Mythic Venice February #Dungeon23 #City23

This year I’m taking part in #Dungeon23 which is a challenge where people write a small chunk of a dungeon each day. There is a variant, called #City23, which I’m using to collect ideas for a Mythic Venice supplement.

The January episode is already up and none of you told me to stop so this will be the
February episode.

The First of February: the inevitable gondola episode

Gondolas appear in the documentary record at the end of the 12th century according to Ackroyd which is earlier than some of my preliminary reading. Game period gondolas are shorter and wider than modern ones and they are symmetrical. Modern ones are slightly asymmetrical to improve manoeuvrability. They have cabins, some of which are removable. They have livery but I’m not sure that’s required. Noble houses have multiple but there are public ones for hire. All ornamentation is forbidden on gondolas in 1562 as part of the Venetian sanctuary lords.

During Elizabeth’s reign there are 10,000 gondolas in the city.

Gondoliers must be discreet. This is odd in a city of spies but if a gondolier denounces a lady to her husband the other gondoliers drown him. They are trusted with sensitive letters.

After 20 years of service, a gondola is too warped to use and is incinerated at Murano to heat the glassworks. This is a link for sympathetic magic.

February 2nd, sumptuary laws

The law is believed to be ancient and fair but changes weekly. [Adventure idea, the Traditionalist and Transitionalist Guernicii come to study this paradox and create a third faction.] Venetian law is codified at the end of the 12th century but custom may override written law. Venetian trials are pragmatic, swift and efficient. Lawyerly tricks are despised. Venetian legislation is a constant, basically futile process. Laws may not be enforced, traditions that are unsupported are retrospectively buttressed by law.

Ackroyd mentions sumptuary law and makes the novel point that its purpose is to stop the poor loathing the rich enough to rebel. Feasts were circumscribed because they brought together powerful people who might conspire against the state. Slaves and cooks were paid to inform on those who had feasts.

Sumptuary laws were often ignored but could annoy magi. The law is saying that you can’t wear more than two rings or you’re not allowed to wear anything “made of X” might prohibit the mundane shape of a magic item. As an adventure idea, the characters may want to change the law to allow them to carry openly a magic item imported from another state.

Sumptuary laws are fiercest when the state is in trouble. After losses against the League of Cambrai, the state cracks down very hard, no swanning about being rich and carefree when the midden is hitting the windmill.

February 3rd: The metaphorical personification of Venice as a body for Norea.

Norea, as mentioned in the January 18th episode, is the spirit from Deep Faerie that the Master
of Games is drawing forth. Venetian artists love to compare their city to a body. What bits
are which varies but they get really complicated about it, down to the circulatory system and
digestive tract. Venice has a desire to grow, express its quintessential self, reproduce,
as in Crete and Corfu, and it has a sort of nervous system and reflexive reactions. Henry
James says that Venice notices your affection. This is the opposite of what I expected, which
was more of a “New York as a woman” by Suzanne Vega thing. He thought Venice mild, interesting and sad.

This is the body of Norea, not the Queen In Glass. That might be important, maybe it isn’t. Maybe that’s just an interface for dealing with humans. The civic plan of 1557 is the city’s final physical border. After that it concentrates on internal complexification. A covenant could be a parish about a campo, or all of them could be stuck in a single place, much as the German merchants have stuck in a single place. Does Norea have different moods in her different suburbs? Ackroyd says that the stones are the soul of Venice. Does that mean that Norea inhabits them as her anchor? He also notes that Venice has eclectic architecture, not solemn or menacing.

Venice’s basic social unit is the family. The family can be fined for transgressions of members. Businesses are run in families. The senate is a meeting of aristocratic families. It’s common for only one patrician male in each generation to marry, and for unmarried men to lead their estates to their nephews. There’s a bee metaphor here that Ackroyd runs with that I’ll skip.

Venice runs orphanages and public health care.

February 4th: education.

