by Molly Owen | May 15, 2011 | Blog, Ruth Kaufman
A friend who sold by turning a historical into an inspirational kept suggesting I give that a try. We’re often advised not to write to market trends…to write the books of our hearts. On the other hand, the inspirational market has been growing. For example, Love Inspired Historicals recently went from two to four books a month.
I was used to writing single title romance, where basically the only rules are appropriate word count and a happily ever after ending. Among other things, inspirational romance means no on the page sex, even if the characters are married. While publishers’ guidelines vary, Love Inspired Historicals, for example, doesn’t want any paranormal elements, and says “Christian characters in the stories may not consume alcohol, play cards or gamble.”
Finally I sat down with one of my medievals. I excised scenes involving sex and other topics I’d learned inspirational publishers might not be interested in, ignoring the pain and sense of loss at deleting so many hard won words.
Doing so left room for adding the required faith journeys for the hero and heroine. I was surprised to find I already had a few religious tidbits. For example, King Henry IV was conservative and very devout, to the extent that he didn’t like women to wear bright or revealing clothes in his presence. I’d used that to show how my heroine didn’t fit in at court. Supposedly he’s quoted as saying, “Be good lads, meek and docile, and attend to your religion.”
How could I use religion and faith to heighten the plot and conflicts I already had, including that he served the king while she supported the king’s rival? I looked at the hero’s and heroine’s current arcs for places where the dictates of religion and believing or not would pull the characters further apart.
I researched and thought about religious issues in my specific time period, which turned out to be another way to incorporate the setting. Fortunately the Church and changes within it were a huge influence in late medieval England.
At first I worried that I was trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. But then I realized the manuscript was a puzzle, and inserting faith was like fitting missing pieces together. It didn’t take long to see who’d be a person of faith and who would have lost belief and why, or to make a variety of religious elements mesh with my story. I’d like to think adding these new elements heightened the emotional intensity. Finally, I changed the title to AT HIS COMMAND, which in this case can either mean the king’s or God’s.
I asked three published inspirational author friends to send me a synopsis, then had two of them review mine. But the first readers were judges in RWA®’s 2011 Golden Heart® contest. You can imagine my joy when I got the call that AT HIS COMMAND is a finalist.
If you’re considering writing a historical inspirational or adding faith elements to an existing manuscript, here are some questions to consider:
–what religious events/beliefs/trends existed in your time period of choice?
–will they make sense in your story, or does adding a faith element feel forced?
–how can you use faith to strengthen plot, conflict and your characters’ arcs?
–how will you resolve faith issues in a believable, satisfying manner?
by Molly Owen | Jan 25, 2010 | Blog, Ruth Kaufman
Two of the challenges of writing historical romance and fiction are knowing when things were invented and word choice. When words or phrases came into common usage can differ depending on the source.
Obvious anachronisms show not only poor research but a lack of attention to detail and can pull a reader right out of your story. On the other hand, never using contractions and restricting yourself entirely to words from your period can make your writing come across as stilted. Often the author needs to rely on his/her best judgment as to how much leeway he/she can accept.
Will an editor reject you because you use words a few decades after your story is set? Probably not. But lest you think specific words don’t matter… a New York Times bestseller, RITA-winning author kindly read one of my manuscripts set in late medieval England. I thought I had vetted it for “too modern” language, but she circled a few words that sounded inappropriate to her, even though they might have actually been in use at the time.
Stopping writing to look up every contemporary term that goes on the page can be frustrating and slow my progress. I don’t want to interrupt my flow, so usually I catch any word choice/invention issues while revising.
The earlier your story is set, the greater the limitations. Sometimes there’s a perfect word to describe what’s in your head that simply didn’t exist at the time of your story. Once I really wanted to use the word bluestocking, but learned that it didn’t come into use until the mid to late 1700’s. On the other hand, sometimes you can use the fact that something hasn’t yet been invented or a new invention to add detail and realism to your setting, or even to enhance plot or characterization. For example, the way your hero/heroine react the first time they use a fork could be quite amusing.
A Few Favorite Resources:
Brohaugh, William, English Through the Ages , Writer’s Digest Books, 1998.
Indispensable.
When I look up a word in the index, I know if it’s listed on a page higher than 99, it came into use after 1500, which is too late for me. Index tells you the page, but finding your specific word on that page can be difficult since the entries aren’t in alphabetical order.
