Blogging at Seduced by History

I am blogging today at Seduced by History on a topic I've posted here before. But since it is so much fun, it was worth revisiting!

Check out Digging Into the Mystery of History's Contraceptives and the Curse of Eve.

Cheers!
Eliza

Want to learn more about a medieval noble's life?

Dates: October 5, 2009 – October 30, 2009
Class: A Noble’s Life in Medieval Times
Instructor: Eliza Knight

Register: www.elizaknight.com/noblelife.aspx

Class Description:

Life in medieval times was so much different than the way we live today. When readers sit down with their favorite medieval historical romance, they are taken away to another time and place.

For most readers, this is where they learn about medieval times, and it is the duty of the author to be as authentic as possible. That being said, you don’t want your book to be a history lecture either, but to just flavor it enough.

This workshop will teach you how people, particularly nobles, lived in medieval times, in order for you to be truer to the era you write about. This is an open discussion workshop, questions and comments are welcome and encouraged. There are five lessons, each of which are broken down daily. This class provides photos, video links, research links, exercises and opportunities to share your work for critique. The lessons will be presented as follows:

Lesson One: The Medieval Castle
Lesson Two: Medieval Entertainments
Lesson Three: Day in the Life of a Medieval Lord and Lady
Lesson Four: Medieval Medicine
Lesson Five: Medieval Clothes


Instructor Bio: Eliza Knight is a best-selling author of multiple steamy Regency and erotic Highlander time travel romance novellas published by The Wild Rose Press. She is a freelance copy editor, professional critiquer and President of the Celtic Hearts Romance Writers signature chapter of the RWA. Eliza's novellas have received outstanding reviews, even being nominated and voted Best Book of the Week by Long and Short of It Reviews. She also volunteers her time as a contest judge, coordinator and chair. Eliza is the author of the award-winning blog, History Undressed and has published numerous articles in various newsletters. She presents workshops on history and researching techniques to writing groups online. For more information on Eliza, please visit her website at, www.elizaknight.com or www.historyundressed.blogspot.com

What did nobles do for fun in the middle ages?

When there wasn’t a huge celebration, or entertainments going on, nobles still did things for fun, just like we do. Has your power ever gone out? What did you do for fun? Believe it or not, what they did for fun is a lot like what we do today for fun, without the technology and electricity.

Here’s a list of some things they might do:

• Read quietly or aloud
• Write – poetry, theology, philosophy
• Art – painting, drawing, sculpting
• Sewing – tapestries, embroidery
• Music – playing, singing, listening, dancing
• Gardening (flowers, herbs, picking fruit and berries)
• Walking
• Horseback riding
• Mock fights (men – unless you have a feisty woman)
• Hunting – there were a lot of types of hunting. Hunting was done on horseback with either/both hounds and hawks (falcons too). They would hunt deer (stag), wild boar, fox, and any other wild animal that caught their fancy. Women hunted too. Hunting was a dangerous and exhilarating sport. If you recall, Henry VIII injured his leg quite badly in a fall while hunting.
• Talking
• Playing cards (triomphe, piquet, vingt-et-un)
• Playing board games (chess, checkers, draughts, dice, backgammon, tabula)
• Watch or participate in a play
  Outdoor games: Bocce, Bowling games, Tennis, In France/Italy a form of football was played called la Soule
• Fishing
• Boating
• Bobbing for apples
• Wrestling
• Treasure hunts
• Christmas Game – “King of the Bean” a bean was baked into a bread or cake, whoever found it was king of the holiday feast
• Riddling – making up riddles people had to figure out (popular among knights as well—kept their wits sharp which was just as important as keeping their bodies in shape.)
• Puzzles
• Gambling
• Blind Man’s Bluff

Guest Blogger Nancy Lee Badger on The Origin of Scottish Mythology

Welcome back guest blogger, Nancy Lee Badger! She is here today to tantalize us with the origins of Scottish mythology.

Take it away Nancy...

Scottish mythology is actually quite entwined with the Irish. One such example expounds on how settlers from Greek Asia Minor sailed across the sea to a place they called “the mountain of Ireland”. These settlers warred with Picts, invaded an area known as Britain, conquered the people, and renamed the land ‘Scotia’. When the Gaelic world assimilated the Picts into their fold, some history was lost and subsequently filled-in with myths and folklore. The people of present day Scotland grew from a diversity of cultures and their individual influences.

