Feeling Medieval-ish

When am I not? A writing friend once said I must have been a medieval princess in a former life. Which might make a lot of sense if I actually believed in reincarnation. Which I don’t. So perhaps I should look back into my childhood to account for this fascination with all things middle ages. Too many fairy tales? Too many King Arthur stories? I can hardly explain the thrill—nearing giddiness—I experience when I come across a book like Laura Amy Schlitz’s Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! (a Newbery winner, no less; and I absolutely swoon over the two-voice poems) or the bargain-bin tome Art of the Middle Ages by Riccardo Belcari and Giulia Marrucchi.

I have been perusing the latter of late. I have been especially transfixed by the beautiful photos of ruined Irish monasteries and the stone crosses dating from the 800s or so. Then there were the pages from the Book of Kells and Lindisfarne Gospels. I have a definite weakness for illuminated manuscripts. The colors! The gorgeous Latin script! (I recently picked up a library book on Vikings and right there on page 5 or so read about their raid on the Lindisfarne monastery in the late 700s. Coincidence? Hmm…)

Speaking of the library. A couple of days ago I had an hour to myself in the grown-up section and while wandering around in bliss, I came across a paperback copy of Maureen Ash’s Murder for Christ’s Mass, which led me into the stacks to find the first of her Templar Knight mysteries, The Alehouse Murders. Now I’ll say right off that Ash is no Ellis Peters, but so far I’m having fun getting to know the denizens of Lincoln in the year 1200, including the former Crusader Sir Bascot de Marins. (My nightly read-aloud with Number One Daughter, Kevin Crossley-Holland’s Arthur and the Seeing Stone, also is set in 1199/1200. Coincidence? Hmm…)

Poetry for Christmas

Last weekend our choir sang Harold Darke’s setting of Christina Rossetti’s “In the Bleak Midwinter” (a day after her birthday, no less), and I found myself hankering after some more Christmas poetry. At the library I discovered Bright Star Shining, a collection edited by Michael Harrison and Christopher Stuart-Clark. It fit the bill perfectly, with a good variety of styles and subjects. Some had a wonderful medieval, song-y flavor, which warmed me through and through.

Speaking of medieval, Number One and I are now on Kevin Crossley-Holland’s Arthur and the Seeing Stone for our evening read-alouds. I’m always thrilled to bring new readers to admire his magnificence.

And speaking of poetry, I’ve been working on a couple new ones of my own!

Reading update

I realize that I have been acting something like a tease. I wrote about how I ordered and almost finished Kevin Crossley-Holland’s Crossing to Paradise and how I checked out Jean Ferris’s Twice Upon a Marigold, but I didn’t write about how I finished both books or how I felt about them once I was done.

So, here’s the report. I enjoyed both books very much, and finished them in pretty good time considering the sad lack of time I have for reading these days. (Maybe I’m spending too much time blogging???) Crossing to Paradise was not as stirring as the earlier, related Arthur series (oh, how I missed Arthur—one of the most endearing characters I’ve ever read); but it makes a nice stand-alone, historical novel. I was tickled at how it referred back to the Arthur series, and how the ending satisfyingly tied up some loose ends in the Arthur series. I breezed through Twice Upon a Marigold, and found Ferris’s humor just as good as in the previous book, Once Upon a Marigold. At first I kept thinking to myself, “What a nice job she does getting a Message across through her charming story and humor,” but by the end of the book I began to feel that maybe the candy-coating on the message was wearing a bit thin. Overall, still an enjoyable read.

I have now entered a more “serious” phase of reading, having begun David Starkey’s Six Wives, about the queens of England’s Henry VIII. I keep hearing Starkey’s voice in my head as I read, having recently watched most of the PBS series Monarchy (ack, I have one last episode to go—thank goodness for Netflix and no due dates). I admit I am a history buff; but I have to say that for interest and readability, novels have nothing on the best popular history books of the last several years. Today I also picked up my inter-library loan copies of two books about Christopher Marlowe. I began reading the first in the dentist’s office just this afternoon. I promise to write reports on these books when I finish, though it may be a while, as Six Wives alone has more than 700 pages. To paraphrase Scarlett O’Hara: I won’t go hungry for quite some time.

What to read?

I’m on the brink of finishing Crossing to Paradise by Kevin Crossley-Holland, so naturally on my weekly trip to the public library today, I had to stock up on future reading materials. Just like most people would never want to run out of food staples like milk or bread, so I get nervous when I’m approaching the last sliver of pages in a good book. I want to know where my next meal is coming from.

Truth be told, I have shelves full or at least stacks of books in every room in my house (OK, not the bathrooms). I am not going to starve. There are dozens of these books I have never even read. Many more that I would gladly read again and again. But going to the library is like walking into the grocery store when you’re hungry. And then you see the bakery case.

So what goodies did I bring home? After watching those crafty, power-hungry, and masterful monarchs in the David Starkey DVD series, Monarchy, I decided to continue feeding my Anglophilia. I checked out Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl and David Starkey’s Six Wives, about the queens of Henry VIII. Then, for good measure, I hopped onto the computer and requested History Play: The Lives and Afterlife of Christopher Marlowe, by Rodney Bolt, and The World of Christopher Marlowe, by David Riggs, through interlibrary loan.

Let the feast begin!

New Crossley-Holland

Ack! I just discovered that Kevin Crossley-Holland has a new book featuring one of the characters from the Arthur and the Seeing Stone series: Crossing to Paradise. I ordered it immediately. I can’t wait to get it! It’s been far too long since I had a book I could really fall into and get lost—I know Crossley-Holland won’t disappoint.

More monarchs

Last night’s view of Monarchy was all about Henrys and Edwards, with a couple of Richards for good measure. Strong kings, weak kings, wars and murder. The history started to feel like those chapters in Kings in the Bible: so and so was good, so and so was bad.

And then there was King John.

History aside, my view of King John (reigned 1199–1216) will forever be colored by the 1973 Disney version of Robin Hood, in which John is represented as a whining, thumb-sucking lion without a mane, and voiced to hilarious perfection by Peter Ustinov (“Power! Power!”; “Do you savoir a faire, il y a, n’est pa?” Cracks me up every time.) They don’t make ’em like that anymore.

John makes a more serious, behind-the-scenes appearance in the wonderful Arthur and the Seeing Stone series by Kevin Crossley-Holland. These are my absolute favorite contemporary King Arthur books: The Seeing Stone, At the Crossing Places, and King of the Middle March. Crossley-Holland is a prose-poet who melds the traditional Arthur stories with the story of young Norman Arthur de Caldicot. Read them! Read them!

A couple of years ago, I read one other book in which King John plays a hefty role: Here Be Dragons by Sharon Kay Penman. The book is about John’s illegitimate daughter, Joan, and her marriage to the Welsh Prince Llewellyn (the Great). In Penman’s book, John is shown mostly as a womanizer and a king desperate to hold on to power.

Of course the real King John is known as the guy who was forced to sign the Magna Carta, the Great Charter, which set out boundaries for the king’s power vis-a-vis his barons. Today the Magna Carta is famous for its early delineating of what we call basic human rights.