Deborah Swift's Blog, page 31

Cabinet of Curio-stories – Birth and Death, A Renaissance Gimmel Ring

This ‘gimmel’ ring was made in Germany in 1631. This type of ring has multiple circlets that fit like puzzle pieces.��The word ‘gimmel’ comes from the Latin word gemelli, meaning twins, and often signified two connected eternity rings denoting a couple’s permanent joining in marriage. This type of ring was popular during the Renaissance, but […]

Historical Fiction – 7 Virtues. No 3 – The Past Does Not Exist

This might seem like a rather existentialist title, especially as in one sense we a brought to look at the past every time we read a newspaper or trawl online for yesterday’s sports scores. But in this article on a new theory of time, Jonathan O Callaghan says that ���When you ask people, ���Tell me […]

Historical Fiction : Recommended reads set in the Spanish Civil War & Colonial India

Andalusia 1938 During the Spanish Civil War,  Professor Pinzon and his young grandson are taken hostage by Republican soldiers and imprisoned in an old church. The church is built upon an even more ancient Moorish site, and so begins a dual narrative, set in medieval Andaluz and in 20th century Spain – two interlinked tragic […]

Lady Anne Clifford – travelling 17thC style, with 40 carts

You can’t live in the Westmorland area and not know anything about Lady Anne Clifford. In the 17th century she travelled around her vast Northern estates accompanied by more than forty carts which contained everything she needed to make herself comfortable at her great castles, which were in ill-repair. What she took with her included […]

Cabinet of Curio-stories – An Elizabethan Hair Pin

Silver bodkins for your hair, bobs that maidens love to wear The Pedlar’s Song, from ‘The Triumphant Widow’ 1677 I love looking at what people have found under our feet by metal detecting or digging in their garden. The past is buried so close to the surface! Here’s an Elizabethan pin found by Don Sherratt […]

Historical Fiction – Virtue no 2 The Non-Fiction Novel

The ‘non-fiction novel’ was a phrase originally used by Truman Capote in 1966 ��to describe his book ‘In Cold Blood – A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences.’ Since then, true crimes have been fictionalised with much success, books such as ‘The Suspicions of Mr Whicher’ leading to a slew of similar […]

Historical Fiction – learning from ‘The Nightingale’ and ‘The Secret World of Christoval Alvarez’

Vianne and Isabelle are sisters whose challenge is to survive after the fall of France to the Nazis in WWII. Vianne’s house is requisitioned by the Gestapo, whilst her husband is away fighting, leading to knife-edge tensions as she tries to protect her daughter Sophie, and her Jewish neighbour, and best friend, Rachel. Meanwhile, rebellious […]

Cabinet of Curio-stories – Shoes from the Mary Rose

The Mary Rose, warship of ��King Henry��VIII, lay undiscovered beneath the waves for almost 300 years until one day, a fisherman���s line got tangled in the wreckage and her whereabouts became known. That was in 1836, but the salvage wasn’t attempted until the 1980’s when��about 60 million people around the world switched on their TVs […]

Historical Fiction – Seven Virtues – No 1 Bravery

Having thought about what might constitute the Seven Deadly Sins in Historical Fiction, I’m now getting a little balance by paying attention to the Seven Virtues. And one of them for certain is bravery, and by this, I mean courage with the language. It is a chance for us to wield words from the past […]

Research Find of the Week – ‘Tudor Wimbledon’

��I bought this from a charity shop in Kendal for ��1.29. ��As Wimbledon was a village so close to London (then 10 miles distant), it does include a few anecdotes about famous London personages, such as Catherine Parr, and Henry VIII. The King visited Wimbledon in his last days, when he was ill and could […]