How I research: a little trip down the rabbithole

There are so many good novels coming out, or recently out, and I can't read any of them now because I am up to my eyeballs in research books at the moment. I love research, though, and I thought I'd use this edition of the newsletter to talk about how I find answers to historical questions, using one recent example of a question I had, and how I went looking for the answer. Research is something I get asked about a lot, and these days, it's getting harder to do well online.

I've got a few topics on the go for my novel Mercutio at the moment: astrology, ships, playing cards, city-state politics, maps, food, clothing, philosophy … This week I spent a whole day reading about travellers from China to Europe in the 13th century. Sometimes I need to know a lot about a topic and sometimes I just have a question or two. And sometimes what I learn is that there is no definitive, findable answer.

Where possible, though, I like to find the answers to my questions as accurately and fully as I can, both because I think it's a useful service to be as accurate as possible, and also because the real, weird complexity of history makes for better fiction than just replicating assumptions.

Here's an example of a specific question I had earlier this month and how I approached it.

I was writing a scene in Florence in 1290, and I needed to know for plot reasons whether any people would be carrying swords on the street, and if so, which people. (If you're wondering why Florence, not Verona, don't worry, the plot moves there eventually.) 

One thing I have to consider is reader expectation, which varies by level of background knowledge. I'm writing a prequel to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, so some readers will expect swords all the time. (And rapiers at that.) But I'm writing it in the time of the original Capulets and Montagues, so it's late medieval, not Renaissance, which matters for swords a lot!

The readers with some knowledge of medieval Europe may believe that only nobles or knights could carry swords (or even afford them). Some readers may believe that carrying swords was forbidden within city walls, but allowed when travelling. Neither of these beliefs is wrong! Overall, they're good defaults to start with. But there is never a blanket truth that applies to all situations in medieval Europe.

The most dangerous way to research is to read overview articles, books or forum posts, especially unsourced ones, about "what life was like in medieval Europe" and just take their word for it. (Actually, that's the second most dangerous way. The most dangerous is ChatGPT or its ilk, which just takes all those know-it-all forum posts and cooks them down into stew.) 

I look for scholarly work and contemporary sources instead, although often I find them, to begin with, in the references for more general overviews, such as the ones on Wikipedia. Then one leads me to another, and so on (bibliographies and citations for the win.)

It's rare that any source is going to come right out and tell me the answer to my question. The concerns of historians are not precisely the same as the concerns of fiction writers. But I know I might find something to tell me (a) what laws were on the books and (b) what actual behaviour was observed by people at the time.

As to (b), in the chronicles by Dino Compagni and Giovanni Villani, I found several references to violence being done by sword within the city, including at moments when violence broke out spontaneously at social gatherings. It doesn't mean it was legal violence, of course, or that people walked around with swords all the time; after all, people get shot in Ottawa sometimes, but people here do not ordinarily carry guns, thank goodness. All the same, it was information to add to the pile.

As to (a), that's where it gets interesting, and where I needed to read more material. This was a period of rapidly changing laws in Florence, largely because of different ideas about what sword-wielding people could and could not do.

Knights in Florence at this time usually (not always!) belonged to a group of mostly noble or quasi-noble families (a group that mostly overlaps with the families historians call the "magnates"). Now, I know that schoolbook models of feudalism put the nobles near the top, but they were absolutely not running things in Florence in 1290, thanks to a popular government and the guilds. (In fact, the very concept of nobility was very fuzzy in medieval Italian city-states.)

The magnates were basically respectable gangsters, and even though they did not control the city government, they did try to control pieces of territory within the city. The main concern of the popular government was protecting everyone else from the magnates (in 1293, they would go even further with this, forbidding magnates from holding public office, for example.)

