Review Roundup

I haven’t said anything about my new book It’s a Feudal, Feudal World in a while, so it seemed like a good time for a roundup of reviews.

Kirkus Reviews calls it “A waggishly illuminating pictorial tour of the Middle Ages” that is “likely to encourage readers to take the next step in learning about medieval times.”

Quill & Quire says “It’s a Feudal, Feudal World serves as a good introduction to the Middle Ages.”

CM Magazine gives it four out of four stars and praises it for covering the diversity and complexity of the era.

Canadian Children’s Book News featured it in “The Classroom Bookshelf” and said it “would appeal to visual learners or reluctant readers.” (The Fall issue’s not free online yet, but you will be able to access it here when it comes out.)

CanLit for LittleCanadians calls it “a satisfying read for the young with historical queries about Medieval Times.”

Want to know more about the book? Take a look at its page at Annick Press. Want to know more about strange and curious aspects of the Middle Ages? Take a look at posts in the category It’s a Feudal, Feudal World here on my blog.

Social Media in Manuscript

I’m a big fan of Tom Standage’s History of the World in Six Glasses and Edible History of Humanity, so I was excited to get my hands on a copy of his new book, Writing on the Wall: Social Media – The First 2,000 Years. The premise, which is almost relentlessly topical, is that until the nineteenth century most news and knowledge passed not in mass produced publications but in what we would call peer-to-peer networks: individuals sharing news, or collecting information from those they knew. It’s a fairly slight idea, but Standage digs deep to come up with interesting examples of “social media” through the ages.

Take, for example, the Devonshire Manuscript, a collection of original poems, notes, and copied texts that seems to have been passed among a group of young nobles at the court of Henry VIII. The Manuscript included contributions, signed or anonymous, by Margaret Douglas, Mary Shelton, Sir Thomas Wyatt, and – perhaps – Anne Boleyn, the queen. (There’s on ongoing editing project on the manuscript at Wikibooks.)

While the Devonshire Manuscript is unusual for having so many contributors, each taking an equal role in its creation, handwritten miscellanies were common in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. These “commonplace books” were private notebooks where readers wrote down interesting bits of information they read or heard. Though usually the work of one writer, commonplace books also passed between readers, each of whom might also write comments.

One of my classmates at Ohio State University, Sarah Shippey, digitized one of those books for the OSU Rare Books and Manuscripts Library. Henry Bellingham’s Book was a miscellany compiled by the English lawyer and MP Sir Henry Bellingham in the seventeenth century and three or four other writers, at least two writing after his death. They copied down notes on science (“Whether the Water or the Fire be the more Excellent Element?”), politics (“Mr. Pym’s speech after the charges against the Earle of Strafford”), and history (“A Table of the Lines of Succession in the Brittish history”), as well as various miscellaneous odds and edds.

Handwritten collections were still circulating in the late nineteenth century, even if less frequently than before. When I was doing research for my dissertation at the Manchester Central Library I found several issues of the “manuscript magazine” of the St. Paul’s Literary and Educational Society, which was exactly what it sounds like: a magazine with short stories and non-fiction articles, all written out in a beautiful handwriting rather than printed.

Writing On the Wall takes the story of these circulating manuscripts and puts it alongside Roman scriptoria, newsletters, pamphlets, and the first scholarly journals to create an entertaining account of the many types of media that preceded the mass media and are now thriving again.

Bel Geddes and the War Dioramas

Yesterday’s post reminded me that I should also link to Enrique Gualberto Ramirez’s blog post about the many dioramas that Norman Bel Geddes designed during World War Two. The post has lots of photos of the models of various battles that Bel Geddes produced for LIFE magazine, as well as his plans for for “Synthetic Training Device #1,” an automated physical representation of a training wargame. Ramirez makes the point that Bel Geddes’s models were didactic, “highly-detailed terrain dioramas that brought a antiseptic, highly-stylized and design-conscious version of the war to American readers.” These were designs that shared the war-as-intellectual-challenge ethos with his pre-war War Game, but with a potent, patriotic sense of educational mission added.