There is no university in Venice, although there is one in Padua, which is a possession so loyal that after the League of Cambrai take it, it rebels to restore Venetian rule. There are grammar schools in every its sestieri and there are academies, public and private tutors, and the most favoured subjects are very practical. Venetian clubs and societies specialise in all kinds of things, so formal training in obscure fields of learning is possible.

Ackroyd says that the Renaissance came late to Venice because it was so interested in practical things. He seems not in this to factor in technological progress or artistic progress. His story about Galileo is that he’s a lecturer in mass at Padua, in vents the telescope, and he pitches it as a device to detect enemy ships at a distance. For this he’s made professor of astronomy for life and paid an ungodly salary.

The epicentre of European printing is Venice. Paper comes from Venetian territory near Lake
Grado. Staley says that the dogaressa is the special patroness of printing. Around 1500,
there are around 200 print shops in Venice. Venice finds a way to commodify learning as
books. One of the early printers ran a sort of printer academy, his name was Aldous Manotitis.

Venetians may only study at Padua. None of this weird foreign learning for a Venetian.
Walsingham, our constant interest in Maginomia, and probably your character’s boss in some
versions of the game, studied at Padua. Padua has all kinds of cool stuff seriously. We should
do some sort of setting here. It was the secular centre of learning in Europe, according to
Ackroyd. This city does not support literature. Its best known writers do memoirs (Marco Polo, Cassanova). It is the home of “rags to riches” as a genre, with fairy tales like Puss in Boots.

Venetians use their own language when legislating in public speaking, but use Greek, then French, then Tuscan, as their language of learning. I’ll just note that Tuscan is the direct
ancestor of modern Italian. Venetian is intelligible, but has an accent. For example, they use
the letter Z far more often.

February 5th: Colours

Ackroyd goes into the dying trade a bit on pages 222 and 223. I can reuse some of that for the colourmen alchemy stuff I was working on for London. [See also Color by Findlay and Chromatopia by Coles.] Ackroyd mentions some familiar sources of colour: orpment, realgar, vermillion, lead-white, lapis lazuli. He mentions, but doesn’t name, ultramarine. He also mentions saffron from the east, but seems again to be coy about the slave plantations that the Venetians had there. Venetian red is a new one on me, Veneto is a mineral, and it’s used to colour the blood of Christ.

Colourmen, which I mentioned before, are people who make paint and dye. Before about 1500, artists used to make their own colours. Later the colourmen are linked to the apothecaries and cosmeticians, that is, they’re a branch of alchemy. Cleopatra wrote a treatise on cosmetic alchemy, but I’m not sure if it’s known in period, secret society stuff maybe.

[Added later, Venice is also a centre of marquetry, glass tesserae, which come from Murano, are
needed in the shape and material table.]

February 6th: Carnival

Ackroyd says that Carnival dates from the end of the 11th century. Carnival’s web page gives 1162. Originally it was 40 days long, eventually it became six months. It encouraged tourism, made the people less likely to rebel, and made Venice seem rich and powerful. It makes works for musicians, theatrical performance, and pyrotechnicians. Lots of sex work, theoretically, and gambling, certainly. There’s a group here called the tolomazi, who act as guides, translators, and money changers all in one. That could be a useful contact for the player characters, or a player character option.

Masks are first mentioned in 1268. Gambling while masked is forbidden. By the 18th century
everyone is masked during carnival, except money changers. Masked balls were open to
everyone with a mask. You were expected not to break character, a full description of
the main masks and characters will occur later in the sequence of episodes. The state doesn’t
own a casino, but it does license casinos. There is a city lottery however, the prize
for 1590 was 100 000 crowns.

February 7th: Sports

A popular sport in Venice is the Labour of Hercules, which is making him in pyramids. Racquets, fencing, horse and boat racing, and balloon (which is a sort of football) were popular. They were always competitive and they were always prizes.

One sport that’s of interest to us is the War of Fists, which is people fighting over bridges. There are two great tribes in this, the Castellani, who are from the Arsenal and the Nicolotti who are the fisherfolk. For the War of Fists, you can use helmets, shields and rattan clubs, and the idea is
to take and hold the bridge. The bridge is over a canal by the way, so if you get knocked
off you just land in the water to the amusement of everyone nearby. This seems to post-date
Ars Magica and predate Maginonia.

