Welcome to the Historical Fiction Online forums: a friendly place to discuss, review and discover historical fiction.
If this is your first visit, please be sure to check out the FAQ by clicking the link above.
You will have to register before you can post: click the register link above to proceed.
To start viewing posts, select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Witchcraft and Historical fiction: Overused? Underused?

For discussions of historical fiction. Threads that do not relate to historical fiction should be started in the Chat forum or elsewhere on the forum, depending on the topic.
Carla
Compulsive Reader
Posts: 965
Joined: August 2008
Contact:

Post by Carla » Tue July 7th, 2009, 7:03 pm

I differentiate between belief in the supernatural on the one hand and supernatural forces that actually work on the other. Beliefs are absolutely fine with me; people's beliefs are part and parcel of their society, just as much as the food they ate or the clothes they wore (though beliefs can be harder to recreate if there's little or no documentary evidence, because unlike jewellery or animal bones archaeology can't dig them up). Supernatural forces that actually work with no natural explanation tip over into historical fantasy for me.
PATHS OF EXILE - love, war, honour and betrayal in Anglo-Saxon Northumbria
Editor's Choice, Historical Novels Review, August 2009
Now available as e-book on Amazon Kindleand in Kindle, Epub (Nook, Sony Reader), Palm and other formats on Smashwords
Website: http://www.carlanayland.org
Blog: http://carlanayland.blogspot.com

User avatar
Volgadon
Compulsive Reader
Posts: 654
Joined: September 2008
Location: Israel
Contact:

Post by Volgadon » Tue July 7th, 2009, 7:53 pm

[QUOTE=MLE;32957]Actually, the treatment of Christianity in Mists is pretty conventional, nowadays. What would be radical is to show the complex issues of the faith for what they really meant to the people at the time instead of cartooning it.
[QUOTE]

Agreed. I would not object to a novel that disaproved of Christianity, if it gave it the nuanced treatment it deserved.

Chatterbox
Bibliophile
Posts: 1667
Joined: April 2009
Location: New York

Post by Chatterbox » Tue July 7th, 2009, 8:19 pm

I'd be very interested to read a novel about the crusades from the Arab POV, for instance. Amin Maalouf has written an excellent NF work about it, but the novels of his that I'm familiar with, while they cover non-traditional (for us) subjects, don't deal with the crusades. So there's a project for me, down the road!

I think MLE mentioned this -- turning traditional/pre-Christian religious beliefs into something new-agey is something else that irks me. Absolutely, there were wise women, and the use of herbs was extremely important in medieval society. And because no one knew how blood flowed, that dirt created infections, etc. -- or even that there was such a scientific thing as cause and effect -- something for which there was no simple explanation, that people couldn't see with their own eyes, was called witchcraft.

When it's fantasy, that's a different matter. When it involves people who are purely fictional creations, that's manageable. But when it leads to those people doing utterly improbable things or behaving in an improbable manner (there's a big difference between a Benedictine abbess with the entire religious establishment at her back in 13th century England when everyone was fussing about the Cathar heresy, and the actions of a few lone, isolated Jesuit priests in New France circa 1550 to 1680 or so, thousands of miles from people who could help them out in a pinch, IMO.)

Ultimately, I couldn't care less about ladies with heads or without on covers; it's what is between the covers that counts. And anything that makes me irritable because it strikes me that the author is ignoring what would have been real and plausible in the interest of catering to contermporary readers' preconceptions. It may not bug other people, but it bugs me, especially because it is becoming so common. It's historical fiction. Yes, it's fiction, but it's historical fiction, which means it needs to work both as history and fiction, and the closer it is to history (real life characters) the more it needs to respect the history as we know it and understand it today. (including the fact that accusations of witchcraft against Elizabeth Woodville were almost certainly fabricated based on myths about her ancestors.) I also want my historical fiction to feel new to me, not like a rehash of a novel I've already read.

If we moved this discussion forward in time, from the medieval era into Salem in the 17th century, would people be as comfortable with the portrayal of witchcraft as actually being practiced? These days, we tend to look at it as Arthur Miller did in the Crucible -- the accusations as a function of mass hysteria in a small, closed community dominated by religion. I wonder if a novel suggesting that some of the victims of Salem were indeed witches could even be published today?

