Christmas Contest for Yet Another Duplicate Book!

I just finished holding a contest over on my sister blog, JDP NEWS, and it hardly seems fair that I should neglect you, my faithful Medieval Research with Joyce followers, from a Christmas contest of your own. Fortunately for you, I have rounded up...yes!...another duplicate book from my medieval  library!

This one is called A Medieval Herbal. It is a small gift book size (5" X 6.5"), hard bound, and to quote from the back cover blurb: "With lavish period illustrations and engaging lore from authentic botanical texts, A Medieval Herbal offers a fascinating glimpse into the traditional art of herbal healing." (See my prior post on Gift Books for more information.)

From what I can tell on Amazon, this book is out of print, so this isn't something you'd have the good fortune of stumbling across in a bookstore, like I did several years ago!

How can you enter to win a copy of this book? It's Christmas time, we're all busy, so I'm going to keep this one simple! Simply leave a comment on this blog telling me why you'd like to win this book. AND either include your email address with your comment so I can contact you if you win, or if you'd rather keep that personal, email me your email address (mailing address are good, too!) to jdipastena@yahoo.com, with "Medieval Research with Joyce Contest" in the subject line. Deadline for entering will be midnight PST, December 24th, with the winner announced on December 25--Christmas Day!

Don't Overlook the Value of Gift Books

I'm talking small (5" X 6.5"-ish), hardbound, beautifully illustrated little books you'll find, not in the history section of your bookstores, but in the "gift section"-- if you're lucky enough to stumble across such a book and if your favorite bookstore has such a section. These are mostly books I've discovered "accidentally", for you never know when they will appear and often it does feel like pure "luck" to be in the right place at the right time just as one of these little jewels is available. For that is how I view these books, as "jewels" in my research collection.

Many of these "jewels" come in the form of A Book of Days. Two such examples in my collection are:

Medieval Lovers: A Book of Days and Medieval Gardens: A Book of Days. Both of these books are filled with reproductions of contemporary medieval paintings, tapestries, etc. These reproductions "show", rather than "tell", what life was like during this period. But there is "telling", too! "Telling" in the form of contemporary quotes, whether medieval verses about love (in Medieval Lovers) or medieval advice about gardening (in Medieval Gardens). The lovely thing in both cases is that the text accompanying the pictures is "contemporary". We hear the medieval voice itself on these subjects!

A Medieval Herbal also contains contemporary medieval pictures and text, but this one is not a Book of Days. This gift book contains a modern introduction, followed by short medieval treatises on a variety of herbs, such as betony, fennel, marigold, wormwood, and many, many more. There are also sections on "In the Wood", "The Seven Herbes That Have Great Vertue", "In the Monastery Garden", "Gathering Herbs", "Drying and Storing", and "In a Pleasure Garden".

Last, but very much not least in my gift book collection, is Love and Longing in the Age of Chivalry. This is my smallest jewel of all, at only 4.5" X 5.5". It varies from the books mentioned above in that the artwork is a combination of contemporary medieval art and Pre-Raphaelite paintings. (If you're unfamiliar with the Pre-Raphaelite painters, then you are in for a treat. Click here to read about the Pre-Raphaelite painters and here to see examples of their paintings.) The text is also a mixture of medieval poets (Chrétien de Troyes, Bernard de Ventadour, Chaucer, etc), and more modern poets, such as Sir Thomas Mallory and John Donne. The former far outnumber the latter, however, once again giving you plenty of opportunities to sample the medieval "voice" in  matters of love!

Now for the bad news. Many of these "jewels" in my collection now seem to be out of print. Most have used copies available on Amazon, however, so there is hope for some of you to track down copies of your own. (And Google searches can usually help you find other buying options, too.) The lesson? If you are fortunate enough to happen across one of these little gift books, run, don't walk, with it to the cash register! If you delay, thinking you can come back and buy it just any old time, it not only might be gone when you come back, it might be out of print!