February 8th: Art

Art is produced in workshops using a sort of assembly line. There’s no suggestion that a single artist should do all of the work. Painters are a trade guild and there’s no real difference between portrait artists and commercial painters because famous artists are commercial painters. Many have side-lines doing set dressing for the theatre or for the state. There’s one painter, the state painter, in charge of professional banners, state processional properties, and maintaining official portraits.

Venetian artists are known for quick, improvised work. There are basically two schools of thought which Ackroyd calls the Opulent and Narrative. Two fires in the 1570s see a heap of public art in the Ducal Palace replaced. A fresh history is published to explain the new art. History is refurbished. Vasari, who’s turned up as a villain before in the podcast because he hated Cellini, was annoyed that Venetians don’t sketch out before they paint. Paintings are not meant to be accurate historically. They’re not very experimental. They are meant to look good to the purchases and their friends.

The Venetians were huge fans of cartography as decoration and arguably they were the most accurate cartographers in the world. There are some brilliant period maps which I should steal as decoration for the final project.

Music is very important in the state. All guilds have songs. Most popular songs already have dancers attached to them or will quickly develop them. All festivals have music. This is because music, the harmonious, choral activity is seen as a symbol of the harmony of the state. You aren’t allowed to applaud in church. Dancing is popular and schools exist.

Singers do have a guild. Female orphanages trained talented singing girls as choirs. Some are so good they could make listeners faint, weep, or propose marriage. This sounds like a hedge tradition.

Music is for sale as printed sheets and this is invented in Venice, centre of trade and
commodification of art. Instrument fabrication for export is also a specialty of Venice,
particularly and strangely church organs,

February the 9th: Sex work

Ackroyd’s numbers are weird. He says 10,000 out of a population of 100,000 were sex workers. Female sex workers. So that’s 20% of women and no men at all. So I must have misread what he was saying. He suggests that dowry inflation makes it so that only one child of each patrician family can be a bride, so lots of horny, single patrician men and lots of nuns are about.

In addition to basic sex work, there’s an upper-class, geisha sort of deal called the “honest courtesan”. Coryat suggests that you should carry moly, a herb, so that they can’t charm you. This is clever, witty, and political because moly is the herb that Hermes tells Odysseus to eat so that Circe cannot charm him. It is, I believe, poisonous, so that’s probably not a good idea. Sex work is a licensed profession. They have a guild.

In Venice, homosexuality is illegal and that doesn’t work at all. Ackroyd suggests that good cruising spots are certain churches, gyms, apothecaries and pastry makers. Honestly, Ackroyd would know: he did a lengthy discussion of gay culture in London from the Romans forward, which at some point we should mine for Magonomia, because it’s brilliant. I’m probably not the
author for that though.

He then discusses cicisbeo. These are male escorts, arguably not sex workers, that women are expected to have with them in the 16th century. Some cicisbei lived in the household and many were gay, according to Ackroyd. They were for public show and husbands were expected to insist on their presence. They acted as a sort of chaperone to maintain the honour of the wife.

Ackroyd notes that prostitutes and nuns tended to get on really well as women outside the civic structure. I’ve seen that noted in several places.

February 10th: places I need plans for
The Doge’s Palace
The Basilica
St Mark’s Square

the gibbet leaves the square in 1505 in the real world, in 1550, Jacopo San Savino remodels the square to be more classical and he builds the library and the mint.

I need to check Thomas Coryat’s book.
I need to make sure the Church of San Germanio is in the plans. It’s pulled down by Napoleon, which is why it’s not in the modern place.
I need plans for San Zacharia.
Ruskin has the Basilica of Torcello as the centre for the Infernal, which I am happy to steal. German merchant palace, that’s the Fondaco de Tadeshi. It could be used as a version of a Hermetic quarter. It’s a current day shopping centre, so there are maps online.
And then there’s also another note of Debarbari’s woodcut, A View of Venice, which I should use as art.

