Interview with Frances Mayes

From Victoria:

I’m no expert; I’ve written only two novels. Most of my books are nonfiction, which is so much easier for me. No plot necessary! You write what happens, as well as you can. I started both novels with a general idea, not an outline. I learned as I proceeded, letting myself go down discursive paths if they appeared. Unless you’ve written one, you can have no idea how deeply tracked in your psyche a story is. How to keep all the subterranean working aloft in the narrative is the skill you must learn. I enjoyed writing my second novel so much. By then, I let the characters have free reign. I liked them and was not going to let anything bad happen to them. They’d had their share of sorrow. In my pages, they could soar. Writing is a rich life, the life of the imagination, of possibility. To create something where there was nothing—well, that’s the joyous root of any artist’s life. (Read more.)

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Women and the Protestant Reformation

From Catholic World Report:

For much of the past 500 years, to the extent that anyone bothered to think or talk about women and the Reformation, the assumption was that since the Reformation improved everyone’s lives, then women’s lives were made far better as well. Luther and other Reformers had profound, deep, and violence-inducing differences, but since they all seemed to prioritize the “freedom of the Christian” in opposition to the rules-and-works mentality of the prison of medieval Catholicism, that must mean that everyone was better off (because they were more “free”) after 1517—and “everyone” includes women, does it not? No longer forced into convents against their will, no longer told that marriage was an inferior state, and now encouraged to read the Bible in their own languages, the lot of the post-Reformation woman must have been an improvement over what her grandmothers had suffered.

The first problem we run up against in this scenario is the Reformers’ definition of “Christian freedom” and our contemporary understanding of their understanding. Whether their understanding was an accurate, truly biblically-based one is a matter for theologians. Whether their sense of it was anything even close to what we think “freedom” is, even interior freedom, is doubtful: ask Anabaptist Felix Manz, executed by drowning for his beliefs by order of the Reform-controlled Zurich council in 1527, barely a decade after the movement began and just a few years after Luther published his On the Freedom of the Christian. 

Setting that aside, we can turn to the question of women’s actual lives. The impact of the Protestant Reformation on women was profound. In some senses nothing changed: nothing Luther or the other reformers said questioned basic, traditional, medieval Catholic assumptions about human anthropology or the roles of men and women in marriage. What did change was something else, but something quite simple, and with profound implications: Luther and the other Reformers went to war against the evangelical counsels as ideals, and especially as the core of a vowed way of life. This type of life and spirituality was no longer an ideal; marriage and domesticity—might we call it the domestic church?—was. 

The Reformation was, of course, a diverse and constantly evolving phenomenon. Common to the entire movement, however, was this conviction that vowed, celibate religious life as an ideal was non-scriptural, unnatural, harmful, led to sin and hypocrisy, and must be eliminated, supplanted by another model of ideal Christian life: the individual, saved by faith alone, dwelling productively in the community as believer, spouse, and parent. 

The strongest symbol of this non-biblical ideal of virginity was of course, the monastery, so in Reformed lands the closing of male and female religious houses was a top priority, and the Gospel of domesticity was preached and enforced in their stead. Every woman, it was assumed, was meant for marriage, children, and homemaking. Gone was that space—as the convent was—for women to pursue intellectual and artistic pursuits, to provide institutionalized charity, to interact with religious, political, and business interests as leaders of their communities, and—very importantly—to support the community and serve the living and the dead through their once highly valued, now “useless” prayers. 

And so, a survey of the large and continually growing body of research reveals wide agreement that is, in fact, 180 degrees away from the former view of the Reformation’s impact on women as beneficial. “The down side of the peculiarly Protestant ‘good news’ to women,” Lutheran historian Kirsi Stjerna notes, “was the exclusiveness of marriage as the basis for the holy vocation. No other options received a theological blessing. Thus, Reformation theology, generally speaking, enforced the domestication of women. … The domestication of women to the honorable callings of motherhood and marriage, advocated through theological argument, knitted with the Protestants’ valorization of family and marriage as the cornerstones of society, on the one hand, and their reiteration of the Pauline rejection of women teachers and ministers, on the other.” 