And the good news? Once again, I just happen to have a duplicate copy of one of these books in my research library. To find out how you can win a copy of A Medieval Herbal, click here.

Medieval Gardens, Part II: medieval healing

In my last post, I demonstrated how you can build a medieval garden for your characters with the help of the book, Medieval English Gardens, by Teresa McLean. Today, I’d like to share another useful function of this book.

In addition to wanting a garden for my heroine to enjoy in Loyalty’s Web, I also wanted her to have some healing skills. Not the “mystical” kind, but the “practical” kind. And for that, I needed to know something about the healing abilities of plants that were available in the Middle Ages.

Medieval English Gardens proved a treasure trove of such information for me. The two most pertinent sections for my research on this subject were chapters 5 & 6: “Many a Fresh and Sundry Flower”, and “The Herb Garden”. Each chapter contains sub-chapters, as follows:

Within: “Many a Fresh and Sundry Flower” are the sub-chapters: “Useful Flowers”; “Useful and Pretty Flowers”; “Beautiful, Flower Garden Flowers, and Flower Gardens”; and “Medieval Roses and Rose Gardens”. The last two sub-chapters are more useful for assistance in garden descriptions (as per my previous post) than for information on the healing properties of medieval plants, but the first two sub-chapters were extremely useful for my “healing heroine".

Within: “The Herb Garden” are the sub-chapters: “Infirmary Garden Herbs”; “Herb Garden Herbs”; “Kitchen Garden Herbs”; and “Backyard Herbs.”

Let me share with you a few examples of the kinds of information contained within each sub-chapter, and the method I used to transform these chapters into a permanent “quick research” resource for me.

This was where a red pencil or highlighter, and a pencil or pen came in extremely handy. The paragraphs are pretty much broken down by flower or herb, which makes it easy to mark each flower or herb individually.

For example, beginning on p 140, under “Useful Flowers”, I red-lined the flower “southernwood”, along with its description and uses. Then, in pen, I wrote the word “southernwood” in the margin, underlined it, and underneath that wrote: “uses”, under which I wrote the words “fever; wounds; pot-pourris”.

The next paragraph (on p 141) dealt with the wormwood plant. So I redlined “wormwood”, together with some pertinent information about it within the paragraph, then in the margin, I penned “wormwood” (underlined), and underneath again wrote: “uses”, then listed “flea repellant; expel poisons; constipation; stomachache.”

I followed this pattern with the following paragraphs on “mugwort”; “tansy”; “marigold”; and so on, throughout the above mentioned chapters (“Many a Fresh and Sundry Flower” and “The Herb Garden”).

Yes, this process can be somewhat time consuming, but it also the kind of task that can be done a little at a time…during commercials when watching TV, while waiting in a doctor’s office, while waiting to pick up a child from an activity…a few minutes here, and few minutes there, and before you know it, you have the quick research guide I referred to above.

Now that I had these chapters thus marked, when I found my hero with a knife wound in his arm and my heroine with a need to help heal it, all I had to do was flip through the margins of the chapters for plants that were used for healing wounds. I was very quickly able to whittle down my list to: southernwood; milfoil/yarrow; primrose; plantain/waybread; comfrey; burnet and orpine; and tutsan.

In the paragraphs I’d marked with red pencil, I could then look from the word in the margin to a more full description (in parentheses below) of how the flower or herb was used to heal wounds:

Southernwood (soothes wounds)
Milfoil/Yarrow: (staunched bleeding)
Primrose (leaves rubbed into wounds to relieve soreness)
Plantain/Waybread (ingredients in ointments to cure wounds)
Comfrey (power to heal wounds and stop bleeding)
Burnet and Orpine (wound soothers)
Tutsan (antiseptic for open flesh wounds)

My heroine ultimately settled on the following:

She gathered up a handful of fresh green leaves from a bowl and turned to lay them on the Earl's arm, squeezing them first so that the juice ran into his wound. The wine had dulled the fiery pain to a bearable throb, but even that discomfort began to subside, as the flesh around the wound grew numb…. [Some dialogue ensues…]

She removed the leaves she had spread on his arm and replaced them with a different kind, gathered from another bowl. "Plantain," she explained, crushing them between her fingers as she had done before. "It will slow the bleeding, and then we will spread on the comfrey poultice to help in healing."