Myths are often considered an aspect of folklore, but not all. Mythology might include the belief in the supernatural, where as folklore and folk tales derived when people had the need to explain mysterious events. Pre-Christianity might have had a hand in old world myths and folklore. A people’s yearning to believe in the hereafter, or in some type of entity, lived on through stories passed generation to generation. Once Christianity became widespread, mythological creatures, such as the “Fairies”, faded away.

Scotland has a rich Celtic History going back over 2,000 years, at a time when superstition was rife and where unusual events were ‘explained’ by legends and whimsical stories. It is therefore not surprising that Scotland has an extensive heritage of myths and folklore. Many objects, including castles, have accumulated their share of myths and legends, such as circles of stones or cairns. These standing stones, and megalithic remains, highlight these reminders of the ancient inhabitants of Scotland.

Some believe that religion was an adaption from stories and memoires or evolutionary biology. In other words, religion evolved as byproduct of psychological mechanisms that evolved for other reasons. These mechanisms might have told early people how to watch for things that could cause them harm (omens). This morphed into an ability to come up with causal narratives for natural events (folk tales) while other people had minds of their own with their own beliefs, desires and intentions (mythology and the precursors of organized religion).

Unexplained observations (thunder, lightning, movement of planets, and other complicated events of nature) were the basis of stories. These word-of-mouth explanations changed with the frequency of their telling which is why one myth could have many different descriptions or endings.

The distinctive features of Scottish Folklore are filled with the characteristics of Scotland’s varied scenery. The serene lap of the deep mountain loch, the trickling of a tiny creek, the harsh splendor of the mountains, the solitude of the moor, reflect in their folk tales and myths. The fairies, the brownies, and the bogles of Scotland are similar to those the Irish believe live in their own hills. Their Irish nooks and crags, streams and meadows might be different, but many legends are told with similar aspects except, maybe, for how they dress.

An example of the similarity between the land of the Highlands and the land of the four-leaf clover is the legend of the Selkie. In Scotland, this mythical Selkies are shy marine creatures in the shape of a seal, usually found near the islands of Orkney and Shetland. A female can shed her skin and come ashore as a beautiful woman. If found, a man could force her to be his wife. Of course, as the legend goes, if she recovered the skin, off she’d go. Male Selkies are said to be responsible for storms. What better explanation for the sinking of a ship?
Selkies of Irish lore are said to come from Co. Donegal in Ireland, which happens to be where many people made their living from the sea. Living by the sea might cause people to craft stories as a way to explain its mysteries. The Irish considered the Selkies to have the same characteristics as those of Scotland, even though they considered other sea creatures more malevolent. Most scholars believe the seals and sea lions from which these myths evolved had sweet, non-threatening dispositions. This might have allowed them to easily be transformed by myth into non-threatening Selkies. At least, the females!

Religion changed much of the thinking of the people who listened or read the more popular beliefs which were often rammed down their throats by the hierarchy of a given land. Myths and folklore slipped to the back burner, but never disappeared. Many tales are quite popular today and have thousands of followers. Think of the legend surrounding the Blarney Stone in Ireland or the Loch Ness Monster. Even Girl Scout troops around the world call their youngest recruits ‘Brownies’ after helpful creatures that do good deeds.

Myths and folk tales live on because people need to believe in them. There are hundreds of wonderful stories out there about kelpies, fairies, banshees, and the like. I recommend the following websites if you would like a taste. You might even recognize one or two stories!

www.compassrose.org/folklore/scottish/Scottish-Folktales.html
http://www.sacred-texts.com/ where you click on

About Nancy Lee Badger:

A Scottish Highlander, chocolate-chip shortbread, wool plaid, dirks and bagpipes fill my life as I travel to and volunteer at present day Highland Games while dreaming of past pleasures. I live with my kilted husband in Raleigh, NC. I am a member of RWA, Heart of Carolina Romance writers, Sisters In Crime, the Celtic Heart Romance Writers, and FF&P.

Visit Nancy:
http://www.nancyleebadger.com/
http://www.rescuingromance.nancyleebadger.com/

Guest Author Blythe Gifford on Cross Dressing in the Middle Ages

Please join me in welcoming guest author, Blythe Gifford! Today she is here to tantalize us with her article, Cross Dressing in the Middle Ages.