Coredon, Christopher, A Dictionary of Medieval Terms & Phrases, D.S. Brewer, 2004, Reprinted 2005.
Cosman, Madeleine Pelner, Medieval Wordbook, Facts on File, Inc., 1996
Both great for things I’d never heard of before but want to use. However, can be difficult to tell when terms came into use. Cosman offers a subject index, Coredon does not.
by Molly Owen | Dec 25, 2009 | Blog, Ruth Kaufman
Since my day to post fell on December 25th, highlighting some Christmas traditions in my favorite time period and location seemed appropriate.
The word Christmas: came from the Old English “Cristes Maesse” and Middle English “Christemasse,” or Christ’s Mass. St. Nicholas day was celebrated on December 6, but the popular saint had no connection with Christmas/Santa Claus during this period. On this day the “boy bishop” was selected in many churches. The chosen one would dress and behave like an actual bishop for three weeks, until Holy Innocents Day on December 28.
Entertainment: from Christmas to Twelfth Night (Feast of the Epiphany, January 6) included, music, caroling (singing and/or dancing in a circle), and mystery plays. The wealthy featured minstrels, costumed and masked tenants and/or visiting players. New Year’s Day was celebrated with music and gifts.
Someone low on the social ladder was chosen as the Lord of Misrule. He presided over raucous revelry and was permitted to subject those above him to his commands.
Gifts: Exchanged on New Year’s Day, not Christmas. Lords often gave money to their servants. Servants made ‘offerings’ to people higher up the social ladder of items including gloves.
Lords and tenants gifted each other with food. The lord would either make arrangements for a communal meal or feed his tenants, but they might have to bring their own dining implements.
Food: People couldn’t eat animal products (even milk and cheese) during Advent. So by the time Christmas rolled around, they were ready to eat meat. The wealthy often dined on a variety including venison, goose or perhaps swan. Why not turkey? It wasn’t imported from America until the 1500’s.
Another popular dish was boar’s head, either real or a representation created from other foods. “Brawn en peverade,” a pottage (stew) made from dark, fatty meat of boar or poultry boiled with vinegar, onions and spices was also popular.
The poor would dine on the deer’s “umbles” (liver, kidneys and other innards) baked into a pie. Hence came the phrase,“eating humble pie.”
The plum pudding’s association with Christmas takes us back to medieval England and the Roman Catholic Church’s decree that the ‘pudding should be made on the twenty-fifth Sunday after Trinity, that it be prepared with thirteen ingredients to represent Christ and the twelve apostles, and that that every family member stir it in turn from east to west to honor the Magi and their supposed journey in that direction. http://www.foodtimeline.org/christmasfood.html
Decorations: Churches and houses were decorated with greenery.
Ruth Kaufman
http://www.ruthjkaufman.com/
by Molly Owen | Sep 25, 2009 | Blog, Ruth Kaufman
When we watch movies set in “medieval times,” the fashions we see can be authentic or a muddle of the medieval period, which spanned more than 400 years.
Many costume research sources delineate periods of fashion development by decades or centuries. I prefer to use each king’s reign (John Peacock’s approach in Costume 1066-1990s). Eighteen kings ruled England from 1066-1485. Two never married (William II and the boy king Edward V). The other kings and their 21 medieval queens, many from foreign lands, influenced national fashion just as presidents and their wives do now. Other influences included the Crusades and improved technology, which enabled the introduction of new fabrics and designs. Sumptuary laws decreeing which classes could wear which fabrics Following is a brief summary of some of the major changes in medieval English headdresses.
Women almost always wore headdresses because it was considered unseemly for them to show their hair. In William the Conqueror’s time, women simply wore a piece of plain cloth (often linen) draped over their heads, held by a narrow band. Some women wore their hair in two long braids around the turn of the 12th century, some with no veils. By Stephen’s reign, headbands were coming into vogue. These were worn with a veil.
As time passed, women also added a barbette, a strip of white fabric that went under the chin. Others wore wimples, similar to the white cloths some nuns still wear around their faces. Some form of the wimple or barbette with a circlet or hat continued through Edward II. A crispinette, or hair net, became a popular hair accessory of the time.
By Edward III, hair was braided and worn over the ears, not unlike Star Wars’ Princess Leia, except that often a crispinette covered the round braids, and was often worn with a hat or band (called a fillet). Padded roll headdresses emerged in the reign of Richard II, and were often jeweled or embroidered and were often worn with a short veil by Henry IV and the late 14th century.