After following footnotes and doing some basic searches, I learned of a scholarly, book from 1991 called The Florentine Magnates: Lineage and Faction in a Medieval Commune, by Carol Lansing. My local university library has a copy, so I spent several hours with it there. I learned that certain laws of Florence at this time did explicitly restrict magnates (the knightly class) from carrying weapons. (I thought this might be the case, but I needed to find that in black and white somewhere.) The common people, though, were under obligation to take up arms (perhaps even publicly provided arms) every time magnate violence seemed to be imminent. (So, it was actually almost the inverse of "only knights could legally carry swords," in this particular time and place. History is complicated!) In the chronicles, there are many references to the people of the city “flying to arms” in the 1290s and 1310s, at a time of civil conflict.

The magnates also had to post a certain amount of money as a kind of security-deposit, a guarantee they wouldn't do violence (a cynic would say, though, this just meant that one had to be rich to be a successful criminal, also true of legal systems today.) 

I also learned that one of the laws of this period specifically restricted armed men gathering outside of their own neighbourhoods, which suggests that they had more leeway on their own territory, even within the city. This was certainly the opinion of many magnates, who believed they could even carry out justice on their turf and acted accordingly.

Lansing's book also had a lot of interesting analysis about the city government's inability to fully enforce its vision on the magnates or influence their behaviour.

So would the magnates always obey the rules restricting weaponry on a street that was one of "their" streets, especially if they feared their rivals? If not, might others have swords in this context too? I don't exactly have definitive answers to those questions, but I think I can tell an informed, plausible story now in a way that fits the evidence I have. (This particular bit of research was only for the sake of a few paragraphs in the novel.)

A final note about research: Sometimes, the best way to find information is to ask an expert outright whether they know the answer. I do this on occasion! I don’t rely on it for everything, though, for a few reasons.

First: I research a lot. A lot. And I bounce around in historical periods and places. I would have to have a team of experts on retainer if I were not going to do any of it myself.

Second: I am fussy, I love history, I was trained as a journalist and I like to know exactly where the answer comes from and make my own judgment calls on it, so an expert opinion is most useful to me when it steers me to a source. I enjoy doing as much of the research on my own as I can.

Third: I'm Canadian and I don't like bothering people. (This is not rational–most experts love to talk about their expertise–but it is a factor.) 

Fourth: While I am always very grateful for their help no matter what, I have found that not all academics are used to answering the granular but speculative questions that authors have. Some are very good at it. Others will give me an informed but generic answer as they would to any member of the public with a question about medieval Europe, not realizing that for my purposes, I need to go as deep and as specific as I can to bring a scene to life. Turning a question into a full interview can help. But that means asking a lot more time and work of the expert, especially if this is not the particular subject they're working on right now, which leads me back to the “not bothering people” point.

I find that I prefer just reading a lot and doing my own analysis, rather than finding an expert and asking them to give me a yes-or-no answer to a question prompted by the needs of my fiction. For one thing, "we don't really know" is a perfectly good academic answer, but an author, who has to write the scene, doesn't have that luxury.

Or, as Hilary Mantel once put it, "My portrait, unlike a historian’s, cannot be balanced or neutral." (This talk of hers about what it means to be a historical novelist is wonderful.) I do believe that we historical fiction writers are doing a service in bringing an informed but speculative perspective to the past, but we have to do both sides of that work, to some degree.

A few bits of news to share:

• I'll be giving two workshops at this retreat for writers in the Ottawa area in July – you can sign up now! Join me in getting words down.

• Also of possible interest to those in Ottawa, I'm giving a two-hour lecture on developing a writing practice at the Summer Showcase at Carleton University's Lifelong Learning Practice, a weeklong program full of amazing lectures on a wide range of fascinating topics.

• The voting on the final ballot is open for the Aurora Awards, until July 13, for anyone who is a member of the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association (or would like to become one.) The Valkyrie is shortlisted in the novel category, but please do vote for what you loved, and you can download the nominated works for free. 

• If you're a member of the British Fantasy Society or a member of FantasyCon, The Valkyrie is eligible and voting is open until June 29.