Two libraries, one incredibly helpful law reference librarian, and the Letters and papers, foreign and domestic, of the reign of Henry VIII later, I have the text of two mid-century secret treaties, and also a collection of Elizabeth’s writings.

Which is not to say people shouldn’t keep making suggestions in the comments to the previous post. More help is always good.

I know this will only confirm my geekery, but — there’s something deeply satisfying about the intensive research slog that suddenly produces the perfect resource or bit of information. It isn’t just the payoff; it’s the effort that goes into it. Of course, you can’t tell from inside the slog whether there are any gems waiting at the end, so you just keep trudging through the mire of English property law, wanting to hit Bracton over the head with his own writings and hoping you’ll get a payoff eventually. When you don’t, it sucks. But when you do . . . .

That’s fun.

This book came to me courtesy of the inestimable Delia Sherman, along with several other works. I am most grateful to her.

It’s interesting to me that this project has, more than anything else I’ve ever done — including college and grad school — liberated me of the notion that I need to read a book cover-to-cover. I mainly read two chapters out of this one, those being the chapters that focused most generally on the relationship between Elizabeth and her courtiers. The rest of the book is broadly both chronological and focused on particular courtiers in particular scenarios; there’s a chapter, for example, on Norfolk’s downfall. Since a lot of that stuff predates the period in which I’m writing, and I’m running out of time for research, I decided to bypass it. Looks good, though.

Not much else to say on this one, I think. But look out for more posts later today, probably, as I knock off reports on a few other books I’ve read lately.

This may possibly take the cake for Most Arcane Research Question I’ve Ever Asked Because Of Writing.

Is anybody out there familiar enough with Terrestrial Dynamic Time to tell me what if any conversions I need to make for a timestamp from 1547? As in, was 12:54 TD roughly noonish back then? The Wikipedia article on Terrestrial Time leaves me entirely unclear as to how closely that timestamp matches normal person time.

Edited to add: astroaztec has been kind enough to verify my math for me. It turns out the difference is truly negligible, so I needn’t worry.

This book wins, hands down, the prize for Coolest Piece of Random Trivia Discovered While Researching This Novel. (The downside is that the trivia in question appears a few pages in, and seems to have dominated the author’s thinking for the remainder of the text.)

The trivia is this. Elizabeth loved to nickname the people around her; Walsingham, for example, was her “Moor,” while Burghley was “Sir Spirit.” Three men in her reign got nicknamed “Eyes.” The first was Leicester, who signed his letters with a little glyph: two circles with dots inside, representing (of course) eyes. The second was Hatton, who ended up being called “Lids” to distinguish him from Leicester; he signed his letters with dotted triangles instead.

The third was John Dee. His special sign for his nickname was two circles guarded by a mark Deacon describes as “what might have been a square root sign or an elongated seven.”

The book then obligingly shows you a picture of the mark, and yes: it looks like “007.”

I have no idea if Ian Fleming knew this, but Deacon doesn’t miss the chance to draw the connection for his readers. And this sets the tone of the book; while the last bio of Dee I read emphasized his scientific and magical work, this one runs with the idea that Dee was an intelligence agent in service to the royal government.

I’m not entirely certain what to do with Deacon’s claims. He’s not as good as he might be about telling you the basis for his conclusions about Dee’s activities, so I can’t be sure when the missions he outlines are things we definitely know happened, and when they’re educated speculation. That Dee occasionally passed information along to Walsingham and/or Burghley and/or Leicester, I can believe with no problem, but Deacon’s biography more or less positions that as the overarching purpose of his life. Dee, according to him, refused jobs he might have taken because they would have limited his ability to engage in intelligence work. His trips overseas were as much for spying as for anything else. And the angelic conversations . . . in Deacon’s view, Dee’s work with Kelley is most easily explained by assuming that much of it was used as a cover, a ciphered means of passing information to those who could act on it. Who would look for intelligence reports in the middle of one of those?

Um. I’m not sure what to do with this. Certainly there seems to have been at least one occasion that an angel informed Dee of something in cryptic terms, Dee passed the report along to the authorities, and they subsequently discovered Spanish agents attempting to burn down the forest which supplied timber to the royal navy, under conditions which matched the cryptic message of the angel. I’m not sure I buy into the thesis that spying was such a major focus of Dee’s work, though.