February 11: The Church.
Bishops are appointed by the Senate. Bishops who receive orders from the Pope cross check them with the Council of Ten.
St Mark, or possibly St Mary is the top saint.
Ackroyd draws the link to Orthodox caesaropapism n Constantinople.
Sermons were checked by bureaucrats.
Protestants are accepted by the government. Jews are accepted by the government.
Venice has more miracles per square mile than any comparable space. They see the city itself as an act of God, and so they don’t care about the popes. Venetian cardinals are expected to report back on the secret councils of the Vatican.
They are very attached to relics, and they import a heap of them, icons too.
Saints who were stolen for Venice wanted to be stolen, or they would have stopped it using miracles.
Many religious houses are named after Old Testament figures.
St Francis lobs in during the 1220s. He’s on his way to try and convert the Sultan. This is where the Franciscans have their church.
Children taunt Jesuits in the street.
The Inquisition arrives in 1571, and uniquely the Venetians force changes so that there are six judges, three ecclesiastic and three secular. Sentences are comparatively light the usual sentence for witchcraft was the pillory.
Property owners of a parish elect their priests. There are about 600, of whom 75% are not of the patrician class.
In the 17th century the Pope excommunicates Venice, and in response priests were forbidden to read the papal bull, and threatened with hanging if they closed their churches. Basically, the people didn’t care.

February 12: Ackroyd’s notes on Venetian witchcraft
Venetians are very superstitious. This is an extension of folk Catholicism. Their witchcraft is focused on wealth, good fortune, and healing.

The devil is big on contracts in Venice, and he often accepts coins or salt for minor things.

Gamblers use charms a lot.

Ackroyd mentions a love potion made of sage and a woman’s own menstrual blood and mixed with the food of the man who they wish to charm.

There are lots of ghosts. Second sight is only found in those not properly baptized. Unfinished business is usually a hidden treasure, and there are haunted canals and houses.

I’ve cross-referenced Marina’s Wail in Staley, which was a very early Venice episode, which is a banshee variant.

February 13: The Spanish plot

In the real world this happened in 1618, but for Magonomia you could put it earlier. On the 18th of May two anonymous bodies were found on the public gibbet. They are, by rumour, French. No official says anything, which of itself is unusual.

People notice 500 French merchants have gone missing. The rumour spreads that the Council of Ten drowned them all. The story circulates that the Spanish and French plus some mercenaries had formed a pact to set fires simultaneously at the arsenal, mint, and ducal palace. This may not have been true.

This might have been a crowd hysteria with the same sort of deadly effect.

This isn’t in my notes, but I’ll mention it now. There is a particular point in the canals outside of Giudecca where they drop dead people so that they wash out with the tide. Well,
executed, dead people.

February 14: Ackroyd’s notes on law

Ackroyd mentions a “Guild of death”.
Executions are solemn, and public. People are also strangled privately in the cells under the Ducal Palace and their bodies are dumped in the Canale Orfano.

Sample punishments:
Forging coins: Burned alive.
Senators singing blasphemy songs: Tongues ripped out and their hands cut off.
Friar who impregnated 15 nuns: Burned at stake.
Priest accused of treason: Burned alive upside down.

It’s not true in the real world that the Council of Ten had a band of assassins on retainer. But in the game world, it’s true, and it’s not just them.

Insulting Venice can get you killed or have your tongue ripped out.

Property crime is more important than violence to Venetians. For theft, you’re hanged, for rape, you get sent to prison for eight days, and then a fine equal to the dowry.

Patricians are the most violent class.
All men carry knives.

There is a special police force called the Lords of the Night who keep peace at night time. Even today Venice is quieter than other cities at night. There’s less traffic and fewer pedestrians.

I don’t have this mentioned here, but in another book, it was mentioned that the Lords of the Night were also responsible for gate-crashing gay clubs.