She followed through with this prescription and finished by binding up his arm with several strips of linen, which Flora handed her from the tray.

"There. Your arm should remain numb for several hours. The pain may return after that, but you may send to the kitchen for more leaves if it becomes too uncomfortable. Mind they be of the tutsan plant and fresh enough to squeeze as you saw me do. If the bleeding resumes, it is plantain you must ask for. The bandages should be changed frequently for the next day or two, each time reapplying the poultice. I will see that some be kept in readiness for you."

I am certain there are other equally useful books for learning about medieval flowers and herbs, but I am confining myself in these blogs only to books and resources that I have actually used myself, and Medieval English Gardens, by Teresa McLean, was my major resource in the writing of my novel, Loyalty’s Web, as well as in writing its sequel, which I hope to publish sometime in 2008. However useful other books may be, Medieval English Gardens is a true treasure, and is well worth the search for a copy of your own.

(See previous post for suggestions for locating copies of Medieval English Gardens.)

Reminder: My drawing for a FREE copy of Medieval Wordbook is still open. For details, see post on Research Book Drawing.

Sometimes What You Need Is a Little Serendipity

I promised in my last post that I would share my “backup source” for my choice of water hemlock as the poison I used in my novel, Loyalty’s Web. Sometimes backup sources (or any sources, for that matter) come about by simple “luck”…serendipity, if you will. Prior to my discovery of Deadly Doses (see January 5, 2008 post), I focused my search for an appropriate medieval poison on various books about herbs, especially since I wanted to incorporate some “healing” techniques in my story, as well. While useful for the latter, what I quickly discovered is that most generalized books about herbs are not very interested in helping you poison someone, even if that someone is a fictional character. Consequently, the herb books I bought mostly proved to be a bust for my poison angle…with one exception. The Herb Book, by John Lust.

The sequence of events went like this: I bought a book entitled Medieval English Gardens (the subject of my next post). In this book, one of the herbs that attracted my attention was a plant called “angelica”, which among other things, was used to ward off plague, made into cordials and perfumes, and eaten as after-dinner sweets. Intrigued by this plant, I turned to my copy of The Herb Book to see what it had to say about angelica. Lo and behold, to my utter surprise, what did I find written under “Cautions” for the herb but this statement: “Wild angelica can be confused with European water hemlock, which is poisonous.”

This was the “Aha! moment” when I knew for a certainty that water hemlock, aka cowbane, would without doubt be the poison of choice for my story. After all, if the would-be poisoner were challenged, he or she could always claim “accidental confusion” between the noxious (cowbane) and the benign (angelica).

My first draft of Loyalty’s Web was written some years before the internet became nearly as common as air in our lives, hence my dependence at the time on printed sources, such as The Herb Book. Nowadays, I could go to the internet to find more information on water hemlock. (Be sure to Google for “European water hemlock”, otherwise you’ll go straight to the American version.) You can even find photographs of the plant (see http://www.all-creatures.org/picb/wfshl-waterhemlock.html), whereas all I originally had was a word description and my imagination.

Even so, I’m not sure that modern technology would have led me to the angelica/water hemlock link any more directly than my fortuitous reading of my little paperback Herb Book. After all, it never would have occurred to me to search for a link until I had accidentally stumbled across it in the first place!

So whichever route your research takes…the old-fashioned printed word or the internet…sometimes nothing trumps pure and simple “luck” in discovering some critical detail to click a plot-point into place.

Note: The Herb Book, by John Lust, remains widely available. Arranged alphabetically with drawings, each herb listing includes: Common Names; Medicinal Parts; Description; Properties and Uses, including CAUTIONS (helpful for an author with a character interested in misusing a plant); and Preparation and Dosage.