I’ve discovered that I quite like searching for academic books on Amazon; the reviews for them are often surprisingly substantive and useful. One for this book referred to it as “training wheels” for the interpretation of Elizabethan drama and poetry: not exactly wrong, but not something one wants to rely on too heavily in textual interpretation. Since I’m not embarking on an analysis of any Shakespearean plays, that’s fine by me.

But it’s a good thing this book is short, because it took me long enough to get through as is. I generally read a couple of pages and then put it down for a few minutes, coming up for air and to digest what I’d just read. Tillyard presents the metaphors by which the Elizabethans viewed the universe as ordered: the Great Chain of Being (some of you might have heard of that before), a set of corresponding planes, and a dance, and he proceeds to demonstrate, through literary texts of the period, just how those metaphors operated and influenced Elizabethan thought.

The great usefulness of this book to me is a reminder not to think like a modern when I write: regarding class distinctions in particular, it’s important for me to bear in mind the extent to which hierarchy permeated that society. Also, it gave me a lot of fodder for my own metaphorical language, regarding elements and animals, astrology and the humours, and a lot more. So the training wheels, I’d say, have done their job.

I’m falling a bit behind on reporting my research, so I’ll cover these two books in one post. They really belong together, anyway.

The one I read first was The Fairies in Tradition and Literature. It’s a good focus on British Isles fairy-lore (as distinct from fairy-tales), and Briggs is pretty good about flagging the region a given detail belongs to, for which I am very grateful; I’m specifically after English fairy-lore here, as opposed to the much more well-known Scottish and Irish and even Welsh materials, so it’s good to know where I should be drawing my mental boundaries.

This book is organized mostly by issues, with chapters like “The Host of the Dead,” “Fairy Plants,” “Changelings and Midwives,” and so on. The big benefit for me is that this gave me the perfect way to think about recurrent tropes in fairy-lore, and how I want to reinterpret them for the purposes of my own work. I have certain ideas now, for example, about why exactly fairies were so fond of certain human foods, and what it is about gifts of clothing that seems to piss off brownies.

The second book is British Folk-Tales and Legends, and it makes a good companion to the first. Redacted from a longer version called The Dictionary of British Folk-Tales and Legends, it’s basically a collection of primary sources (sometimes simplified or summarized, sometimes given in their entirety, dialect and all), organized once again into categories. A bunch of the sections I skipped entirely, like “Fables and Exempla” or “Jocular Tales,” but there are categories for black dogs, bogies, devils, dragons, fairies, ghosts, and giants, all of which are quite handy. And a great many of the stories in here are referenced in the other book, so it’s nice to have it on hand for cross-referencing. Bonus points to Briggs for having the right attitude about her categories: they’re there to help the reader find what they’re looking for, but she acknowledges where appropriate the difficulty of distinguishing one type of story from another, and the ways in which they continually muddle up one’s boundaries.

I’ve got one more Briggs book coming my way, The Anatomy of Puck, which should specifically focus on the fairy-lore of Shakespeare’s time. With that, I should be more or less set with my fairy research, except for one out-of-print book that costs something like eighty dollars for a used copy, which I will probably check out from the IU library at some point.

You remember when, a little while ago, I referred to John Stow’s A Survey of London, Vols. 1 and 2 as More Than I Ever Wanted to Know About Elizabethan London, Vols. 1 and 2?

Looks like I should amend that to More Than I Ever Wanted to Know About Elizabethan London and Printed With Unmodernized Spelling to Boot, Vols. 1 and 2.

Sample:

Thames the most famous riuer of this Iland, beginneth a little aboue a village called Winchcombe in Oxfordshire, and still increasing passeth first by the university of Oxford, and so with a maruelous quiet course to London, and thence breaketh into the French Ocean by maine tides, which twice in 24. howers space doth eb and flow, more than 60. miles in length, to the great commoditie of Trauellers, by which all kind of Marchandise bee easily conueyed to London, the principall store house, and Staple of all commodities within this Realme, so that omitting to speake of great ships, and other vessels of burden, there pertayneth to the Citties of London, Westminster, and Borrough of Southwarke, aboue the number is supposed of 2000.