In other words, what we are left with in Reformation-dominated lands is a vision of a holy society in which worship is centered on preaching from a literally-interpreted Bible, from which female saints have disappeared, and in which women might no longer envision or live out their spiritual lives in ways unrelated to earthly marriage and family life. They must be connected to a human male in a legal, familial way in order to have social legitimacy, human worth, and a role in the spiritual landscape. (Read more.)

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Medieval Art Revealed

From the Daily Mail:

Incredible medieval church murals not seen since the 16th century have been restored as part of painstaking preservation project. The murals were covered after William Shakespeare's father was ordered to paint over them more than 450 years ago. The colourful murals, thought to be some of the finest in Europe, were covered with limewash in 1563 when John Shakespeare was bailiff of Stratford-Upon-Avon. He was acting on orders from Henry VIII as part of the Protestant Reformation which was a backlash against the Catholic Church. The 16th century Reformation, championed by reformers including the Tudor king and Augustinian monk Martin Luther, saw a huge upheaval in the religion, politics and culture of the day, triggering persecutions and conflicts. (Read more.)

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The Wonder of Santa

From Victoria:

"Christmas was a magical time for our family and the small community I grew up in,” says entrepreneur Bethany Lowe. “Families went for horse-drawn carriage rides, ice-skated together on country ponds, went caroling door-to-door, and built snowmen to greet passers-by.” Lowe, a self-taught folk artist, weaves the spirit of these idyllic holiday memories into the realistic Santa figures that form the foundation for her company, Bethany Lowe Designs. Bethany’s somewhat unexpected career began in the 1980s when she and husband Curt were running a family farming operation and raising four children in their home state of Illinois. Her mother had always encouraged her creative pursuits, so when Midwestern farmers were hard-hit by the country’s economic woes, it was natural for Bethany to turn to art as a means to supplement the family’s income. She began making “country décor” items to sell at home parties, which soon led to juried folk art shows across the country and, eventually, the wholesale market. (Read more.)

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Uther Pendragon

From English Historical Fiction Authors:

The Dark Ages of ancient Britain is an incredibly interesting period of time. We know so much about other times in history, but the Dark Ages is an era where we find few facts handed down to us. There are many stories, poems and myths, and many of these refer to the shadowy figures of Uther Pendragon and his far more infamous son Arthur. There are many people that would love to find proof of King Arthur’s existence; he is a figure that looms large in the imagination, and yet that proof continues to remain elusive. Uther, however, appears more often in the few written accounts that have survived as a man that actually lived, a man who may possibly have drawn the tribes of Britain together when it was needed most.

To set the scene for when the Pendragons may… or may not have existed, we have to take into account that the term Dark Ages refers to the long period of time which started several decades before the Western Roman Empire fell in AD 476 and lasted to the beginning of the Renaissance period, which was around AD1300.

These dark ages were a time of little or no law and order, when civilisation, the written word and record keeping were at a very low point. Britain and most of Europe was in turmoil as the rule of Rome dissolved, all of which leaves modern scholars somewhat ‘in the dark’ as they search for their solid facts. Many of these ‘almost’ facts, these stories and tales of battles, the struggles of leaders and kings, were handed down verbally through generations as people sat around their fires and entertained each other with tales during the cold British nights. As they repeated them they changed, so many facts turned into myths. (Read more.)

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Brilliant Spools

From Victoria:

After twenty-three years of flying, Paulette Knight translated her air miles into yards upon yards of ribbon that decorate her San Francisco shop, The Ribbonerie. A former flight attendant for American Airlines during the industry’s fabled golden era, she wandered the arrondissements of Paris between flights, repeatedly drawn to the enchanted trimmings that festoon the city’s candy stores.

