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While writing fantasy is probably my first fictional love, I have a deep and abiding passion for historic fiction. A significant proportion of my half-started trunk novels might be described as "lesbians through the ages in Welsh history", combining several of my rather idiosyncratic passions. But my first published historic romance story, "Where My Heart Goes", fell outside my usual centuries and locations, being set in mid-16th century Italy.
One of the standard failure modes for historic fiction is to cram too much of your background research into the story itself. Given the word-count limit I was working with, that wasn't a serious temptation in this case. But I thought it would be fun to share the historic framework from which I distilled my version of history.
The immediate inspiration, of course, was one of the articles I covered for the Lesbian Historic Motif Project: Eisenbichler, Konrad. “Laudomia Forteguerri Loves Margaret of Austria” in Same Sex Love and Desire Among Women in the Middle Ages (ed. By Francesca Canadé Sautman & Pamela Sheingorn), Palgrave, New York, 2001.
Eisenbichler examined the love sonnets that Laudomia wrote to Margaret, the commentary of their contemporaries on the deep emotional bond between the two women, and both their personal and society context that might shed light on the details of that emotional bond. The poems themselves are, to some extent, conventional in their imagery, unusual only in that those conventions of romantic love are addressed from one woman to another. But the strength of their emotional connection as such that Laudomia's admirer and countryman Agnolo Firenzuola invoked Plato's mythologized explanation of desire as individuals seeking their literal "other half", though Firenzuola felt the need to contrast "those who...love each other’s beauty, some in purity and holiness, as the elegant Laudomia Forteguerra loves the most illustrious Margaret of Austria, some lasciviously, as ... in Rome the great prostitute Cecilia Venetiana.”
Another contemporary noted that at their first meeting, “as soon as Laudomia saw Madama [i.e., Margaret], and was seen by her, suddenly with the most ardent flames of Love each burned for the other, and the most manifest sign of this was that they went to visit each other many times.” And on one of these visits, “they renewed most happily their sweet Loves, and today more than ever, with notes from one to the other they warmly maintain them.”
Their contemporaries seem to have raised no concerns about any possible "lascivious" angle to their love, though in a later century the scandal-monger Brantôme accused them of having a sexual relationship.
In the context of historical speculation, this seemed more than enough basis for imagining a romance between the two women. But what were the historical facts within which this romance would have played out? Historical facts should be outside any prohibition on spoilers, but on the off chance that readers feel differently, I'll put the rest of this behind a cut. Here are the intriguing lives of these women that inspired my story. In addition to Eisenbichler's article, and some basic background from Wikipedia, the bulk of my research was supplied by Charlie R. Steen's Margaret of Parma: A Life (Leiden: Brill, 2013).
( Read more... )
One of the standard failure modes for historic fiction is to cram too much of your background research into the story itself. Given the word-count limit I was working with, that wasn't a serious temptation in this case. But I thought it would be fun to share the historic framework from which I distilled my version of history.
The immediate inspiration, of course, was one of the articles I covered for the Lesbian Historic Motif Project: Eisenbichler, Konrad. “Laudomia Forteguerri Loves Margaret of Austria” in Same Sex Love and Desire Among Women in the Middle Ages (ed. By Francesca Canadé Sautman & Pamela Sheingorn), Palgrave, New York, 2001.
Eisenbichler examined the love sonnets that Laudomia wrote to Margaret, the commentary of their contemporaries on the deep emotional bond between the two women, and both their personal and society context that might shed light on the details of that emotional bond. The poems themselves are, to some extent, conventional in their imagery, unusual only in that those conventions of romantic love are addressed from one woman to another. But the strength of their emotional connection as such that Laudomia's admirer and countryman Agnolo Firenzuola invoked Plato's mythologized explanation of desire as individuals seeking their literal "other half", though Firenzuola felt the need to contrast "those who...love each other’s beauty, some in purity and holiness, as the elegant Laudomia Forteguerra loves the most illustrious Margaret of Austria, some lasciviously, as ... in Rome the great prostitute Cecilia Venetiana.”
Another contemporary noted that at their first meeting, “as soon as Laudomia saw Madama [i.e., Margaret], and was seen by her, suddenly with the most ardent flames of Love each burned for the other, and the most manifest sign of this was that they went to visit each other many times.” And on one of these visits, “they renewed most happily their sweet Loves, and today more than ever, with notes from one to the other they warmly maintain them.”
Their contemporaries seem to have raised no concerns about any possible "lascivious" angle to their love, though in a later century the scandal-monger Brantôme accused them of having a sexual relationship.
In the context of historical speculation, this seemed more than enough basis for imagining a romance between the two women. But what were the historical facts within which this romance would have played out? Historical facts should be outside any prohibition on spoilers, but on the off chance that readers feel differently, I'll put the rest of this behind a cut. Here are the intriguing lives of these women that inspired my story. In addition to Eisenbichler's article, and some basic background from Wikipedia, the bulk of my research was supplied by Charlie R. Steen's Margaret of Parma: A Life (Leiden: Brill, 2013).
( Read more... )
