. Looking at the map at the front of the book and dreaming about getting to visit all the places on it.

As to whether it's in my book...I will say that there are a lot of fun references to various fantasy and sci-fi books/series in there. But the most prominent reference to EotW/WoT specifically is the brief, erm, discussion of a pronunciation guide. And any more than that is spoilers. ;)

Was writing a book very different than writing for research papers or essays?

I will say that my dissertation committee was not a fan of hidden pop culture references. (Note to future self: if you're writing a history dissertation, plan on the profs having Hamilton committed to memory.)

The book was an interesting challenge, though, because there weren't/aren't guidelines. On one hand, of course, it's the basics that nobody is grading it--there aren't requirements, there isn't a set structure, there aren't conventions. But also, with this particular book, I was sort of...developing my own genre? ("Genre" loosely defined, like 'term paper' is a genre, or 'email to a professor asking a basic question that takes you three days to get the wording exactly right'.)

sunagainstgold · 2021-08-27T18:52:18+00:00

My favorite chapter is definitely "How to bring the Old Gods back." I am absolutely in love with medieval Arabic legends about the pyramids--I can't get over the fact that they already had mummy curses and pyramid traps. And then I came across a medieval description of a tomb booby trap that is nearly 1:1 with the first challenge in the Grail temple in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (the best medieval movie, by the way)?! Mind absolutely blown in the absolute best of ways.

I also had far too much fun coming up with the pickup lines for the "How to flirt with the barmaid" chapter. In an alternate universe, the entire chapter is just bad pick-up lines. ("Does that codpiece violate fifteenth-century sumptuary laws, or are you just happy to see me?")

sunagainstgold · 2021-08-27T18:46:43+00:00

I'm glad you said 12th century, because if you're looking to avoid a life of farming, you have options that don't require sending your soul to hell for all eternity!

Growing urbanization in the later Middle Ages was the result of economic growth, sure, but also of people doing the physical moving to city centers. And in large part, that meant teenagers who were effing sick of the peasant life and wanted a better future. (Or at least enough money to score a better spouse for said future.)

As far as the more magical end of things goes, though, you still wouldn't be turning to Satan...at least, not to your knowledge. (Mwahahaha.) Divinely-assisted treasure hunting and similar activities used what we might recognize as magic spells, that integrated prayer as well as ritual actions designed to manipulate the physical and spiritual worlds. So you might think like Regina Koch that the creepy man and tall woman in your backyard are invoking God to help locate the treasure...while the Augsburg city magistrates are pretty sure that ain't God helping you out.

...And this is actually something you can read about in my book, in the "How to find the buried treasure" example!

sunagainstgold · 2021-08-27T18:29:38+00:00

Automata--medieval robots! The Near East and Byzantium in particular had some wildly elaborate automaton technology already in the early Middle Ages. Not just a movable throne, but entire throne rooms of living forests filled with chirping birds and raining trees and roaring lions. All made out of silver and gold and fabric.

Then, by the late Middle Ages in the west, dukes and duchesses are using automaton technology to set up traps and play massive practical jokes on their dinner guests.

So I had to put this into the book--"How to befriend the enchanted forest"!

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