Toxic Beauty
The Associated Press reported this story two days ago: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1236916/Dying-look-good-French-kings-mistress-killed-gold-elixir-youth.html A mistress of the French King Henry II died from her beauty regime which involved drinking liquid gold, designed to prolong her youthful allure. The story reads: “The French court believed gold harnessed the power of the Sun, which would be transferred to the drinker. Alchemists often acted as apothecaries and prescribed solutions made up of gold chloride and diethyl ether.” This, of course, is hardly the first instance of toxic beauty regimens. The modern Botox injection or silicon breast implant are only two examples, but both women and men have harmed themselves–not always unknowingly–throughout history. Galena, for example, or lead sulfide, a toxic substance, has been used in kohl since ancient Egypt. This site talks about the use of lead in Ancient Rome: http://www.epa.gov/history/topics/perspect/lead.htm “Lead was a key component in Read more…
Time Travel part II
In terms of modern inventions that could be implemented in the Middle Ages, with the available technology, there are two which seemed most likely to make a difference to medieval people. The first was simple sterilization: washing hands, submersing implements and wounds in alcohol, and boiling. Just taking these precautions could decrease rates of infections as well as keeping mothers who would have otherwise died of childbed fever alive. The second is gunpowder, or rather, ‘black powder’, which is its earlier incarnation. It is made of charcoal, sulfur, and potassium nitrate or saltpeter (found, for example, in bat guano). It had actually been invented by the mide 1200s, but wasn’t put to broad use in Europe until the mid-1300s, when it was being made on a broad scale for the English crown. To return to 1282 Wales, then, and be able produce Read more…
Twilight of Avalon Video
Anna Elliott, who posted on this blog not long ago, has just released a video for her book Twilight of Avalon, the first in a trilogy. The next book, Dark Moon of Avalon will appear in May 2010. In the meantime, enjoy her video and buy her book! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpj6WItY_Qc Twilight of Avalon: She is a healer, a storyteller, a warrior, and a queen without a throne. In the shadow of King Arthur’s Britain, one woman knows the truth that could save a kingdom from the hands of a tyrant… Ancient grudges, old wounds, and the quest for power rule in the newly widowed Queen Isolde’s court. Hardly a generation after the downfall of Camelot, Isolde grieves for her slain husband, King Constantine, a man she secretly knows to have been murdered by the scheming Lord Marche — the man who Read more…
Wisdom Teeth
Although within fiction and movies, there is a sense that hygiene was poor and few people lived into adulthood with all their teeth intact, people did care for their teeth in the Middle Ages. Herbs and mouthwashes existed that allowed people to do so: http://www.gallowglass.org/jadwiga/herbs/teeth.html At the same time, it is certainly true that tooth extraction was extremely common, and probably one of the few means of dealing with a rotten tooth. http://www.ada.org/public/resources/history/timeline_midlage.asppeople If people didn’t care for their teeth, they lost them, as the following image clearly indicates (copyright to the British Library Board). I’ve been rereading Ellis Peters’ Brother Cadfael series. These books are a joy to read, if only because Peters is a master of her craft and it is enjoyable to note how beautifully she strings words together. But she also writes about an area of the Read more…
Medieval Days of the week 1100-1500 AD
I just discoverd a web page (http://www.medievalgenealogy.org.uk/cal/medcal.shtml) where some hearty soul has calculated the dates/days of the week from 1100-1500 AD. Thus, for the book I’m writing now, I discovered that 11 December 1282 was a Friday. It was also the 3rd day before the Ides, which was a Roman way of figuring the days. The Roman calendar was originally based on the first three phases of the moon, with days counted backwards from lunar phases. The new moon was the day of the Kalends, the moon’s first quarter was the day of the Nones, and the Ides fell on the day of the full moon. (Thus, Julius Caesar was murdered on the Ides of March, or March 15) December 11th was the Feast day St. Damasus, who commissioned the translation of the Bible from Greek to Latin in 366 AD. Read more…
National Novel Writing Month
Yay! NaNoWriMo is one of the most insane-yet-exhilerating things I’ve done, certainly as a writer. Maybe as a person. Writing 50,000 words in a month is a lot. This year, I did it the smart way and paced myself. Last year, I wrote 15,000 words in four days, gave up on the book as a lost cause and abandoned it for 2 1/2 weeks, and then picked it up again with only 6 days to go. Fortunately, those 6 days occurred over Thanksgiving, which we spent at my sister-in-law’s house. You know the part about how you wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving, and then bolt your food to go hide in the corner and be anti-social so you can write? That was my tactic last year. This year, I didn’t sign up the day before the contest started, I actually Read more…
Dark Age and Medieval Armor
The Arthurian knight in plate mail, jousting on his horse, is the classic image of a medieval knight, but is totally inaccurate. Armor has evolved over time and that plate mailed knight was a relatively late development in the evolution of warfare. Dark Age warriors wore a range of leather and chain mail armor, properly referred to as simply ‘mail’. This was standard for the next five hundred years, until the gradual shift to plate mail during the fourteenth century, particularly for high status warriors. From: http://historymedren.about.com/library/weekly/aa041500a.htm “The construction of mail was begun by hammering a sheet of metal very thin and flat. The sheet would then be cut into narrow strips, and each strip would be wound around an iron mandrel or rod. (Later, when the technique of drawing wire was developed, soft iron wire would be used instead.) The wound wire or strips Read more…
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