Welcome to June! For your perusal this week:
- Think history’s all boring dates? Try social history – a former history class-hater turned historical fiction writer because of her love for the ‘real lives behind boring dates and wars’. I never disliked the big names but the food, clothing, hygiene, tools, and other minutiae of every day life provides a sense of place and time that larger events just don’t.
- New research maps in unique detail the devastation of the Black Death on medieval England – Over two thousand square meters of plague burial pits excavated between 2005 and 2014 reveal such a sharp drop in pottery fragments that they estimate the “population of England remained somewhere between 35 and 55 per cent below its pre-Black Death level well into the sixteenth century”. The article links to the University of Lincoln’s announcement and it links to the original paper, which is, alas, password protected.
- Call to save nude Tudor murals on old brothel site – renovation of a former clothing shop in Buckingham UK reveals murals with “lots of naked people in them and…several explicit images” dating from the 1570s-80s. Only one rather tame image at the link, though I suppose the curious could always try contacting the professor quoted in the article.
- Work from 1616 is ‘the first ever science fiction novel’ – I’ve never thought of the Rosicrucian text “The Chymical Wedding” as proto-science fiction, but given that it’s about alchemy and adventure and flying women, I can see it. But is it really the first? The article cites works by Kepler and More as possibilities. What do you think?
- Margaret Cavendish, the long-ignored godmother of science fiction, gets her due in Margaret the First – “The Blazing World” is novel in 17th century literature for including alternative worlds and talking animals, but it seems the author was at least as interesting as her story. Privately ambitious but publicly apologetic for it, this review suggests a tale of female frustration at dreams thwarted that’s maddening in its familiarity – and therefore looks like a cracking good read.
