ASK ME ANYTHING - THE ANSWERS (28 April 2022)

Thank you so much for all your questions! I've tried to get to as many as I can... more to follow on the podcast tomorrow!

Holy medievamoly you guys don’t mess around when the AMA shout goes out. There is no time for pre-amble, I am just going to launch into as many of your questions posted on Wednesday’s thread as I can. When I fall asleep I will stop typing… and then pick it up again on the First Draft pod tomorrow.

Thank you everyone who got involved! I love you all.

We are fairly used to seeing depictions of Medieval life on TV etc - but if we were to travel back in time what would most shock us about life in those times? Something obvious like the hygiene/smell or the violence, or would it be something more left field?

-       Ben Neville

I think it might be the language. Have you ever read Chaucer aloud? Or heard it done? I remember walking into a friend’s room when I was at university to find a small group of English students reading one or other of the Canterbury Tales with the fourteenth century pronunciation. It was sort of recognisable as what today we call English, but at the same time radically, almost comically different. So if you whipped back to the 1380s in your time machine, you would likely find yourself quite unable to communicate, despite speaking an evolved dialect of the same tongue.

Incidentally, whenever I travel to the United States, I find myself faintly aware that with my own English accent I sound absolutely bizarre and borderline incomprehensible. I spent a week or so many years ago in Virginia with my cousins and their girlfriends. I was talking to one of the latter over dinner one evening, and this highly educated and intelligent woman was nodding and smiling politely but blankly. After a while she stopped me and said, ‘you know, what you’re saying sounds wonderful, but I can’t understand a word of it.’

Of course, I assumed she was referring to my accented English. I might just have been talking shit. It wouldn’t be the first time.

I've always been curious about what Europe's history would have been like if Islam hadn't exploded out of the Middle East and surged into Eastern and Western Europe. How would things have progressed? Would we be as far along technologically, philosophically, and culturally as we are now, or even further behind since so much of Greek and Roman learning was preserved by Muslims?

-       Todd Campbell

Counterfactuals are deadly, but it’s definitely possible to imagine that the transmission of Aristotelean dialectics, Euclidian mathematics, Ptolomaic astronomy etc etc would have suffered a delayed entry into Christendom, had the libraries of al-Andalus (esp Cordoba) not fallen into Christian hands in the Reconquista. Yes, I’ll buy that for a dollar.

That being said, medieval ‘worlds’ were porous and I think that one way or another the process of knowledge rediscovery would have happened anyway. I’ve just read an interesting new book by Ian Morris, the Stanford archaeologist and ‘Big History’ writer. The book is called Geography is Destiny and in it Morris uses a concept he calls ‘levelling out imbalances’, in which (if I’ve read him correctly) he sees the advance of big technological and intellectual movements – think agriculture, copper, bronze, iron, government, organised religion - from east to west as essentially inevitable, but time-variable depending on the mode of transmission (eg migration vs a form of social osmosis). Something similar might apply here.

The book is worth picking up, if you’re into ‘big history’ (I sort of am, although with some significant reservations). I’ve reviewed it in this weekend’s Sunday Times.

With the threat of Putin and his nukes if this was medieval times, what would be the most dreaded weapon that towns and villages could fear or be threatened with ? Simple fire and all those quaint thatched cottages?

Would we be better off if Putin was a medieval war lord or would he have been even more dangerous with gunpowder or plague bodies and ballista/ trebuchet chemical warfare weapons?

-       Jo Carroll

I’m very far from an expert on Putin and nuclear strike theory. But I went down something of a wormhole on Substack this week – this, by Zvi Mowshowitz, will either fascinate you, or scare the crap out of you, or both. (Particularly if you live in London.) It’s a good, sober, easy-to-read statistical/game theory driven look at the assumptions and potential political sequences that would lead to either a tactical or strategic nuclear strike/exchange. Read Zvi, not me, if it’s Putin you are interested in.

What I can possibly speak to is the matter of Putin as a medieval warlord. In the sense that Putin is a kleptocratic gangster politician, whose default mode of governance is somewhere between tsarism and Tony Soprano, he is indeed rather a medieval figure. His typical unfussy resort to fairly indiscriminate destruction of civilian targets in pursuit of military goals doesn’t look unlike an English chevauchee through northern France in the 1340s or the arrival of the Mongols outside a city like, well, Kyiv.