It isn’t impenetrable . . . but it will be slow going.

Not a book, but very useful: this website, which appears to be more or less the text of someone’s bachelor’s thesis. (I say “more or less” because it’s rather lacking in citations for its quotes.)

. . . okay, I suppose it’s only useful (let alone interesting) if one might have a need for knowing what the acatry was, where it fit in the hierarchy of Elizabeth’s household, and how many people it employed. (Except that the acatry is one of the few departments for which Batty doesn’t give that last detail. Bad example, I guess.)

In other words, this is a highly tedious website I mention only because it might be of use to anybody else planning to write historical fiction set in Elizabeth’s reign and involving the daily life of her Court.

Which might be precisely none of you. At best, it is very few.

Carry on.

The major criticism I’ve seen of this book online is that in its efforts to canonize Sir Francis Walsingham as the founder of English espionage, it gives too short shrift to Cecil, who apparently used (or invented?) many of the same techniques credited here to Walsingham. Which might be true, but for my purposes it’s irrelevant; the point is that Walsingham did use them, around the time period I’m going to be writing about, and therefore I can wreak whatever havoc with them I like.

But oh, is this book full of tasty espionage. (Espionage, and political backbiting; god, I never knew educated Renaissance gentlemen could be so damn catty.) Maybe Budiansky is novelizing his subjects a little too much, but there’s a good sense of personality in a lot of the incidents, some of it reassuringly backed up by genuine quotes from period documents. Until this book, I had no idea Walsingham had a sense of humour; one wouldn’t have expected it, given the Puritanism and the espionage, but it seems to have been true.

It’s very readable, though a touch novelistic in places, which makes me a little wary that Budiansky might be interpreting events to make them fit his story, but I don’t see any glaring evidence of that. I’d give it a thumbs-up as both a short bio of Walsingham and an example of Renaissance spy-work (which I want for other purposes besides Midnight Never Come) — he gives good, detailed accounts of the diplomatic and covert work that went on around the St. Bartholomew massacre, the Ridolfi plot, the Babington plot, and the Armada.

My complaint from this book is directed at Mr. Secretary Walsingham himself. He was so very adroit in the matter of the Babington plot, and moreover kept such very good records of it, that I’m left with far less wiggle room than I would like in which to have Other Stuff Going On. C’mon — couldn’t he oblige me by being less good at his job? It would make my job so much easier.

Oh. Right. Nobody ever promised this would be easy.

Step one in writing that wretched beast known as a historical fantasy is, of course, research. Ergo, I’m alternating between Elizabethan history books and English fairy lore, on the theory that will produce the correct state of mind necessary for the novel. So far, it’s mostly melting my brain. Whether this is suitable remains to be seen.

But I figure I can at least share the progress of my research with you, the reader, by making brief posts on the books I read as I go along. If you have recommendations of other books I might find useful, or caveats about the ones I’ve read, please share with the class.

First up is Elizabeth’s London, from Liza Picard. For readability, you can’t beat her. Let me quote from the section on period gardening: “Hill suggests olive oil or soot for snails (Oxford snails would come miles for a nice extra-virgin oil) and for that other pest, moles, put a live mole in a pot — first catch your mole — and after a while ‘he will cry and [all the other moles in the neighborhood] will hastily draw near unto him and minding to help him forth will fall into the pot’. But what do you do with a potful of crying moles?” Or there’s the plate caption for a woodcut where, after having carefully identified all the other figures in the image, she concludes by saying “I have no explanation for the man in bondage gear.”

I want to say I spotted something in the book that contradicted what I’d read elsewhere, but a) the other thing I read might have been wrong, and b) I don’t remember what it was anyway. In general, the book is chock-full of concrete facts, including things like different types of cloth and their uses, prices for vast numbers of things, and a very good map with all the halls of the major livery companies marked. In other words, the kind of information most books I read take for granted.

The biggest drawback is not Picard’s fault: this book focuses on the lives of common-to-wealthy Londoners, not nobles, and as such it doesn’t tell me much about life at court. I need another book for that one. Anybody have a recommendation?