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Joan of Arc may be the most famous cross dresser of the Middle Ages, but as I researched my September release from Harlequin Historical, I discovered she was hardly the only one.

I took heart from that when I wrote IN The MASTER’S BED. In it, my medieval heroine runs away from home disguised as a man in order to study at the University. At that time, women were not even allowed into the living quarters to do laundry, let alone into the classrooms to take courses. My heroine ends up living in the 14th century equivalent of a fraternity house, where she manages to maintain her secret for longer than you might expect.

Strictly fiction, you might say. But no. There is a reliable account of a woman in medieval Poland who attended the university there for two years before she was discovered. Her story had a happy ending. She was not punished, but, revered for her scholarship, joined a convent and became the abbess. Like my heroine, when she was disguised, this woman lived in an all men’s hostel and “behaved properly toward others, did not frequent the baths, and attended the lectures diligently.” (Note: I’ve listed the sources for this post below.)

This happened less than fifty years after my story is set, so I felt totally justified in thinking that it COULD have happened the way I wrote it.

In fact, the idea of a woman dressed as a man was not as foreign to medieval people as we might think. Marjorie Garber says the “transvestite female saints of the Middle Ages were legion as well as legend.” At least thirty have been counted. When the miracles started coming, some of these women were even graced with beards.

The common thread in the stories of these cross-dressing saints is that the woman suffers a personal crisis and reinvents herself as a man. In the words of St. Jerome: “As long as a woman is for birth and children she is different from man as body is from soul. But when she wishes to serve Christ more than the world, then she will cease to be a woman, and will be called man."

This is, of course, consistent with the medieval concept of the hierarchy of the universe: God, priest, man, and then, woman, who only reaches God when given permission by the two ahead of her.

The women saints who chose the path of pants were a colorful lot. One, a prostitute, converted to Christianity, changed her name, and dressed as a man. No one discovered her real sex until after her death.

Another, disguised as a monk and accused of fathering a child, refused to expose her true sex in order to prove her innocence. She was expelled from the brotherhood and, still living as a man, raised the child. Seven years later, she was accepted back into the monastery and lived as a man until discovered to be a woman after death. (No reports of who raised the seven year old child after that.)

Yet a third woman, prohibited from joining the monastery, dressed as a man so successfully that she was elected an abbot of the house. Then, accused of rape, she revealed her identity and proved her innocence by baring her breasts in the middle of the court before her father. (Freud, had he lived in medieval times, would have had a field day with that one. I have visions of the monks repeating this tale with relish over cognac and cigars after dinner.)

No male saints, apparently, felt it necessary to don a skirt to grow closer to God. Then, as now, it was more acceptable for a woman to don pants than the other way around.

That is not to imply that it was accepted. The book of Deuteronomy stated "The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man” and medieval audiences took that literally. When Joan of Arc was condemned to death for heresy, her mode of dress was a key issue at her trial. Yet unlike so many of her fellow saints, Joan didn’t pretend to be a man. She just thought that riding astride at the head of an army was easier without a skirt in the way.

Of course, she was right, something even Thomas Aquinas, himself a saint, understood. He knew it was “sinful for a woman to wear man's clothes, or vice versa, especially since this may be a cause of sensuous pleasure.” But he allowed a pass under certain circumstances, stating that it might not be a sin if done “on account of some necessity, either in order to hide oneself from enemies, or through lack of other clothes, or for some similar motive."

And there are examples aplenty of such motives, such as ease and safety when traveling. There are also examples of women who dressed as men in order to save a husband’s life. Two such German tales tell of the wife disguising herself as a man to visit her imprisoned husband, who faces execution because he committee adultery. Dressed as a man, the wife then switches clothes with him and he escapes, leaving her in prison. (This is lauded as the epitome of wifely virtue. Twentieth century women can only ask What was she thinking?) In court, she reveals all, again, yes, by baring her breasts.

There are reports of women dressing as men during the Pre-Lenten carnival and sneaking into a monastery, though no report on what they did once inside. While this all sounds like good, Mardi Gras fun, the reality could be quite different. In Nuremberg, Germany, in 1481, a woman was put into the basement prison for her offense, presumably the standard punishment.