Then, as now, turning a ‘professional’ (not quite the right word but you see my point) army on defenceless civilians was the go-to tactic, and torturing/killing people, destroying buildings and ruining the means of food production were the means. One example that always sticks in my mind is that of Simon de Montfort, when Henry III sent him to rule Gascony. He attempted to terrorise the people there into subservience – one of his means of doing so was destroying grape-vines. That does not just destroy one harvest – it impoverishes winemakers for five years or more. Desperate stuff.

What of course makes Putin many orders of magnitude MORE dangerous than any medieval ruler, including Genghis Khan, is that he is armed with very much more powerful and destructive weapons than anyone who lived before the 1860s/1910s/1940s could have possibly imagined. It would be very much better for global security if Putin were armed with ballistas and plague bodies than nerve agent and 6000+ nuclear warheads. If anyone can conjure up a way to make that happen, please see to it as soon as possible.

Who is your favourite female character from history and why?

-       Helen Hodskiss

I really don’t know that I can choose just one, so I’m going to instead make this an opportunity for a blatant plug for a new book, the third in the ‘Colour of Time’ series I work on with Marina Amaral. It’s called A Woman’s World and it tells a story of the years 1850-1960 through 200 colourised photographs of women from that era. Victorian and early twentieth century history looks wildly different when you strip out all the dudes with big hats and bushy beards. The book’s out in August and maybe we can discuss the stories in it then…

Idea for next TV series: man vs medieval food. You are the man. Thoughts?

Anna and Pete

I am the man, I’ll give you that. However, while I can see the idea, I am kind of weird about eating things on camera. Firstly, it’s a mega-yawn shooting anything with food for boring continuity reasons. Secondly I really hate the sound of people eating, including myself, and the thought that I would spend every working day doing that makes me feel a bit bilious. So I’m afraid I have to pass on your idea – but good luck selling it with another historian called Dan attached. There’s no shortage of us.

Hi Dan, in your previous post you said you didn't want to lower the tone of History, Etc to the sewer just yet. Would it be too soon to give us your thoughts on the Erfurt latrine disaster?!

Benjamin Thrussell

I suppose only that the mind boggles at the thought that the castle’s cesspit was a) so large and b) so infrequently emptied that it was big enough for SIXTY people to drown in it. Do we think it can really be true? I think it must have been the fall and the collapsing timber/masonry that did for a lot of them, rather than the volume of piss and faeces alone. But I am not a medical man, and would welcome other theories.

You write mostly about very broad topics that cover a lot of time, territories , and historical characters (Crusades, Templars, War of the Roses, etc.) that can be called macro-history. Have you ever thought of writing about a non fiction micro-story topic? Maybe something like The Cheese and the Worms (by Carlo Ginzburg)?

Deborah

Yes, I am very drawn in my nonfiction writing to the epic, the big, the sweep of time. There have been exceptions: I wrote a book about the Peasants’ Revolt which really concentrated on a few weeks in England in 1381, and another couple about Magna Carta and the year 1215, both of which had a comparably narrow focus. But I tend to go for Big Book Energy (BBE) as my signature mode these days. In nonfiction. Or course, in fiction it’s a different story. There, I’m drawn to much shorter, tighter, more claustrophobic narrative frames. The Tale of the Tailor… took place over three or four days. Essex Dogs takes place over about six weeks. I do have one idea for a book called Molecatcher, which is a Wars of the Roses era murder mystery and a true story, which if I wrote it would be similarly constrained in its scheme of events. But I can’t decide yet if it’s fiction or nonfiction. So you’ll have to wait.

 Do you think writing is a discipline or a creative pursuit?

-       Julia Dietz

I think it’s a creative pursuit, and a craft. But the most important quality you do it successfully is discipline.

Hi Dan. I’m in Vindolanda. Advice? Also when you do your walking podcasts how are you recording? It sounds too good just to be talking into phone.

-       Michele Olender

I’m a huge fan of Vindolanda! I think by the time you’re reading this you won’t be there, but my favourite/most memorable exhibit was the Roman boxing gloves, artfully mounted on the arms of a dummy. I’m a big boxing fan, and a big history fan, and the two things coming together in such an arresting way tickled me greatly.

