Katherine Keenum

I suppose I could save this for next year's February 14th post, but, nah—it's too much fun to hold back! While transcribing a late 19th C letter from Virginia today, I came across a reference to "Valentine's meat juice." An internet search immediately turned up an Atlas Obscura article on the very thing—turns out to be a tonic made of juices extracted from meat cooked at a low temperature to retain the structure of proteins. Isn't that an excellent detail for historical fiction? Or the little brown, pear-shaped bottles could lend themselves to stories about junk dealers or children inventing magic potions to go in one they'd found. Any other ideas?

Blog post alert: For those of you who follow a traditional calendar, this is the ninth day of Christmas. You'll be pleased by a few last glimpses of a delicious interior from Amy Merrick at Dennis Severs' House. And for those of you who think about writing historical fiction, Lucinda Douglas Menzies' photographs of the house are lovely help to visualizing the chiaroscuro of a pre-20th C winter. No wonder ghost stories are a part of the season!

Over the years I've enjoyed collecting images to illustrate terms and allusions in Greer Gilman's Moonwise. For this year's reading, it was "Who'll dig his grave? I said, the owl," which comes from The Death and Burial of Cock Robin. What specially tickled me was discovering the Cock Robin Card Game published by Mcloughlin Brothers in the latter part of the 19th C. In brief, players first have to correctly identify the verse that goes with a picture or vice versa. Then when all the cards have been identified, the rules turn it into a sociable party game of forfeits. Right there historical fiction writers have a use for the tidbit.

 Read More 

Blog post alert: Picturing Children's Food in Early Modern Europe at the Folger Shakespeare Library's website contains an image pertinent to my earlier query about illustrations of girl's education. This is late Renaissance, not late medieval, but still full of details about clothes and activities for historical-fiction writers to mine. Image via the Metropolitan Museum.

My favorite book dedication is Rudyard Kiplings for Plain Tales from the Hills: "To the wittiest woman in India." Now it has a close runner-up, Natasha Pulley's in The Half Life of Valery K: "For Claire, Larry, and Jacob, who put up with me telling them pointless facts about nuclear physics for the whole of lockdown." The rest of the novel is terrific, too—I only wish it weren't frighteningly apt at a time when jitters about the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine are all too real.

 Read More 

Accounts of medieval windows generally focus on stained glass, and no wonder—they're very beautiful. But, of course, not all windows were tinted. Recently, I came across a complicated allegorical frontispiece on fol.1r of a French Mirror of History. Half the picture depicts a church being built with various kings, saints, and biblical figures as craftsmen—including these two monks. They grabbed my attention because I had never seen a depiction of glaziers installing windows.

 Read More 

Hamlet muses, "I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space—were it not that I have bad dreams." But what about good dreams? A History Blog post on a 16th C prayer bead prompts the question, How could a two-inch sphere that opens to an intricately carved interior be used in a story?

 Read More 

When I looked up the word bewilderment in the OED to see when it was first used, I was startled by an 1884 citation to a novel by Willian Black called Judith Shakespeare. Yep, there really is one about William Shakespeare's daughter. It was first serialized in Harper's Magazine, vol. LXVIII, with illustrations by Edwin Austin Abbey.  I took a look at the text and decided its Prithee style of historical fiction wasn't for me (nor its likely Victorian attitude toward women). Nevertheless, I'm still amused that it exists and enjoy Abbey's illustrations. For two more pictures from Judith Shakespeare, click here and here. For more of Abbey's work, including paintings, click here.

Blog post alert: Friends, Romans, historical fiction writers, and history buffs, lend me your ears—and eyes and noses! VR bus drives back in time through ancient Rome gives you a taste of technology put to the task of immersing tourists in a real bus ride that takes passengers through an opt-in virtual reality that includes narrative, GPS-guided imagery, and wafts of smell. Screenshot via YouTube.

I'm reading The Universal History of Numbers by Georges Ifrah a few pages at a time. If you were like me, you had an elementary school teacher who reprimanded students who used fingers to count; but really it's a good way to reinforce understanding. Moreover, finger-counting has been used in remarkably complicated systems for calculations by many cultures over millennia. Ifrah illustrates one discussion with an image based on this early Renaissance painting of the 6th C philosopher and mathematician, Boethius, which is part of a fresco on the north wall of the Ducal Palace in Urbino. The portrait set me thinking that it would be worthwhile to pay attention to Finger Counting and Hand Diagrams in medieval illuminations in order to read them correctly.

 Read More