I’d have to read more about Dee to say for sure. But the nice thing about this research is, I’m doing it for a novel, not a dissertation. Which means I can appreciate Deacon for the details he gives, and discard his overall point if it doesn’t suit my purpose.

Edited to add: Hah. A footnote from Peter J. French’s John Dee: The World of an Elizabethan Magus:

“Richard Deacon’s book, John Dee: Scientist, Geographer, Astrologer, and Secret Agent to Elizabeth I (London, 1968) does regrettably little to establish Dee’s true importance. In a rather sensational way, Deacon portrays Dee as ‘a roving James Bond of Tudor times’ [not, so far as I’m aware, an actual quote from that book — me], the master of a massive espionage system. He considers the ‘Spiritual Diaries’ a form of enciphering used for spying purposes. Deacon’s argument is tenuous at best, and his book is riddled with factual inaccuracies.”

I guess I’m glad I only read selections from it. But it’s good to hear someone else evaluate that thesis and find it to be kind of bunk.

As the presence of the word “Aquarian” in the title might suggest, this book ranges from fuzzy-headed neopagan pablum, to fairly well-researched archaeological and folkloric history, to a random dissection of a William Blake poem, depending on which article you’re reading.

The middle category is, of course, the one that was the most useful to me. There isn’t a terrible amount in here that was utterly new, but it helped reinforce some stuff I already knew, and offered a vareity of tidbits (like the London Stone, or the bells of St. Mary-le-Bow, or a reminder of the existence of Walbrook) that I’m smuggling into the novel where I can. I wish the article on “London Leys and Lines” had been more useful to me, though. Alas, it failed to present me with the kind of sacred/mystical geography I was hoping for.

The other thing of use in here is the bibliographies attached to (most of) the articles. If I ever write that London novel that’s in my head (which, given the research it would require, I don’t even want to think about right now), I’ll have some good leads on books to pick up.

I feel bad for having not read this entire book, but it’s no reflection on the quality; I just conceded defeat on getting through the entire thing in one day, and quit once I’d passed into the stuff that will be happening after Midnight Never Come is over.

The moronic thing is, I had to read this book to find out whether I needed to read this book. Less cryptically, I was trying to decide once and for all whether or not Kit Marlowe is going to be a character in MNC. There are vague reasons to put him in, and vague reasons not to, so I decided I’d read a biography of him and see if any historical felicities offered themselves for use. (A rather large amount of this novel is built on such foundations.) As it turns out, no such felicities were to be found, at least not ones that are compelling enough to shoehorn themselves into MNC. Marlowe was mostly involved with Burghley, not Walsingham, and his involvement with the other Walsingham (i.e. Sir Thomas, not Sir Francis) mostly grew up after the point at which I’m writing.

So Kit is likely to be Sir Gay-Atheist-Spy Not Appearing In This Book. Having said that, I do quite like Riggs’ work, and if I don’t end up reading the remainder, it’ll be because I’m getting bloody sick of the sixteenth century, not because I didn’t like the biography.

The big selling point of this book, to me, is that it grounds itself thoroughly in the historical and cultural context of the period. Which is making a virtue of necessity: Riggs points out in the prologue that we know precious few facts about Marlowe’s adult life, and the documents relating to him are either written by him in the voice of another (i.e. plays and poems and translations), or else written about him by other people; he left behind precisely one “first-person utterance” (as Riggs terms it). You can’t get at Marlowe directly; you have to reconstruct him from oblique evidence. To quote Riggs again, “All the evidence about his mutinous cast of mind sits at one remove from his own voice [. . .] He is an irretrievably textual being.”

Which means this book approaches the “gay atheist spy” trifecta by contextualizing the indirect evidence in more concrete facts about the period. Take the notion of Marlowe as a homosexual: Riggs denies that the term as we understand it today would fit Marlowe, since “homosexuality” as such did not exist in the Elizabethan mind. Sodomy was a behavior, not an identity, and was linked with other behaviors like heresy and treason. But given the social context in which Marlowe lived during a goodly chunk of his life; the way that his education promoted homosocial behavior, intimate male bonding, and sharing a bed with other men; and the kinds of classical texts to which he was exposed during that education, there are basically two options for his sexual behavior: either he was celibate, or he was a sodomite. There simply weren’t any women in his vicinity for him to do anything with. And sodomy certainly did happen.

