from Medieval Academy News

How Medieval Can You Be in a Medieval Mystery Novel?
by Margaret Frazer

Not very, is the answer that first springs to mind. The disparities of perception, behavior, and language between medieval times and ours seem to make it impossible for a fiction author to be true to the time and yet accessible to modern readers. Yet why set a story in another time if not to explore and experience the otherness of that time?

Certainly some authors prefer to do the Middle Ages “on the cheap,” as only an excuse to parade characters around in fancy-dress—the “Mary Jane visits the Castle” syndrome. They establish they’re writing about the Middle Ages by trotting out the clichés—filth (preferably dung, but mud will do); hanging, drawing, and quartering and/or heads on pikes; general brutality; the (inevitable) Black Death—and there you have The Middle Ages, with everyone waiting for the Renaissance to happen so they can have a bath and be civilized. (This pre-supposes a vast ignorance of the Renaissance, but that’s another matter).

But suppose an author wants to deal honestly with a fictional medieval setting—to have the characters in a story exist in something other than a crowd of cliches? Perhaps first among the problems of doing so is language. A book written in medieval prose style would sorely try the general reader, but to write a story with purely modern vocabulary is a vast falsification. In my own novels, set in England in the early 1400s, I try to keep most of my vocabulary pre-1500. For example, “nervous” meant something different in the 1400s, so when writing of a “nervous” man I found medieval ways to describe him rather than using the modern word.

Or did a word exist at all in medieval England? Take “blackmail”—a Scottish word, first noted in the early 1500s. But blackmail was surely done in medieval England—and it was. As “extortion.” This trying to hold to medieval vocabulary provides me with an insight into the time and keeps me from imposing alien concepts on the characters while giving readers a subtle sense of being there instead of here, of being then instead of now. Likewise, a simple twist of sentence structure—“It must needs be done as soon as might be”—is easily understood but gives the feel of someone speaking somewhen other than the twenty-first century.

Then there is setting. Modern-set novels don’t usually start along the lines of, “Here in the early twenty-first century, the air reeking of auto-mobile exhaust, people dying of AIDS by the thousands, political scandals at every turn . . .” because we know we don’t frame our everyday lives with a constant litany of horrors. Most of our days are ordinary days, and much of late medieval English life was surely the same—ordinary days lived in ordinary ways.

Since I write mystery novels, something troublesome is going to occur in the course of the story, but around that trouble, I write of medieval life going its everyday ways, with the characters thinking, reacting, moving, and perceiving within the parameters of their time, not ours. A woman may be of independent mind—that’s perfectly medieval—but should not wield modern feminist attitudes. The hero may be a bold thinker but as a follower of, say, Duns Scotus or John Wycliffe, not as an Existentialist. Modern attitudes, from cleanliness to warfare to religion to sex, do not belong in a medieval novel.

For instance, class structure was as normal as air to medieval people and informed everyone’s behavior. It should likewise inform the behavior of characters in a story without being an issue, unless the issue is specific to the story. Nor is there need to make elaborate point of what were ordinary, everyday ways of behaving. When sleeping ar-rangements are dealt with in a story, for instance, the reality that most people did not sleep privately should be part of the narrative flow, not an occasion for pining for privacy—unless privacy is needed to commit a murder, of course.

All the same a balance needs to be kept between creating the medieval world for the reader and over-creating it. There must be details enough to move the reader into the place and time without gratuitous minutiae—details thrown in just because the author knows them. To describe a moment in a nunnery as “. . . a settled quiet. A sway of skirts along stone floors, the muted scuff of soft leather soles on the stairs . . .” presents the way the women are dressed and something of the setting and its sounds. To describe how the soft-soled shoes are made of well-tanned leather, with low-cut tops, laced rather than buttoned, and bought in quantity from a cordwainer in Banbury last St. Ursula’s day is unnecessary. Unless, of course, the cordwainer and his shoes are going to figure in the plot.

But what of medieval elements not easily clear to the general reader? What’s to be made of “a breach of the assize of ale”? Happily, context or a parenthetical phrase can make most things clear. “Bess Underbush had been fined two pence for breach of the assize of ale, having begun to sell a brewing before the village’s ale taster had had chance to taste and pass it according to the rules of ale for sale.” Enough information for a reader to feel they understand what’s going on; not enough to slow the story’s forward momentum.

Ninety percent of what I research for a book is never overtly used, but it informs what I do use—and what I don’t, because knowing what couldn’t be in a medieval setting is as important as knowing what could. Which brings up the ongoing problem of what we simply don’t know. There is where extrapolation from the known to the likely takes place. Prolonged speculation on the seating of jurors for a manorial court can come down to merely, “the benches had been shifted end-on to the rood screen to serve the court . . . with space left between them for the court’s business to be done . . . .”

And then, beyond books and speculation, there’s the physical experiencing of what remains from medieval times. Not merely cathedrals and castles, but landscapes and the houses of ordinary people and their clothing and artifacts. It alters perception to stand in a medieval hall and feel how differently the space relates to a modern living room; to go up and down the narrow, steep twist of a medieval wooden stairway; to be in a peasant house when a waft of damp wind through the wood slats of the window drifts the fire’s wood smoke into your face. And I promise you that a few days spent wimpled and veiled and in a floor-length gown makes very clear how differently life is lived and work is done in such clothing. Or consider the difference in daily wearing a dagger slung from your hip as casually as you pick up a briefcase on your way out of the house.

This ongoing attempt to write as true to the times as possible has caused me to think my way more deeply into late medieval England than I would have done otherwise, to step away from the cliches and look at the world as people then would have seen it, rather than the way we see it here and now. So, “How medieval can you be in medieval mystery novel?”—if a fiction author has a will to move into the medieval mind and world, a devotion to the very much research needed to make that possible, and the skill to keep careful balance between being true to the times and accessible to modern readers—then, yes, you can be very medieval, even in a novel.

But why bother at all?

For me, the answer is that to live only inside one’s own particular time and shape of space and thought is to live impaired in sight and understanding. To be able to see with other eyes, to think—even peripherally or for a bare few moments—in another’s mind, to feel with an-other set of feelings than our familiar everyday ones, is to grow, to stretch our limits of individuality a little larger, to reach our minds a little farther, to open our perception of our world and selves a little wider.

And that, surely, is not a bad thing by any reckoning.

Editor’s note: Margaret Frazer is the author of fourteen Sister Frevisse mysteries, the most recent of which is The Widow’s Tale. The Sempster’s Tale is due to appear in January 2006.