(Complete non-sequitur here: there is actually a genealogical society out there that you can join if you can prove you're descended from one of the people executed in Salem: Descendants of Early American Witches, I think it's called... Forget the Daughters of the American Revolution!!)

User avatar
SarahWoodbury
Avid Reader
Posts: 496
Joined: March 2009
Location: Pendleton, Oregon
Contact:

Post by SarahWoodbury » Tue July 7th, 2009, 8:53 pm

[quote=""Chatterbox""]
(Complete non-sequitur here: there is actually a genealogical society out there that you can join if you can prove you're descended from one of the people executed in Salem: Descendants of Early American Witches, I think it's called... Forget the Daughters of the American Revolution!!)[/quote]

Yes! I'd get to belong to that. I just read an NF book about this and it would definitely bother me if the book, even with fiction, said that real witchcraft was going on. My 12 generation back ancestor lived in Beverly (just down the road) and he kept a horse stabled in his barn at all times in case someone needed to flee. He was a Deacon, even, but there was the real sense, almost immediately after the trials, that they had gotten far, far out of hand--a lot of embarrassment and apologies.

User avatar
MLE (Emily Cotton)
Bibliomaniac
Posts: 3566
Joined: August 2008
Interest in HF: started in childhood with the classics, which, IMHO are HF even if they were contemporary when written.
Favourite HF book: Prince of Foxes, by Samuel Shellabarger
Preferred HF: Currently prefer 1600 and earlier, but I'll read anything that keeps me turning the page.
Location: California Bay Area

Post by MLE (Emily Cotton) » Tue July 7th, 2009, 9:01 pm

Actually, regarding scientific method and cause and effect, modern people's attitude about people 'way back then' is quite unfair. All complex organisms seek to relate cause and effect. That's what helps a fox learn to hunt mice; what makes a lion cub avoid a porcupine next time; and what keeps a deer from being eaten.
If the item really is the 'cause for the 'effect' -- i.e. rat+ fleas+ bacteria= bubonic plague, then it's science. If the association is purely circumstantial, it's superstition. But all organisms are always trying to put two and two together.

As an illustration, take the incident of the 'superstitious pigs'. Modern pig farms want each pig to get the same ration. So they set up feeders where only one pig at a time can approach/eat. Every pig has a tag on its collar. When the pig approaches the feeder until the sensor can read the tag, the bin will fill with the right amount of food if that pig has not already eaten.
In this setup, it seemed that some pigs would not quite get close enough for their tags to be read, and they would get impatient and stamp their feet. Eventually, they would get within range, and the food would appear.

These pigs were observed to develop the 'superstition' that stamping their feet was the cause that brought food. They regularly approached the feeders and began the stamping behavior.

Even if sometimes we get it wrong, interpreting cause from effect is a function of intellect. Quite frankly, I don't think bloodletting is so odd. It can save a horse from going founder, so it would be a natural extrapolation that it might be good for humans.

Chatterbox
Bibliophile
Posts: 1667
Joined: April 2009
Location: New York

Post by Chatterbox » Tue July 7th, 2009, 9:27 pm

Oh, I meant to mention one book where the supernatural did fit in well and was very plot-appropriate (although it wasn't terribly well-written by the author's high standards, and the supernatural content got a bit overdone as a result). The books are the two latest by Pauline Gedge, beginning with the Twice-Born, where the main character makes frequent hallucinatory trips into the Egyptian netherworld and meets with Anubis and Osiris, etc. It makes complete sense in the context of the plot and plot developments, and in the context of ancient Egyptian civilization (or what I know of it!) The only reason it doesn't always work is that it starts to ramble in those parts of the book, and the reader gets impatient to return to the main story line. But it's completely relevant and appropriate to the plot.

Chatterbox
Bibliophile
Posts: 1667
Joined: April 2009
Location: New York

Post by Chatterbox » Tue July 7th, 2009, 10:29 pm

Whoops, one more example of this, although it's very borderline historical.

Colin Cotterill has written a series of utterly brilliant mysteries set in the 1970s in Laos, with an elderly coroner as his MC. The coroner is also the reincarnation of an ancient shaman, and there are a lot of shamanistic elements in the plots, visions, etc. They link to both plot and character, and are completely in tune with what I know of Lao society (more than ancient Egypt, as I've at least been there!)

