Category: Uncategorized
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Religious Fights and Disabled Knights: Charity, Crusade, and the Origins of the Order of Saint Lazarus
“The king’s light manner vanished, and an unheard-of look of fear came into his scarred face. ‘I can’t. I—’ He suppressed a small shudder and whispered, ‘I’m afraid that if I ever enter the Lazarus Postern, they’ll never let me out.’” – The Gourd and the Stars, chapter 16 After a few months off, I…
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The Anarchist Aristocrat: The Chimerical Career of Joseph Fouché
“And first, let me not be considered responsible either for the Revolution, its consequences, or even its direction. I was a cipher.” – Joseph Fouché, Memoirs (1824) “Turning later to the duke of Otranto, he [Napoleon] said: ‘The man is merely a schemer. He is prodigiously clever and facile with a pen. He is a…
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Letting the Inmates Run the Asylum: Writing and Character-Led Plot Development
This week, I thought we’d get back into some writing mechanics content and talk more about the process of constructing a story that is satisfying to write as well as read. A debate that gets a lot of airtime in creative circles is whether it is better to plan out every aspect of a story,…
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Girls and Boys and Boys and Girls: Medieval Identity and Gender in Le Roman de Silence and Aucassin et Nicolette
This week, as threatened, I want to get back into some medieval literature with two more lesser-known 13th century French chanson prose poems, the Arthurian-adjacent Roman de Silence and the tongue-in-cheek romance parody Aucassin et Nicolette. While not perhaps immediately similar, both of these works have what a modern audience would likely find surprisingly sophisticated…
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Boats, Beads, and Bird-Eating Beetles: Adventures in Modern Museum Conservation
We’re hopping back into some museum content this week because last night I had the opportunity to attend a members event at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History for their new temporary Egyptian exhibit, The Stories We Keep: Conserving Objects from Ancient Egypt meant to fill the gap during the Walton Hall of Ancient Egypt’s…
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Appointment in Chautauqua: Meditations on Salman Rushdie’s Knife
“So my first thought when I saw this murderous shape rushing toward me was: So it’s you. Here you are… This was my second thought: Why now? Really? It’s been so long. Why now, after all these years?” — Knife “The history of life was not the bumbling progress—the very English, middle-class progress—Victorian thought had…
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Day Tripping at the Met, Part 3: A Little Bit of Everything Else
Okay, folks we’ve made it to the third and final entry in my Met roundup, where I try to wrap up everything else that I saw after I escaped the first floor of the museum (and try not to think about all of the stuff I didn’t have time to see). A truly impossible task,…
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Day Tripping at the Met, Part 2: Little Latin and Less Greek
As promised, we’re back with round two on my latest experience in the Metropolitan Museum of Art—this week focused on the Greek and Roman Art wing. As my paraphrase of Ben Jonson above suggests, I spent more time with the Romans (and specifically the first century Romans of my books) than the Greek stuff, but…
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Day Tripping at the Met, Part 1: Egypt
Last week, my wife and I took the train (this is America, it really is the train—Amtrak’s singular, once a day Pennsylvanian route) up to New York City for a couple of days to do some general sightseeing. As I touched on in my Susanna Moodie entry, despite living in the same state for most…
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Christendom’s Favorite Frienemy: the History and Hagiography of Salah al-Din in the Western Imagination
“[Saladin] gave [the stolen Christian baby] to the mother and she took it; with tears streaming down her face, and hugged the baby to her chest. The people were watching her and weeping and I was standing amongst them. She suckled it for some time and then Saladin ordered a horse to be fetched for…
Sarah Holz 