February 15: Caterina Sforza

Having broken down Venice: Pure City for RPG hooks, the next book is Daughters of Alchemy by Meredith K. Ray. I feel like I have made a mistake there. Yes, I have. During my notes, I keep
swapping between Kay and Ray, but yes, it’s Meredith K. Ray.

It leads out by talking about Caterina Sforza and her book Experimenti. Sforza is the maternal great-grandmother of Catherine de Medici, the sorceress and rival queen in the Magonomia setting. Experimenti, or Experiments in English, is a Book of Secrets. That is, it’s part of a genre of writing of the time.

Caterina swaps secrets with people. She’s part of a Republic of Letters. See the Catholic wizard in the Tower of London in the basic Maginomia rules or, for Ars Magica players, this is an epistle network.

Experimenti isn’t a philosophical book. There’s none of that mucking about trying to get to immortality that you get in other books. The recipes are intensely practical in effect, and about 30 are alchemical in the sense that they try and transform metal. A few are in Latin, rather than Italian, a few have their methods encoded using an included key.

Sforza uses colour as her marker for process completion. The style of alchemy, therefore, needs glass vessels. She includes medicines, antidotes, poisons, money-making things, cosmetics, and confectionery. She has an apothecary in the city of Forli. She also bought ingredients from nunneries, which sold pharmacological supplies. These were leftovers from their gardens. Caterina and all her kids have botanic gardens, for materials. She may have her own laboratory in that garden. Ray calls this her officina, so if you don’t want to call your laboratory a lab, Ars Magica or Magonomia, office seems a perfectly period-effective alternative.

The Florentine nunnery where she was educated had a retail pharmacy and it sent her fruit, flowers, and so on. It also has a famous scriptorium.

“Pills, ungents, liquors, elixirs, and possibly cosmetics.” – from Nuns as pharmacists by Sharon Stroschia

Cosmetics are part of alchemy from the very beginning. There’s a recipe for a triple distillation in Sforza. The first distillation removes freckles, the second distillation cures fistulas, and the third distillation cuts through iron.

Alchemical secrets are state secrets, because they destroy and disrupt economies.

The next chapter in Kay is about Isabella Cortese. I’ve not previously seen this work in English. Sforza dies in 1509.

February 16th: Venetian treacle

the earliest panacea, was made by Mithridates VI of POntus, who tested venoms and antidotes on his prisoners. A variant was used by the Romans. Galen had one, but it takes years to make. These curatives were called “theriacs”.

The main ingredient of theriac, in the Venetian version, is vipers caught in the hills around Padua, where the university is. In English, the word theriac becomes “treacle”, and the best comes from Venice. It’s also where the word “apothecary” comes from. The London Guild of Physicians inspected apothecary shops for cleanliness and medicinal purity.

There is a law about treacle quality, the Pharmacy Wares, Drugs, and Stuffs Act in 1540. Eventually, only one guy was licensed to make it, during Elizabeth’s reign, and that was a man called William Besse. Seems like a valuable monopoly. In 1669, Moyse Charas deliberately published the recipe he used, so that he could damage the Venetian monopoly on theriacs.

Theriac making includes fermenting herbs, so it takes months. It’s strongest after
being stored for six years, but it lasts for decades.

February 17th: Speziale

Speziale are apothecaries.. Socially below a physician. They stock “not just ingredients from medicinal prescriptions but also with foods, sugar, candy, oils, pigments, papers and ink” and that’s a quote from Meredith Kay. Howell says that in Venice physicians hang out in apothecary
shops, but put a copper plaque above the door. If you want a physician, you go to the apothecary. Jews are allowed to be doctors and bankers and not much else so there are a lot of Jews in medicine.

Venice is a centre for supplies much as it is a centre for spices. Courts have purchasing factors here. The name “speziale” literally means “spicers” but in the extended sense of pharmacist / compounding apothecary / cosmetician / ink and dye seller / stationer. Padua University has one on staff.