“I was a real Francophile and went to France on all my vacations,” says Paulette. “I saw this extraordinary French wired ribbon hanging in the windows, but it was just decoration—you couldn’t get it even if you bought a box of bonbons.” Following successive trips, she happened upon a place that supplied the Paris confiseries and was able to purchase a few coveted satins and grosgrains to take back home. Eventually, her keen eye for embellishment (she was a student of fashion design prior to her jet-setting days) would shift the direction of her career and lead her to a new venture within the French marketplace. (Read more.)

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The History of Early English

From English Historical Fiction Authors:

Two thirds of England’s rivers take their names from ‘Celtic’ words, for example, Avon. We have place names which are a mixture - in the case of Much Wenlock, Much is from Anglo-Saxon mycel, meaning great, Wenlock comes from Celtic wininicas, white area, and the Anglo-Saxon loca, (place.) We have Roman influence, too, with castra (fort), seen in places such as Chester, and Manchester. Of course, the Anglo-Saxons did build forts of their own - burhs, which give Britain all the burgh and borough place names. But the Anglo-Saxons didn’t just come to fight, and/or defend, they also came to stay. They cleared places, to make space for their settlements, and gave us word endings like ley, ly, leay and leigh, which all mean 'clearing'. The Scandinavians followed suit and also added place names - by, booth, and thwaite.

The Normans did add a few of their own - Ashby was given to the de la Zuche family, (giving us Ashby de la Zouche) and Bewdley came from Beau Lieu (beautiful place).

But the Norman-French did not settle in with the same comfort as the Anglo-Saxons and the Scandinavians, nor in the same number. As we saw above, the commoners kept speaking English, which was still evolving, nevertheless, and came to add many French words. (Read more.)

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The Jilted Princess

From Sharon Bennett Connolly:

Joan of England was the oldest of daughter of King John and his 2nd wife, Isabella of Angouleme. Born 10th July 1210 she was the 3rd of 5 children; she had 2 older brothers and 2 younger sisters would join the family by 1215. Even before her birth, she was mooted as a possible bride for Alexander of Scotland, son of King William I of Scotland. A verbal agreement between the 2 kings in 1209 provided for John to arrange the marriages of William’s 2 daughters, with 1 marrying a son of John’s, and Alexander marrying one of John’s daughters. Following the death of William I a further treaty in 1212 agreed to the marriage of 14-year-old Alexander II to 2 year-old Joan. However, the agreement seems to have been made as a way of preventing Alexander from looking to the continent – and especially France – for a potential bride, and by extension allies. (Read more.)

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The Unmatched Discipline of the Prussian Army Under Frederick The Great

From War History Online:

This was the army of the Kingdom of Prussia under the direct command of her king, Frederick II, called Frederick the Great. Frederick was the consummate soldier-king, a great general with many victories – as well as some notable defeats – in his career. His soldiers were the product of a century of sustained and rapid training and development, paralleling the swift expansion of Prussian-controlled territory on the northern European landmass.

Including Frederick, three generations of Prussian kings had given their close attention to military affairs. By the time Frederick II the Great marched at Leuthen, the precision and discipline of his troops was without peer. Even Rome at the height of her ancient power, thought Frederick, could not show so well as this. He rode with his staff in the midst of his cavalry, a powerful figure physically, but dressed without ostentation, with practicality and speed in mind; just a cavalry officer. Messengers rode near him, ready to speed his orders to any point in his army at a moment’s notice.

He was a learned and practiced tactician and strategist. In 1757, Frederick was in his mid-forties, as was his opponent on this early day in December. Upon hearing news of Frederick’s arrival in Silesia Charles had arrayed his huge force in a line facing west. The line stretched fully four miles long from north to south with the hope of guarding against a fast flanking maneuver by the Prussians. Charles’ army outnumbered Frederick’s two-to-one, and they both knew it. (Read more.)

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