If anyone is a mystery fan as well as HF, def hunt these novels down.

User avatar
Divia
Bibliomaniac
Posts: 4435
Joined: August 2008
Location: Always Cloudy, Central New York

Post by Divia » Tue July 7th, 2009, 10:55 pm

[quote=""Chatterbox""]If we moved this discussion forward in time, from the medieval era into Salem in the 17th century, would people be as comfortable with the portrayal of witchcraft as actually being practiced? These days, we tend to look at it as Arthur Miller did in the Crucible -- the accusations as a function of mass hysteria in a small, closed community dominated by religion. I wonder if a novel suggesting that some of the victims of Salem were indeed witches could even be published today?
[/quote]

I would and it wouldnt bother me a lick. But I find it interesting so why would it bother me?

Mists still gets peoples knickers in a knot..check out the reviews on amazon. There are many people upset about how religion is handled. It is the norm now but wasnt back then.
News, views, and reviews on books and graphic novels for young adult.
http://yabookmarks.blogspot.com/

User avatar
Ariadne
Bibliophile
Posts: 1151
Joined: August 2008
Location: At the foothills of Mt. Level

Post by Ariadne » Wed July 8th, 2009, 12:01 am

[quote=""Chatterbox""]
If we moved this discussion forward in time, from the medieval era into Salem in the 17th century, would people be as comfortable with the portrayal of witchcraft as actually being practiced? These days, we tend to look at it as Arthur Miller did in the Crucible -- the accusations as a function of mass hysteria in a small, closed community dominated by religion. I wonder if a novel suggesting that some of the victims of Salem were indeed witches could even be published today?[/quote]

Yes and yes, actually. Katherine Howe's The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, currently #8 on the NYT Bestseller list, fits this description exactly. I enjoyed the book, though had issues with the academic stereotyping and exaggerated Boston accents (not a big fan of seeing this in dialogue), but no matter -- it's an entertaining summer read. Howe's accused Salem witch, Deliverance of the title, is a "cunning woman" and, as it happens, a successful practitioner of magic. That didn't bother me in itself, just like the witchy aspects of Mists of Avalon and Twilight of Avalon, minor as they were in that volume, didn't bother me either. I enjoy historical fantasy and don't mind supernatural happenings in my historical fiction, if they suit the story/time period/etc.

What did raise the eyebrows is that there was a historical Deliverance Dane, a woman of 17th-c Andover, Mass., who confessed to witchcraft after being accused as part of the Salem trials. She survived until the 1730s. Her story and the character's are similar in many respects, different in others. I hope people won't come to believe that the real Deliverance was actually a witch (no doubt she'd be horrified at the thought) but some probably will. She was an obscure historical figure until now. Howe at least makes it clear that she borrowed the name and some attributes of the historical Deliverance; it's not meant to be a biographical novel about the real person. Deliverance Dane is a great character name; can't blame her for wanting to use it!

This relates, however, to the issue I have with a witchy Elizabeth Woodville and a very bloodthirsty witchy Catherine de Medici, who does some incredibly nasty things to gain power in a forthcoming historical novel. Yes, it's fiction and all, but I don't really buy that reasoning. Defaming the dead purely for fictional entertainment is something I have a growing intolerance for.
Last edited by Ariadne on Wed July 8th, 2009, 12:17 am, edited 7 times in total.

User avatar
Misfit
Bibliomaniac
Posts: 9581
Joined: August 2008
Location: Seattle, WA

Post by Misfit » Wed July 8th, 2009, 1:51 am

This relates, however, to the issue I have with a witchy Elizabeth Woodville and a very bloodthirsty witchy Catherine de Medici, who does some incredibly nasty things to gain power in a forthcoming historical novel. Yes, it's fiction and all, but I don't really buy that reasoning. Defaming the dead purely for fictional entertainment is something I have a growing intolerance for.
Here here. Although I have to admit I just finished Dumas' La Reine Margot and I adored Catherine's over the top wickedness. ;) :)
At home with a good book and the cat...
...is the only place I want to be

Post Reply

Return to “General Discussion”