Camilla Erculiani was an apothecary in Padua, a writer and a salonniere. She thought that the deluge was caused by human extreme longevity because human earth was not returning. It allowed the waters to be comparatively strong to rise up.

Speziale were social spaces where news was exchanged so they were important for spying. They were also surveilled by the Inquisition, but recall that in Venice the Inquisition is cowed by the civil government. Camilla Erculiani also thought science was a way for women to prove their worth and to demand fairness.

February 18th: Epistolary Networks

Here’s a quote from Ray.
”Recipes performed different functions, depending on the circumstance. By supplying
a valuable secret to someone in a higher social position, one might earn status or financial
reward. Those already established among the highest levels of society circulated recipes
among themselves to reciprocate favours or gifts, establish goodwill and maintain networks
of communication, and cement their own position and reputation through access to valuable
and even clandestine knowledge.”

And another quote:
* ”Recipes were indeed a form of currency used to reciprocate important political, intelligence and counsel.”
* A few other quick notes from this section of Daughters of Alchemy, secrecy can’t be a solitary pursuit, it needs insiders and outsiders.
* Epistolatory novels are considered a feminine genre.
* A female participant is called a letterata and a male participant is called a letterato.

Sometimes the correspondent is fake. It lets the author talk in two viewpoints and shields them if the “other” says something heretical because reporting a conversation isn’t the same as holding heretical beliefs. It lets you head off objections by having the “other” voice them. Some collections are written for the receiver, others for an audience and when they are collected for publication, serious editing might occur. It gives your ideas reflected glory if the “other” you are writing to was famous and lets you show off your classical learning as the “other” and your experimental credentials as you. Then I make a note about Griffin and Sabine, which you should check out if you haven’t read, and it lets the “other” praise you so you get to big note yourself in front of the reader.

February 19: The fashion for secrets

A secret or experiment is valuable “not as something unknown but as something proven”. It is not the rarity or weirdness that gives it its value, it’s that it works and it has provenance (that is, it
comes from a celebrity noble or a doctor). Books of Secrets are popular amongst the money
class and are part of a movement towards vernacular Italian literature, the vulgari, and they are
targeted at women.

Books of Secrets demystify despite their name. Women are the target audience because they contain practical advice on their interests. These books are effective and entertaining but don’t teach underlying philosophical theory.

Collecting recipes is linked to the Venetian habit of collecting art, luxury items, and natural curiosities.

The occult/secret is integral to the marketing of the books. Books in Venetian and Tuscan are easier to sell to women because they are rarely taught Latin.

February 20th: Anatomy of a Secret
This is according to Cardano (1562).
A secret may be discovered in six ways. These are Ars Magica experience sources,
* learned insight
* comparison of similar things
* from teachers
* by travelling the world,
* by having enough money to do research at home
* through good fortune.

Secrets have three levels, great mediocre and trivial. The examples given are a cure for the plague, a cure for the fever, and a cure for rashes.

Secrets can be perfect, which means 100% effective or rare, not effective most of the time due to complexity.

They may vary in difficulty and cost.

Good secrets have seven attributes, they are authentic, useful, morally sound, have easily acquired ingredients, are relatively quick, are not labour-intensive, and have a noble goal.

Recipes and secrets are related. The format (ingredients > methods > tools) isn’t similar coincidentally. Most look like early cookbooks, because books of secrets assume that you know certain terms and techniques, much as cookbooks do.

So a good secret is
* easy to use
* fast
* cheap
* dependable
* profitablE
* moral.

It is not necessarily secret in the sense of being occluded.

February 21: Basics of practice from Isabella de Cortese

* Work is practice, do not waste time on the puzzles of philosophers.
* Use recipes which are direct, none of this medieval mystical rubbish.
* Work alone.
* Use strong glass or terracotta vessels.
* Become familiar with basic materials.
* Watch your file
* Keep tongs nearby.
* Do not discuss the Art.
* Keep people out of your lab.
* Acquire a faithful helper.
* If successful, give thanks to God and give to the poor.

A faithful helper is defined later as experienced, loyal, and discreet.

