June 16th, 2009
HOW MEDIEVAL CAN YOU BE IN A MEDIEVAL MYSTERY NOVEL? Not
very, is the answer that first springs to mind. The disparities of
perception, behavior, and language between medieval times and now seem
to make it impossible for a fiction author to be true to the time and
yet accessible to modern readers. Yet why set a story in another time
if not to explore and experience the otherness of that time? Certainly
some authors prefer to do the Middle Ages "on the cheap", as only an
excuse to parade characters around in fancy-dress -- the "Mary Jane
visits the Castle" syndrome. They establish they're writing about the
Middle Ages by trotting out the cliches -- filth (preferably dung but
mud will do); hanging, drawing, and quartering and/or heads on pikes;
general brutality; the (inevitable) Black Death -- and there you have
The Middle Ages, with everyone waiting for the Renaissance to happen so
they can have a bath and be civilized. (This presupposes a vast
ignorance of the Renaissance, but that's another matter). But
suppose an author wants to deal honestly with a fictional medieval
setting -- to have the characters in a story exist in something other
than a crowd of cliches? Perhaps first among the problems of doing so
is language. A book written in medieval prose style would sorely try
the general reader, but to write a story with purely modern vocabulary
is a vast falsification. In my own novels, set in England in the early
1400s, I try to keep most of my vocabulary pre-1500. For example,
"nervous" meant something different in the 1400s, so when writing of a
“nervous” man I found medieval ways to describe him rather than the
modern word. Or did a word exist at all in medieval England? Take
“blackmail” – a Scottish word, first noted in the early 1500s. But
blackmail was surely done in medieval England -- and it was. As
“extortion”. Trying to hold to medieval vocabulary provides me
with an insight into the time and keeps me from imposing alien concepts
on the characters while giving readers a subtle sense of being there instead of here, of being then
instead of now. Likewise, a simple twist of sentence structure -- "It
must needs be done as soon as might be.” – is easily understood but
gives the feel of someone speaking somewhen other than the 21st century. Then
there is setting. Modern-set novels don't usually start along the lines
of, "Here in the early 21st century, the air reeking of automobile
exhaust, people dying of AIDS by the thousands, political scandals at
every turn..." because we know we don't frame our everyday lives with a
constant litany of horrors. Most of our days are ordinary days, and
much of late medieval English life was surely the same -- ordinary days
lived in ordinary ways. Since I write mystery novels, something
troublesome is going to occur in the course of the story, but around
that trouble, I write of medieval life going its everyday ways, with
the characters thinking, reacting, moving, and perceiving within the
parameters of their time, not ours. A woman may be of independent mind
-- that's perfectly medieval -- but should not wield modern feminist
attitudes. The hero may be a bold thinker but as a follower of, say,
Duns Scotus or John Wycliffe, not as an Existentialist. Modern
attitudes, from cleanliness to warfare to religion to sex, do not belong in a medieval novel. For
instance, class structure was as normal as air to medieval people and
informed everyone’s behavior. It should likewise inform the behavior of
characters in a story without it being an issue
unless the issue is specific to the story. Nor is there need to make
elaborate point of what were ordinary, everyday ways of behaving. When
sleeping arrangements are dealt with in a story, for instance, the
reality that most people did not sleep privately should be part of the
narrative flow, not an occasion for pining for privacy -- unless
privacy is needed to commit a murder of course. At the same time
a balance needs to be kept between creating the medieval world for the
reader and over-creating it. There must be details enough to move the
reader into the place and time without gratuitous minutiae -- details
thrown in just because the author knows them. To say of a moment in a
nunnery “… a settled quiet. A sway of skirts along stone floors, the
muted scuff of soft leather soles on the stairs...” presents how the
women are dressed and something of the setting and its sounds. To
describe how the soft-soled shoes are made of well-tanned leather, with
low-cut tops, laced rather than buttoned, and bought in quantity from a
cordwainer in Banbury last St. Ursula’s day is unnecessary. Unless, of
course, the cordwainer and his shoes are going to figure in the plot. But
what of medieval elements not easily clear to the general reader?
What’s to be made of “a breach of the assize of ale”? Happily, context
or a parenthetical phrase can make most things clear. “Bess Underbush
had been fined two pence for breach of the assize of ale, having begun
to sell a brewing before the village’s ale taster had had chance to
taste and pass it according to the rules of ale for sale.” Enough
information for a reader to feel they understand what's going on; not
enough to slow the story's forward momentum. Ninety percent of
what I research for a book is never overtly used, but it informs what I
/do/ use -- and what I don’t, because knowing what couldn't be in a
medieval setting is as important as knowing what could. Which brings up
the on-going problem of what we simply don't know. There is where
extrapolation from the known to the likely takes place. Prolonged
speculation on the seating of jurors for a manorial court can come down
to merely, “... the benches had been shifted end-on to the rood screen
to serve the cour ... with space left between them for the court’s
business to be done...” And then, beyond books and speculation,
there's the physical experiencing of what remains from medieval times.
Not merely cathedrals and castles, but landscapes and the houses of
ordinary people and their clothing and artifacts. It alters
perception to stand in a medieval hall and feel how differently the
space relates to a modern living room; to go up and down the narrow,
steep twist of a wooden medieval stairway; to be in a peasant house
when a waft of damp wind through the wood slats of the window drifts
the fire's woodsmoke into your face. And I promise you that a few days
spent wimpled and veiled and in a floor-length gown makes it very clear
how differently life is lived and work is done in such clothing. Or
consider the difference in daily wearing a dagger slung from your hip
as casually as you pick up a briefcase on your way out of the house. This
on-going attempt to write as true to the times as possible has caused
me to think my way more deeply into late medieval England than I would
have done otherwise, to step away from the cliches and look at the
world as people then would have seen it, rather than how we see it here
and now. So, to hark back to "How medieval can you be in medieval
mystery novel?" -- if a fiction author has a will to move into the
medieval mind and world, a devotion to the very much research needed to
make that possible, and the skill to keep careful balance between being
true to the times and accessible to modern readers -- then, yes, you
can be very medieval, even in a novel. But why bother at all? For
me, the answer to that is that to live only inside one's own particular
time and shape of space and thought, is to live impaired in sight and
understanding. To be able to see with other eyes, to think -- even
peripherally or for a bare few moments -- in another's mind, to feel
with another set of feelings than our familiar everyday ones, is to
grow, to stretch our limits of individuality a little larger, to reach
our minds a little farther, to open our perception of our world and
selves a little wider. And that, surely, is not a bad thing by any reckoning. This article appeared in the Medieval Academy News, Fall 2005. | 