By Henry V and into the beginning of Henry VI (1422-1461), rolls were worn over other headdresses or crispinettes, some with veils, some not. Transparent veils came into vogue during the latter part of Henry VI. Tall, conical headdresses called hennins (popular in the court of Burgandy, which influenced fashion) with veils appeared during the early years Edward IV but were replaced by fairly boring hats and caps with folded back brims by the end of his reign.
Ruth Kaufman owns approximately 200 books about medieval and early Renaissance England and has written 5 medievals. Visit her at www.ruthjkaufman.com or www.ruthtalks.com.
by Molly Owen | Aug 31, 2009 | Blog, Ruth Kaufman
When you want to write or read an English medieval, what assumptions do you make about medieval times? That there will be castles, kings, and knights in shining armor? That no one will bathe, people will die of the plague, and women will wear tall headdresses? By any definition “medieval” encompasses hundreds of years. So depending on exactly in which year your medieval is set, the castles, armor, hygiene and fashion may be very different than those that first come to mind.
Not even historians agree on exactly when the medieval period began, or if “middle ages” means the same thing as medieval. For England, use the 5th century fall of the Roman Empire and the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons to identify the start of the middle ages; others begin with the 7th century. Many label the years up to the 11th century as the dark ages or early middle ages. The era is often also divided into high and late, though sources disagree on the precise dates those designations encompass.
The scholars I follow generally define medieval as beginning in 1066 (with the Normans and William the Conqueror) and ending in 1485 (after the Battle of Bosworth and the death of Richard III, the conclusion of what we now call the Wars of the Roses and the start of the Tudor period with Henry VII). Even that definition covers more than 400 years!
Can you imagine lumping together one modern century, like the 20th, considering how many life-altering products were invented and how social mores changed from 1910 to 1990? Watching a few episodes of Mad Men shows us how different the working world of the 1960s was from today. It’s hard for us to believe that computers weren’t common household items until the 1990s, and that many of us grew up without our own telephones, much less a cell with Internet access, multiple apps and texting. Just because medieval times took place hundreds of years ago doesn’t mean society and lifestyle were the same in 1300 as they were in 1400. Even so, many readers and even authors lump hundreds of years into one pot, assuming that life was pretty much the same at the beginning as it was at the end. That just by dressing the heroine in a gown, giving the hero some armor or chain mail and a squire to polish them, and sticking them all in a damp, stone castle (which is often filthy and requires the heroine’s touch to tidy up), you’ve got a medieval.
But attention to the unique, precise details of the specific years in which a book is set–the subtleties of history and politics, and how changes in ruling factions affected the country, food, drink, clothing, architecture, societal perceptions, religion, coins of the realm and more–that make all the difference. That, in addition to being accurate, help make the story come alive and can enhance conflict, plot and character.
But because of stereotypes and assumptions about medievals, I’ve received some frustrating comments from contest judges. One wrote that Richard was not the Duke of York but the Duke of Gloucester. In the 1450s when that manuscript is set, as indicated by the dateline on the first page, Richard Plantagenet was in fact Duke of York, and the Richard she meant was a mere toddler. One commented that people didn’t have carpets. Well, in this time, they weren’t common but were being acquired by the wealthy, which my character was. And I don’t quite recall why, but one judge made a comment about Columbus. Who would also have been a child in the 1450s. If I’m not certain about who’s who or what existed when judging a contest or writing my own pages, I’ll look it up to make sure.
Another issue is word choice. Though I had carefully and constantly consulted English Through the Ages to be as accurate as possible about when words came into common use (I wanted to use bluestocking, but clearly that wasn’t period!), a few non-authentic words are bound to slip in. An NYT best-seller graciously critiqued one of my medievals; her view was that even if a word was technically in use at the time, if it sounded too modern it should still be replaced. As a judge, I’ll overlook some words (aware that the earlier the manuscript is set, the more challenging it is to sound authentic. Many, many words we want and need to use were not around in 1066), but will note words that jar me out of the story and if there are many words that sound like and were in use much closer to the Regency than the medieval period.
What do you think?
Ruth Kaufman owns approximately 200 books about medieval and early Renaissance England and has written 5 medievals. Visit her at www.ruthjkaufman.com.