Earlier, the city had banished a woman for nine years because she “walked about in manly ways and wore man’s clothes.” Banishment was the lighter punishment under consideration. The other option was to bury her alive. Of course, this woman was also accused of “permitting her brothers and cousins to have sex with her,” so that might have been the burying offense.

But wait, you say. Were there no men who felt the need to cavort in women’s garb? Well, yes, there were. There are reliable accounts of Franciscan friars escaping the monastery, dressed as woman, to run through the streets. In Women and Gender in Medieval Europe, Margaret Shaus calls the practice “ubiquitous.” It tended to happen, however, during holiday celebrations, the Feast of Misrule or the Pre-Lenten carnivals, when it was practiced by “ebullient, usually youthful, male revelers.”

Exactly the type you would find in a university hostel.

At the University of Paris, those in charge complained that “Priests and clerks…dance in the choir dressed as women, or disreputable men, or minstrels.” There are repeated prohibitions by University governance bodies against loud singing and playing of music, dancing in the streets, and dramatics. The regularity of these pronouncements suggests their ineffectiveness. Then, as now, copious quantities of alcohol were necessary to higher education, and likely contributed to frolicking in the streets in various states of dress.

In discussing cross-dressing, I have not explored sexual preferences or gender identity.

There is a reliable report of a man at Oxford, who called himself Eleanor and worked as a prostitute. He was accused of practicing the “abominable vice” with “three unsuspecting scholars.” It is not clear from the records whether these “unsuspecting” innocents knew his sex at the time. They reportedly visited him “in the marsh,” so they may not have disrobed, but they also visited “Eleanor” often.

Often enough to know?

That, we will leave to the mists of history.

I hope you enjoyed this look backward at an “undressed” part of history and welcome your comments and thoughts.

Sources for this post include: Clothes Make the Man: Female Cross dressing in the Middle Ages, by Valerie R. Hotchkiss; From Boys to Men, Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe, Ruth Mazo Karras; Vested Interests: Cross Dressing and Cultural Anxiety, Marjorie B. Barber; The Cambridge companion to medieval women’s writing, Dinshaw and Wallace; Women and Gender in Medieval Europe, Margaret Shaus; Obscenity: Social Control and Artistic Creation in the European Middle Ages, Jan Ziolkowski; The Seekers: The story of man’s continuing quest to understand his world, Daniel Joseph Boorstin; A Female University Student in Late Medieval Kraków, by Michael H. Shank, published in Signs, Vol. 12, No. 2, Reconstructing the Academy, Winter, 1987, pp. 373-380, and Wickepedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-dressing,_sexuality,_and_gender_identity_of_Joan_of_Arc#cite_note-6.org/wiki/Cross-dressing,_sexuality,_and_gender_identity_of_Joan_of_Arc#cite_note-6)
Picture of Joan of Arc, public domain, from Centre Historique des Archives Nationales, Paris, AE II 2490

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Author Bio: BLYTHE GIFFORD (http://www.blythegifford.com/)is the author of a four medieval romances from Harlequin Historical, three of which feature characters born on the wrong side of the royal blanket. Her September release from Harlequin Historical line is IN The MASTER’s BED. When not nurturing her first love, writing historical romance, she feeds her muse with art, music, history, long walks, good food and good friends.

(Cover Art used by arrangement with Harlequin Enterprises Limited. All rights reserved ®and T are trademarks of Harlequin Enterprises Limited and/or its affiliated companies, used under license.)

Kreativ Blogger Award!

Wow! I had a lovely surprise in my inbox today :) Romance author, Emily Bryan sent me this very colorful blog award along with a couple rules about accepting it. I have to share my favorite 7 things and then pass the award along to 7 other blogs. So here are my 7 Favorite Things in no particular order:

1. History! Without a doubt, I love all facets of history, and can be completely arrested by documentaries, museums, books, blogs, and so much more. If it's historically related, I'm there!

2. Writing! Obviously I love writing :) Whether I'm writing a story, an article or a blog, the act of writing is very enjoyable for me.

3. Reading! I'm a huge fan of reading. Luckily my hubby shares my love of reading, and we've passed it along to our children as well.

