The calm before the calm before the storm: Coundown to Langue[dot]doc 1305 Day 2
Today is your last countdown post before my book comes out. Countdown will skip a day due to Yom Kippur. I know - bad author! Except that the wonderful Helen Stubbs has interviewed me about the book and about various other things and that will be on her blog tomorrow. You'll find it here, then: http://helenstubbs.wordpress.com/
One last thing before I get to the interesting stuff, my novel is now available on pre-order (which I forgot to say, earlier). You can find it here.
Today's stories worth reading are Medieval. In a perfect world, I would be giving you Clemence of Barking and other fine authors of saints' tales, or maybe my favourite Middle French poetry, for both are relevant to my novel, but Clemence is hard to obtain and that made me think that it might be more polite to give you something in a language you can certainly read rather than in a language that only a few of you read. It's a shame, though, because Clemence's Life of St Catherine is cool. Or something interesting, anyhow.
It's another work I haven't read for so long I've half-forgotten it and that requires a re-read. I meant to re-read it for my novel, but it turned out that my historian's academic specialisation was not something the scientists cared about so no-one even asked her who Clemence of Barking is, so the saint remains a mystery in the story and so I had no excuse for my re-read. One of the reasons I made my historian an expert in Clemence of Barking was for an excuse to read all the modern literature on Anglo-Norman hagiography (on which I'm not an expert), so it all went a bit awry. I could have just shoved in everything I knew about everything and found excuses that way, but that would have been such a different type of novel and much less fun for everyone. Except Clemence of Barking, who has missed her moment in the sun. Come to think of it, a sulk by Richard I gets more time than the Life of St Catharine. So does an astrolabe that no-one can use. Life is not fair sometimes.
To get back to the readable-in-English, this is one of my favourite sites for Medieval texts: http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams I've been using it recently for versions of Robin Hood (there is no Robin Hood in Langue[dot]doc 1305 but here's some for you anyway) and it has some gorgeous Arthurian material. Speaking of which, here's the Alliterative Arthur (for I am in a mood for alliteration). Also almost entirely unrelated to my novel are the magic and occasionally bawdy stories of Eustache the Monk.
If anyone wants to know the sources I actually did use for my novel, I've got a list of a lot of them (not all, but close enough) and would be happy to put it up under a cut. I'd put it up on my webpage, but the webpage is in passive mode right now, for it's going to change entirely at the end of the year. If you say "please, I want!" before Kol Nidre I might be able to put it up before Yom Kippur and give you your Day One post anyhow.
One last thing before I get to the interesting stuff, my novel is now available on pre-order (which I forgot to say, earlier). You can find it here.
Today's stories worth reading are Medieval. In a perfect world, I would be giving you Clemence of Barking and other fine authors of saints' tales, or maybe my favourite Middle French poetry, for both are relevant to my novel, but Clemence is hard to obtain and that made me think that it might be more polite to give you something in a language you can certainly read rather than in a language that only a few of you read. It's a shame, though, because Clemence's Life of St Catherine is cool. Or something interesting, anyhow.
It's another work I haven't read for so long I've half-forgotten it and that requires a re-read. I meant to re-read it for my novel, but it turned out that my historian's academic specialisation was not something the scientists cared about so no-one even asked her who Clemence of Barking is, so the saint remains a mystery in the story and so I had no excuse for my re-read. One of the reasons I made my historian an expert in Clemence of Barking was for an excuse to read all the modern literature on Anglo-Norman hagiography (on which I'm not an expert), so it all went a bit awry. I could have just shoved in everything I knew about everything and found excuses that way, but that would have been such a different type of novel and much less fun for everyone. Except Clemence of Barking, who has missed her moment in the sun. Come to think of it, a sulk by Richard I gets more time than the Life of St Catharine. So does an astrolabe that no-one can use. Life is not fair sometimes.
To get back to the readable-in-English, this is one of my favourite sites for Medieval texts: http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams I've been using it recently for versions of Robin Hood (there is no Robin Hood in Langue[dot]doc 1305 but here's some for you anyway) and it has some gorgeous Arthurian material. Speaking of which, here's the Alliterative Arthur (for I am in a mood for alliteration). Also almost entirely unrelated to my novel are the magic and occasionally bawdy stories of Eustache the Monk.
If anyone wants to know the sources I actually did use for my novel, I've got a list of a lot of them (not all, but close enough) and would be happy to put it up under a cut. I'd put it up on my webpage, but the webpage is in passive mode right now, for it's going to change entirely at the end of the year. If you say "please, I want!" before Kol Nidre I might be able to put it up before Yom Kippur and give you your Day One post anyhow.
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