As far as atheism goes, I was floored by the detailed discussion of Elizabethan higher education. Its purpose was to turn out good little leaders of the Church of England, but its design . . . well, let’s just say I’m surprised more of the men who went through it didn’t end up Catholics, Puritans, or atheists. Teaching young men to defend and attack arguments as a logical exercise, without any particular concern for the truth of the argument, nor any particular intent to arrive at a conclusion, seems a pretty good way to guarantee they end up casting a cynical eye on the things you then tell them to believe.

This book deserved better attention than I was able to give it, but I was conducting a high-speed reading with a specific purpose. In particular, I would like to come back to it some day when I’m more familiar with Marlowe’s writings: I started really skimming a ways into the detailed discussion of Tamburlaine, even though it was less a lit-crit analysis of the text and more a survey of how it fit into the political and theatrical scene of the 1580s. Then I read the Faustus chapter, skipped ahead to his death, and quit.

I don’t think Kit will be in this novel, except very, very peripherally. Which is a pity. But I’m not going to cram him in just for the sake of the Marlowe fangirls, even if I am one myself.

When I don’t know a fact for this novel, I can make it up, within the limits of what I do know. So, for example, I don’t actually know which palace Elizabeth was living in during April 1590. But I know St. James’ was a royal palace, and that various other palaces were usually occupied in the summer or autumn or winter, so I can put her in St. James’ that spring and be content.

My problem is that, once I learn a fact, I can’t make myself ignore it.

The solution to this ought to be for me to stop researching. If I hadn’t dug through my books for more detailed information on Elizabeth’s coronation procession, I never would have found a reference to a text which some kind soul (hah) put online which lets me know exactly the route she took, and therefore I wouldn’t know she never went near Candlewick Street, and therefore the flashback scene I had in mind that requires her to be there during her coronation procession would be just fine and dandy in my mind.

But now I know. And I can’t make myself ignore her real processional route just because I want her to pass by a certain significant half-buried rock on Candlewick Street.

<grumble mutter hmpf>

Okay, fine. I’ll work this differently. But my life really would be easier if I could either stop researching, or ignore what I read. (But then what would be the point of reading it?)

Note to self: do not take hiatus of several weeks in the midst of reading a book for research. You will forget most of what you read in the first half.

This book, as some of you might guess, is a biography of Doctor John Dee. I also need to pick up Dee’s diaries, probably, and give those a read-through (especially the parts around my time period), but first I figured I needed an orienting framework, a simple biography that would give me the context of the things noted down in those diaries.

If that’s what you’re after, this book seems pretty good. It has the virtue of acknowledging not just Dee’s mysticism, but also his scientific work and the political context in which he was operating. (That latter aspect in particular cemented my dissatisfaction with Lisa Goldstein’s novel The Alchemist’s Door, which I very much wanted to like but didn’t.) I suspect that balance might be a legacy of Dame Frances Yates, whose work I’ll be taking a look at — hopefully — if I have the time. From the overview given toward the end of this book, it sounds like a lot of biographies of Dee more or less write him off as a deluded crackpot, which does not serve my purposes at all.

Oh yes, I have a purpose in reading this. (Are you surprised?) I will admit that Dee is likely to show up in Midnight Never Come. For those of you — i.e. mrissa — who grimace at the thought, I promise to try and put him in right, up to and including reading Yates if I have the time. (I solemnly swear to depict John Dee as a Christian Cabalist, not as some kind of cracked-out mother-goddess-worshipping Elizabethan neo-pagan. Mris, who the hell did that to him?) The difficult part will be grokking Christian Cabalism well enough to try and depict it, and balancing that out with the ever-unanswered question of what the hell was going on with Edward Kelley. I can think of all kinds of interesting possibilities; I just don’t know which one will serve my purposes best.

Now, let’s see if I can finish off one of the other three or four books I’m halfway done with.

Technically this book doesn’t have much to do with the Elizabethan period, as it was written in early sixteenth century Italy, not late sixteenth century England. But I figured, y’know, I keep referring to Invidiana as Machiavellian (in descriptions of the novel, not within the novel itself), and I’d never read this book, so I figured I should.

Not a lot to say about it, except that it’s, um, less Machiavellian than I expected. Yeah, there’s the whole “ends justify the means” approach, and he does say it’s safer (not “better,” at least in my translation) to be feared rather than loved, but he also points out that you shouldn’t make your subjects hate you. (Which would be where Invidiana has gone wrong.) It’s a short book, and a quick read, especially if (like me) you skim over the examples he chooses from recent Italian politics.