The arrangements of secrets in the four volumes shows that stuff we take for granted is miraculous in her time. For example soap balls, that removal stains are in with making gold and dyes, not over in the beauty waters and cosmetics. This is because they renew expensive fabric,

February 22: Moderata de Fonte (Modesta Pozzo)
Again, this is Ray. This section is about the Querelle des femmes”, which is a sort of rolling, many-sided debate about the role of women. It’s not a lot of use for this in the Mythic Venice setting, because women being equally capable is baked in. Enemies from the “women suck” or “cosmetics are cursed”. lines of argument are boring.

One take that I saw, which I thought was interesting and I hadn’t read before, is that cosmetics are longevity potions. By staving off death they stave off Salvation. It’s insane, but it’s new insane.

Fonte’s earliest work is an incomplete chason in the Orlando style called Floridoro. Its characters are
Risamante: who’s like Bradmentine except less interested in men
Circetta: a literal “Maga”. She’s not a witch, she’s a magus with the female form. This links into Ars Magica, where we’re used “maga” for magi who are female for real-world decades. It’s good to find it in the source documents.
Risamante’s impetus is getting back her inheritance from her sister, and in her happy ending she has a daughter, Salarisa, who is the progenatrix of the Medicis.
Circetta is an amalgam of Alcina, the princess of Cathay, who does illusions, Logistilla and Melissa (who is the daughter of Cersei and Ulysses). She is virginal and wise.

The book is dedicated to Bianca Cappello, and Francesco de Medici, who are alchemical practitioners. Then I notice that Circetta means “Little Cersei”. Then I debate whether Bianca Cappello needs an episode because she’s a Venetian practitioner of alchemy, who marries into the Medicis in 1579.

Circetta can turn men into trees. She’s kept eternally young in a regio by her mother’s “curse” that works suspiciously like a blessing, She can’t leave until a man as good as Ulysses comes to rescue her. She’s described as brave, severe, courteous, kind, honest, and marvellously wise. She commands the beasts of the forest, and she has three handmaidens, who appear to be alchemical assistants, among other things.

Circe’s lore is in the books of the island, and Circetta’s arts are the good parts. Circetta’s a powerful natural magician.

February 23rd.: Circetta continued
Check: Fonte’s “Worth of women”. This is only 16 cantos long.

Circetta can use her magic to
* cover every city in the world in fog
* raise mountains
* build a temple
* change men into swine, bulls and bears
She can only do this because it’s closer to the true nature of the victims, that is, she has a method to unlock heartbeasts.

Her palace has astrological statues. Astrology is blamed for women loving men despite their moral deficits. She puts true friendship above true love.

Ferrara was damaged by earthquakes in 1570 to 1574, causing a lot of learned speculation about the cause of earthquakes. This book makes really quite extreme claims to Ars Magica’s Law of Essential Nature, stating that magic cannot alter men’s morals or nature.

Similarly, women seem doomed to slavery by their love and compassion, which are not
alterable. Fonte gives seeking alchemical gold as a masculine practice, which would surprise many of the practitioners already named in these notes. She then cops out by saying that the
sweat of a man’s brow is transmuted to gold by his own work, and that is an alchemy that never
fails.

February the 24th: Happy Arcadia
Marinella, has a maga called Ernia in her book “Enrico.”

Has two magi and a maga in “Happy Arcadia”. Check also Ersilla in the same book.

Then there’s a family tree. There’s a magus called Ciberione. He can travel the world in a few hours via his chariot pulled by four black courses. He has an apprentice called Erimeno.

Erimeno
* can talk to all creatures
* has a garden of multigrafted trees via natural magic
* has a collection in a grotto, including gems, roots, sstones, herbs
* a camera obscura
* a hydraulic organ
* an automaton of a shepherd that puts real shepherds into the uncanny valley, so they think it’s * motivated by demons
* and a substance called Rabiano, which conveys the air of respectability to the wearer. There’s * a note here that that might be radium. Hmm, seems strange, I don’t think that was discovered
at the time.

