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 Word of the Day

Mead: a medieval garden designed to imitate a small meadow

The low-lying flowers this woman is sitting in is an example of a medieval "flowery mead"

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.

Medieval Gardens

When plotting out my novel, Loyalty’s Web, there came a time when I wanted an exchange between my hero and heroine to take place in a castle garden. I had just recently purchased a book entitled Medieval English Gardens, by Teresa McLean, and although my novel was set in a portion of France called Poitou, I worked on the assumption that, as far as medieval gardens went, castles gardens in medieval France were unlikely to be significantly different from castle gardens in medieval England.

Medieval English Gardens is chock full of information on gardens in the Middle Ages…their history, their variety (monastic vs. city vs. castle/manor gardens), and descriptions you can draw on to create your very own, imaginary medieval garden for your novel or short story.

As I’ve stated before, my purpose with this bog is not to review research books in detail, but to share with you how I used a particular book for my particular needs in writing Loyalty’s Web. For the purposes of my scene, I knew I did not need information on monastic or city/town gardens, so I turned immediately to “Castle, Palace and Manor Gardens” (Medieval English Gardens, beginning on p. 89). Within this chapter, I limited my research to those sections which dealt with gardens from “the period of the Conquest to the late fourteenth century”, since that was the time range in which my novel was set. (In other words, why read the chapter on “Late Medieval Pleasure Gardens”, until I decide to set a novel in that particular time period? I may read more just for “fun”, but for research purposes, I prefer to focus on information that pertains most immediately to the time and setting my novels are placed in.)

Here are some of the things I learned from the above chapter and sections, which I was then able to weave into my scene (and I do recommend using a red pencil or high lighter, to make quick reference easier when rechecking one’s facts—and regardless of what your mother told you about writing in books, don’t be afraid to make notes in the margins! They’ll be worth their weight in gold to you later.):

“The fact that they used turf lawns [in gardens] does not mean that they were bare of flowers. They may have been planted with small flowers—violets, daisies and periwinkles, to make the ‘flowery meads’ so beloved in the Middle Ages.” (Medieval English Gardens, p 94)

“Apart from the orchards and vineyards which were outside the walls of many castles, it was usual for there to be either no gardens at all in a castle or else just pleasure gardens.” (Medieval English Gardens, p. 96)

One castle built “a dove-house at the corner of the herb garden….its purpose was to enhance the herb garden’s pleasant appeal, for the cooing of doves was a popular medieval delight full of symbolic importance for romantic and religious love.” (Medieval English Gardens, p. 105)

“Gardens were walled, fenced, hedged and palisaded…so there was a good deal of stonework, carpentry, hedge-making, locksmithing and painting to be done in the making of them, and more of the same in the making of their mounds, fountains, benches, railings, paths and raised beds. (Medieval English Gardens, p. 106)

This information, combined with information on rose gardens in the section on” Medieval Roses and Rose Gardens” (pp. 164-171) under the chapter, “Many a Fresh and Sundry Flower”, culminated in the following two paragraphs in Loyalty’s Web (p. 146)

A shaft of sunshine broke through the hovering clouds and the roses danced their tangled heads against the breeze in what remained of the Lady Gwenllian's pleasure garden. Though spared devastation from the siege by its remoteness from the curtain walls, it had nevertheless been much neglected these eighteen months while rebuilding had gone forward in the outer bailey. The stables, the barracks, the forge, all had had to be raised again almost from scratch, so thorough a job had Gunthar's fiery missiles done. The orchard and herb garden had been maintained for their usefulness to the castle's occupants, but save for mending the dovecot, damaged by a winter storm, Laurant had insisted the roses would have to wait.

The bushes had grown shaggy and tall, climbing over the low, enclosing walls, and would have choked off the gate had Heléne not kept a path well pruned. She loved it here in the wild bower it had become, where no one ever seemed to venture but she. She did not mind that the benches were peeling, that the flowery mead had become a confusion of disordered weeds, or that the fountain had gone dry. The trill of the nearby doves usually soothed her nerves while she plied her needlework or immersed herself in one of the rare books she cajoled her father into buying. But on this grey, dismal morning both lay neglected, the former on the dusty plank beside her, the latter in her lap.

With the treasure trove of information on medieval gardens contained in Medieval English Gardens, by Teresa McLean, you, too can create a perfect (or even, as in Loyalty’s Web’s case, an imperfect) garden for your medieval characters to enjoy!

Sadly, as is the case with many of my favorite research books, Medieval English Gardens no longer appears to be in print. It can be worth the search for a used copy, though. I have found copies listed on the following sites (a little Googling will lead you to further options):

http://www.alibris.com/booksearch?wauth=teresa+mclean&wtit=medieval+english+gardens

http://www.textbookx.com/product_detail.php?upc=9780670464821&type=book&affiliate=froogle

http://www.bookshopinc.com/cgi-bin/bsp455/220953.html?id=mLzH44U6

http://www.antiqbook.co.uk/boox/cour/1571.shtml (United Kingdom)

http://www.biblio.com/details.php?dcx=54245062&aid=frg (United Kingdom)

Next time: Medieval English Gardens, by Teresa McLean, Part II. I’ve only scratched the surface of the usefulness of this book, so be sure to return to medieval research with joyce in two weeks!

Note: Speaking of which, due to a scheduling conflict, beginning in two weeks I will be posting new blogs on this site on the first and third Thursdays, instead of Wednesdays, of each month. My next post will appear February 21st.