The Bel Geddes dioramas also reflected a judgment on the nature of war. The LIFE dioramas and the planned Device #1 lovingly modeled atmospheric effects and the physical terrain to be viewed from a god’s eye perspective that combined exceptional visibility with a precision greater than that available from a real commander’s map. They offered a position from which war became a matter of the application of proper rules (to be executed via electronic calculators in the Device #1) to a known situation: something to manage with knowledge, not intuition. (Is it a surprise that the War Game used three dice, required no umpire, and attracted at least two international chess champions?) Despite the cotton puff smoke and clouds, Norman Bel Geddes’s dioramas never had any fog of war.

Bel Geddes and the War Game

I’ve been sitting on a link to a fantastic essay about industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes and his fascination with miniature dioramas and games, including in the 1930s a vast one-of-a-kind war game. I’m posting without comment because I just haven’t had any luck coming up with something new to say about a story so interesting. It mixes high society, gambling, the heavy shadow of World War I, and a fascination with technology both full-scale and miniaturized:

As with the horse races, players took the proceedings seriously. Tensions tended to run high; faces would redden, lips tighten, fists clench. So much Prohibition liquor was consumed that Geddes was finally reduced to serving water. Many participants wore felt hats, headbands, or eyeshades to keep perspiration from running down their faces, and carried handkerchiefs to dry sweaty hands. Theater critic Bruce Bliven doubled as a referee and war correspondent, madly punching away at a typewriter set up between the opposing sides.

The essay is here, at The Believer.

Fantasy Past and Present

Over a Tor.com, I’ve been really enjoying the series “Advanced Readings in Dungeons & Dragons.” Tim Callahan and Mordicai Knode are busy reading and blogging their way through the books in Appendix N to the original D&D, designer Garry Gygax’s list of fantasy and science fiction inspirations for the game. So far they’ve covered many of fantasy’s founding luminaries (Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock), sadly neglected hidden gems (Manly Wade Wellman, Stanley G. Weinbaum), and midlist classics that should have stayed buried (Fletcher Pratt, L. Sprague de Camp).

It’s a fascinating conversation (with a surprisingly good, and civil, comment thread) that shows just how eclectic and gonzo fantasy’s post-Tolkein years were, mixing science fiction, fantasy, and a whole whack of other genre inspirations together in a way that’s a little less obvious today – at least partly, I suspect, due to the influence of D&D’s, blandest, most generic aspects. The bits that every sixteen-year old D&D player (myself included) took away first.

That said, we’re definitely in a renaissance for fantasy today, and not just because of the influence of George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire novels and their fairly faithful TV adaptation.*

Martin is probably the most prominent example of gritty, unflinchingly dirt-ridden fantasy, but I think the real cream of the crop these days is a more urban, cosmopolitan sort of fantasy represented by Patrick Rothfuss’s Kingkiller Chronicles and Scott Lynch’s Gentlemen Bastards sequence. These are books that are responding not just to our reflections on medieval Europe but to a wide range of contemporary qualms about our city-dwelling, corporate-connected, globally affected lives.

I’m not sure, though, that the fantasy renaissance is necessarily a good sign for the future. If science fiction is the quintessentially modern genre, convinced that science and technology are the bedrock of an ordered, knowable universe, fantasy is channeling a much more chaotic, fractious, disordered world that may simply be beyond human comprehension, let alone control (that, after all, is what lets us post facto differentiate between science and magic).

I recently read The Sword and Sorcery Anthology, edited by David G. Hartwell and Jacob Weisman. It’s a wide-ranging collection, with both classic and modern stories, and I was struck by just how many of them diverged from the classic tropes of “heroic hero overcomes dastardly villain.” The stories weren’t straightforward parodies or inversions. They just came at the issue from different directions. Heroes aren’t always heroic, villains not obviously villainous, and victory hardly obvious or without consequences. As a reader, it was an enjoyable selection. But I’ve got to say, if believe you can read into literature as a guide to the tone of an era, I’m not entirely optimistic about the times in which we live.

* I’m only at the end of season two, but I’ve mostly been impressed by how the show handles, and adds to, the novels. Giving up Martin’s strict first-person perspective has added depth in a number of places, letting Sansa and Cersei shine in a way that they don’t in the book until they become perspective characters, and giving smaller parts like Bronn and Shae greater opportunities. In fact, I would say that some of the material written purely for the show (the talks between Cersei and Robert, the Arya-Tywin relationship at Harrenhall, Tywin and Pycelle fishing at King’s Landing) is actually the best material in the show.