4. Romance! Real life romance, books, movies, I just love--love!

5. My Husband! He's my rock, my man :)

6. My children! My joy!

7. Music! I love to play music, dance to music, listen to music...

Now I get the joy of paying this award forward! Here are seven blogs I find worthy of a Kreativ Blog Award, in no particular order:

1. Mama Writers - Raising kids, writing romance! Need I say more?

2. Seduced by History - A fabulous blog of historical romance authors blogging on history.

3. Chicks of Characterization - Introducing us to tons of romantic stories and authors all the time!

4. Fierce Romance - An author group blog, writing advice, fun stories, inspiration and so much more!

5. Romance University - This is a great blog with guest authors, editors, experts etc... An awesome stop for writers, authors and readers.

6. The Pen and Muse - Book reviews, guest authors, and advice on things from writing to technology!

7. Romance Roundtable - Guest authors and writers sharing their works, inspirations and advice on writing romance!

Thank you again to Emily!!!

What are your favorite blogs to visit?

Guest Blogger Carol Goss on Potent Potables of the Regency Bon Ton

Please join me in welcoming Carol Goss to History Undressed! Today she'll be discussing the very exciting and interesting topic of drinks--aka Potent Potables--in Regency England.

Take it away Carol!

Hello Everyone. I'm Carol Goss, and I hope you'll find this topic as useful in your reading and your writing as I have.

Have you ever wondered why so many scenes in Regency novels involve the imbibing of alcoholic drinks and what those drinks really are? Well, let's see if we can answer those questions.

The first question often asked is, "Why don't they drink water?" The answer is, "Water could be and often was deadly." Deadly? Dead Right!

Especially in towns and cities, the water was polluted as the rivers and streams from which the water was drawn were also the city's or town's sewers. London was especially bad in this regard with its huge population only increasing the pollution of the Thames. In the country, animals drank from and defecated in streams, so those waters often were polluted as well. Even my Sicilian grandfather, though he moved to the United States in the late 1800s, wouldn't drink water. He only drank wine. When offered clean city water after arriving in Detroit, he rejected it emphatically, saying in Sicilian, "Water is for washing, not drinking."

It wasn't until the middle of the Victorian period that sanitation became a public concern and drinkable water became available in developed nations. In fact, many current scientists believe one reason so many children died in earlier times was that whatever they drank was often made with unboiled water.

If a child did manage to reach adulthood, what did that adult drink? The answer is tea, coffee, occasionally hot chocolate – all made, you realize, with boiled water – and alcoholic libations. What were those libations? That depended on what class of society you inhabited. The working classes drank ale and beer if they could afford it and "blue ruin" if they could not. "Blue ruin" is Regency slang for gin. Gin was cheap to make and thus cheap to buy. Often, to make more profit, the distillers adulterated the gin intended for the poor with dangerous additives so it was even cheaper to make and sell. It got the name "blue ruin" because it ruined so many lives and caused so many deaths - as did its equivalent during 1920's Prohibition, bathtub gin.

As for the bon ton, the upper class of Regency society, their potent potables were many for the gentlemen, fewer for the ladies.

Fortified wines were especially prized because the addition of brandy to the wines made them much easier to ship and gave them a longer cellar life than non-fortified wines.

Ladies would drink wine with meals and occasionally drank sherry, a fortified wine that, after fermentation, has brandy added to it which helps preserve the drink. Sherry was and is still considered a wine and thus suitable for the ladies. Sometimes this drink is referred to as "sack" or "Canary" for the Canary Islands where much of the sherry originated.

As for the alcoholic drinks of Regency gentlemen, they had many choices. The two most used in novels are brandy and port. These also seem to have been the most common daily thirst-quenchers for gentlemen during this period though men also drank wine with meals and on other occasions.

When a Regency dinner was over, the servants cleared the table. The women then withdrew to the (with)drawing room for tea while the men stayed at the table, drank port and talked. Port starts with wine which, halfway through fermentation, has brandy added. The port is then put into barrels and aged. Because the brandy stops fermentation, port has more sugar left in the wine and thus a higher alcohol content than sherry. This seems to be the reason it was considered a man's drink rather than a lady's.

Brandy is made by distilling wine and storing it in wooden barrels or casks. This was a man's drink and came in various forms depending on what was used to make the original wine and how that was distilled. Cognac is a well-known type of brandy as is Calvados, which is made with apples and Grand Marnier, which is made with oranges. Men of the ton drank brandy as their usual daily drink or while in their offices handling estate affairs as we might drink water or coffee and with their friends or at their clubs the way we might drink cocktails or mixed drinks. Clubs, however, offered many types of alcoholic drinks.