Hey Dan, Are you going to the Whitby Vampire gathering in May?? There’s a world record to beat

-       Savannah Darcy

The last time I dressed as a vampire I think I was 11 or 12 years old. My mother made me a cape from a black bin liner, and I had so much hair in those days that it swept back beautifully into a pomaded Drac cut. I fear if I were to try and repeat the look it would be nowhere near so impressive. But never say never. If events should place me in Whitby on May 26th then I will go with the flow.

How important do you think accuracy is when writing historical fiction? When I read The Other Boleyn Girl, I could barely get through it. The inaccuracies ruined the story! I’m not saying everything needs to be 100% correct, especially when we know so little about certain people and periods, but there’s a difference between historical fiction and just fiction!

-       Carly Gibson

I sort of addressed this in Monday’s post on medieval food (I think) but I know it’s a topic that comes back again and again, so apologies if I repeat myself here. There is no single optimum way to write historical fiction. In fact, there’s a vast range of approaches, all of which have their merits and their disadvantages. There are novelists who simply use history as the ‘costume department’, writing stories that could just as easily be set in space, or in an alternative cosmos, or in twenty-first century Brooklyn among a group of miserable, overpaid millennial dickwipes obsessed with their own identities, their hang-ups and the supposed tyrannies attendant on living in the most affluent and technologically advanced society in the history of the known universe. That’s fine. You just take a ‘white label’ story, usually romantic, and put it in the century of your choice. Some readers just want a good story and any variety in its setting, however superficial, is sufficient to make the story fresh and appealing.  

There are other writers, by contrast, who are obsessed with nothing but period detail, and what we often call ‘accuracy’, and will sacrifice any amount of plot or novelistic depth on the altar of making sure the third naval office to the left is wearing the right brocade. Pedantry is religion. This is pleasing to a different subset of readers, for whom deep down life is a contest to be right about absolutely everything, no matter what the cost to their social skills or mental wellbeing.  

I am working with caricature here, but only just.

That being said, most historical novelists fall on a spectrum between the two, and will serve up to their readers stories seasoned according to their tastes: enough period detail to achieve verisimilitude, but enough plot engineering to make the story exciting or moving or satisfying in some other way. The most honest of them will admit that all historical fiction is a compromise, and be clear that the whole point of writing historical fiction (rather than narrative history, say) is to have one’s cake and eat it. You grow the beanstalk of your story on of the fertile compost heap of the past; history thereby nourishes it, but the plant is not the same thing as the soil, and nor should it be.

I’m basically cool with any of the above approaches on one condition: that the author is honest about what they’re up to. What I cannot abide, and I will not name the author(s) whom I think are most guilty of this, but you can probably identify them for yourself, is when a writer of historical fiction chugs down so many brimming flagons of their own Kool-Aid that they begin to imagine that they are so brilliant that they are in fact offering up historical truth rather than a form of literary entertainment that has a noble tradition in its own right. These people are frauds and phoneys and hypocritical liars. And I have no time for their works.

I’m trying to decide where to take my kids on holiday. We like to explore local history and culture (read food) Needs to have interesting architecture and museums. Can you recommend anywhere for us? We like Italy and have done the usual touristy places.

-       Gaby Jones

I had a very nice time in Kas peninsula in southwestern Turkey a few years ago. Hot as Satan’s pizza oven, but stunningly beautiful and you couldn’t go ten yards without falling over an amphitheatre or submerged city. But I also like Sicily, especially around Taormina. And in a few weeks am heading out to southern Spain, to take in Cordoba, Seville, Granada and the Alhambra etc. Take your pick. Pack SPF.

Okay, one more as I’m literally in bed and falling asleep here.

Hey Dan, how is the new SubStack format working out? I notice you have 87 questions/comments so far and that is high. I’m just wondering if the new approach is living up to your expectations with regards to membership, engagement, etc.?

-       Shane Batt

I must say I am enjoying this all immensely. I love the sense of community among the readers and subscribers, and I like the freedom to write what I like, at whatever length seems most appropriate. Substack are a great company to work with, and they have a bunch of interesting new products and add-ons coming down the line. They are not paying me to say this! I’m into it, and I really believe that platforms like this are the future for writers who no longer have to depend on the whims and often puny budgets of commissioners at newspapers and media outlets in order to get their ideas out there and make a living as they do. So thank you all for being along for the ride. I’ll get around to more of the questions tomorrow, and probably clean up this article for typos, etc.

Until then…