The other major reason I picked it up is that I may put brief epigraphs at the beginning of each section, and I suspected this might provide me with some good ones. I have a couple of strong possibilities marked down now. Unfortunately, the other two things I want to read through in search of quotable quotes are The Book of the Courtier and The Faerie Queene, neither of which will be half so quick to get through.

I grabbed this book because it was on the shelf next to The English Court, which I reported on a little while ago. Unfortunately, it turns out to be the first useless research book I’ve read.

Dutton describes his purpose as “to show the influence of the reigning monarch on the way of life carried on at his court, and also how and where he lived.” Unfortunately, because it goes from Henry VII to George II (three hundred years) in just over 200 pages, the result is unavoidably shallow. And also unbalanced: Mary I, who reigned for five years, gets fourteen pages of coverage, while Edward VI, who ruled for six, gets two.

I had hoped for this book to be a good complement to The English Court, giving me a better idea of daily life during the period. No dice. It contains a few anecdotes I wasn’t familiar with before, but it ends up reading like a half-baked history, failing to really cover the events of the period (which the author admits he isn’t trying to do) while failing to dig into the practicalities of life back then (which is what he was supposed to be doing). And while the chapter on Elizabeth isn’t completely idolatrous, Dutton appears to be firmly in the camp of Gloriana, extolling her virtues and achievements while mostly glossing over her flaws.

On the bright side, I only read the Tudor section, so I only wasted eighty-five pages of my life, instead of 220.

Oh well. I can’t hit a home run with every book, I suppose.

I slacked off on the research reading while moving, and then ended up halfway through several books at once, but I’ve finished the relevant portion of this one, so back we go to the book reports.

I picked it up on the recommendation of Alden Gregory, who gave me a tour of Hampton Court Palace; he called it the definitive book on the place, and I believe it. Which means that it really isn’t the sort of thing you want to read unless you have a specific need; the detail is fabulous, but only when there’s a specific application for it. (Even I ignored some of the information, like how much was spent on renovations and upkeep in a given year, except insofar as it helps give me a better sense of what a pound was worth back then.)

Alden photocopied for me the chapters that covered Elizabeth’s time, but I ended up checking the entire book out so I could read the preceding chapters. Hampton Court is one of those buildings that has been added to and remodeled and restored over a period of hundreds of years; my notes from my tour are a confusing jumble of details I couldn’t build into a coherent picture. (Frex, though I remembered where Alden said Elizabeth had most likely stayed when using the palace, I didn’t know why she was there, or what it meant when the photocopied chapters said she probably used the same quarters her father did, but that they don’t know what she did with the queen’s side; which bits of the building were that?) So I started more or less at the beginning, with Daubeney’s small manor house, and followed it through Cardinal Wolsey’s modifications, then the extended building spree of Henry VIII, and then finally the few changes made in Elizabeth’s time.

This took quite a while, because I was constantly flipping back and forth between the architectural plans of the different stages, making sure I was oriented, keeping track of where the new stuff went in and where things were rebuilt. But the end result is that now I can look at the Elizabethan floorplan and know what everything is, more or less, which I couldn’t do when it was presented to me as a finished product. The building is a palimpsest of earlier periods; I had to go through it chronologically to understand.

And this is relevant because, even when I’m writing scenes not at Hampton Court, my understanding of the architecture there affects my understanding of the period in general. I now grok the pattern of watching chamber, presence chamber, chamber of estate, privy chamber, bedchamber, and so on, and what those meant for how court life functioned; I know the function of galleries, and the processional route to the chapel; I have an idea of how much living space would be granted to courtiers high-ranking enough to be in residence. Even if I don’t know the precise details of how these things were laid out at Greenwich or Richmond or Whitehall, the important thing is that I understand how that stuff worked.

Which means that I’m less likely to write the Elizabethan period as if it were the modern era in ruffs. And that, ultimately, is the goal.

Once again, I am reminded to be grateful of my position at a large university, with all the informational resources that provides. Not only do I have electronic access to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (no more reliance on Wikipedia, and far more detail than I’d ever get there!), but I have the libraries.

And a list of nine more books I want to/need to go check out and read for Midnight Never Come. Doing a lot of research doesn’t mean you reach a point where you know what you need to; it means you become steadily more aware of how much you don’t know and should. (Nor am I yet to the point where I just have to tell myself to let it go, though sometimes I really wish I were.)

Ah well. Here we go again.