One drink not often mentioned in Regency novels, but definitely popular in Britain, especially after the Napoleonic Wars, was champagne which, by the way, did not originate in France. Champagne was an accident. British wine enthusiasts who could afford it bought barrels of still wine from Champagne, France. However, those expensive barrels could go bad rather quickly. So these rich men added a little brandy and put the wine in bottles. Later, it was discovered that also adding sugar to the bottle would start a second round of fermentation and - Voila – the still wine became a sparkling wine. The process transferred to France after that. Those French winemakers weren't about to lose the profit on a sparkling wine they could make themselves. One of the most famous producers of champagne in the early 1800's was a woman, Barbe-Nicole Clicquot, referred to as the Widow Clicquot because she took over the family winery when her husband died. It was Madame Clicquot who worked to get the tiny bubbles we associate with champagne. She hated the large bubbles that had been in the wine before; in fact, she referred to them as "toad's eyes". She also helped design the riddling rack which is used to move sediment to the neck of the bottle where it can be removed, thus giving us that clear wine with the sparkling bubbles we so prize today.

In his recent book, The Widow Clicquot, Tilar Mazzeo described how she managed to get 10,000 bottles of her high-proof 1811 Veuve Cliccquot past the British blockade of France to Konigsberg where it sold for what would be today $100 a bottle. When the British and Prussians celebrated their first defeat of Napoleon in 1814, they toasted each other in Mme. Clicquot's champagne. Even Napoleon said, "In victory, you deserve champagne; in defeat, you need it." After the Napoleonic Wars, British men ordered Mme. Clicquot's champagne at their clubs by asking for "the Widow". In short, champagne became the wine of celebration we are so fond of today.

There were other drinks that were popular in the Regency as well. Claret is a British term for the wine Americans call Bordeaux. Samuel Johnson, the famous Georgian lexicographer, said, "Claret is the liquor of boys, port of men; but he who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy." Another favorite was Marsala, a fortified wine from Sicily that is similar to port. Madeira was also popular, especially Malmsey which is the sweetest version of Madeira. This is also a fortified wine and keeps a long time, even in warm climates, which made it popular even later in Victorian times as the song of seduction, "Have some Madeira, m'dear" so clearly illustrates.

You're probably asking yourself "Where is the whiskey?" Well, most whiskey in the Regency was illegally made in Scotland, where it is spelled whisky and Ireland where it is spelled whiskey.

As punishment for the Scots and Irish rebellions against the Crown, exorbitant taxes were imposed on the production of whiskey and on the stills to make it, for whiskey is a distilled liquor of high alcoholic content. Also, the English, especially those of the upper classes, tended to view the Scots and Irish as barbaric. As you can imagine, this led to thousands of illegal stills and to the smuggling of whiskey for over a century. Thus whiskey did not become a regular British drink until the Victorian period

The only upper class British who might have regularly imbibed that illegal whisky during the Regency would have been the Marcher Lords whose estates bordered Scotland and who often had ties with the Scots dating far back in history. It wasn't until 1823 that the British government passed an act allowing legal stills for a license fee. This led to whiskey, however spelled, making its way into the homes and clubs of the English ton.

I hope you found this discussion interesting and helpful. Thanks for reading. All comments are welcome.

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Sources: Wikipedia; winereviewonline.com; princeofpinot.com; vinography.com;
nytimes.com/2008/12/28/books/review/Stern-t.html; The Widow Clicquot by Tilar J. Mazzeo, Collins/HarperCollins Publishers.

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Carol's Bio:

Carol Jo Kachmar, who writes as Carol Goss, comes by her knowledge through a voracious love of reading. By age ten, she'd discovered Elizabeth Bennett and Jane Eyre. Those feisty heroines sparked her lifelong love of romance, the Regency, and, of course, England. These passions led to years of teaching English literature and history, both in England itself and in America.

This recent finalist in Beau Monde's Royal Ascot contest now writes while overlooking her own creek and pond in Michigan and being cheered on by her loving, supportive husband and cheered up by three lively but spoiled cats.