It says he was trained on the highest mountains, which in Ars Magica probably means
in a big magical aura.

Ciberione has a daughter called Erato. She’s a natural magician, astronomer, and prophetess. She has a fiery visage, which I presume is Piercing Gaze virtue. She has a companion called Armilla. She is chaste, virginal, and Diana-like. She has an exceptional mind. Erato is called the “new Hypatia.”. She has a garden above the clouds, and thinks the Milky Way is made of stars, not the afflatus of the earth.

February 25th: Enrico

Enrico is a historical epic set around the Fourth Crusade. It contains a maga called Erina. She is wise, chased, rules an island of women (a hundred beautiful virgins). She greets a noble, male shipwreck victim. She has a study companion called Altea.

Erinaq’s teacher was her father, Fileno, who learned from his father, who learned from the Magus Armano. Her father was an astrologer, so his lab is up another mountain. He is very perceptive of first causes and only teaches good magic to his daughter. He counsels
his daughter in a dream, force ghost style, because he is dead, that the shipwrecked knight is related to her and was wrecked on the island via a divine providence. If he returns to the war, he will die. Still, he must be allowed free choice in the matter.

Erina takes a knight on a tour of the world, giving the reader a primer on Venetian ideas of geography. He leaves to join the Venetian assault on Constantinople and dies. They travel by a flying chariot, led by a winged lion. Note the winged lion is an important Venetian symbol.

February 26: Padua University

Good grief, this is short. This needs to be done far better. Founded by Venice in 1545. There are a mix of students and scholars from all across Europe. It has alumni all over the place,
Walsingham for example. It has the first botanical gardens, it says here, I doubt that’s true,
because I know that the French had them before. First in where I wonder? It’s a centre for study of medicine and anatomy, It exports alchemical practices via alumni to many courts. Padua has a humanist curriculum, focusing on classical languages, history, theology, astronomy and mathematics.

February 27: the predicted floods of 1524.

I’ve already used this in Magonomia, but in Venice the idea that a rare conjunction in Pisces means global deluge is a huge, huge deal. This is first published in 1522 and this leads to a flurry of what’s called Deluvian literature. Oddly the Church’s position that global flooding would require a miracle because Aristotle says that water doesn’t spontaneously flood the land is more reassuring than contemporary science, which is full of “Yeah, but maybe…” ideas. Italy does get floods in that decade, likely because of deforestation.

There’s a note there that we should do something for its 500th anniversary. And a note to myself that I have not worked on the Saeftinghe Flotilla idea. It’s not at all relevant to this but I’ll just quickly mention it. There’s a flood in Holland in 1570 that does enormous damage and the English send relief fleet. So that could be useful for a story idea.

February 28: Margherita Sarrrochi
Calidora is a maga in the poem Scanderbeide by Margherita Sarrrochi.

Sarrochi was a correspondent with Galileo and asked him for editing assistance and help to translating her writing into paid patronage. Her book was published in a second edition with the Calidora plotline removed, which is suspicious. In real life that was probably to make the war story the sharper focus. Calidora forms a link Circetta the earlier Erina, This could be actual in-game. The editions are in 1606 and 1623 so the acceleration that is caused by the Master of Games is needed.

Calidora wears a sun and moon diadem and is presented as an amalgam of male and female,
which are science and love as elements. She is slighted in love by her husband and heads out
to the forest to make a love potion. There’s some good flavour text here.

“At the appointed hour in a lonely spot she sprinkles amber, myrrh, and other choice scents
over a fire of ebony that burns with no smoke at all…She lets down her golden locks into
the wind and removing the hearts from three live doves with a single knife, she writes [his] name upon the page in her own blood.” She has a wax image in him as well. That quote is from Ray.

She could be a Tytalus because she is said to revel in public enmities by her
detractors.

That brings us to the end of February and to the end of my notes from “Daughters of
Alchemy”. Next month we start filling out what you would find in a spices shop by going through all of the colours and their sources and what mystical associations they had in local folklore.