Idyl contemplation

[kestrell]

I like to think that I am not a total Torquemada when it comes to historical accuracy in novels set in the medEvil period, but there are some clankers which set me to brooding.

Just as a for instance: it is highly unlikely that an English monk living in an eighth-century monastery would be able to see his reflection in a glass window.

Also, it is just as unlikely that a medieval woman would show a guest into her living room.

I know, I know-- I am just a cranky elitist snob throwing the cold water of historical continuity upon some poor author's creativity, but I can't help feeling that authors should make some pretense of not gratuitously crossing over the yellow line while blithely barreling down the highway of poetic license.

Comments

[xiphias]

When DID multi-room homes become standard, anyway?

[siderea]

That's kind of the wrong question. Multi-room homes go back to antiquity. The question is when people started having something they or we might call a "living room".

[kestrell]

Right. So the medieval monastery might have a place set aside for bathing, but it was just for bathing, not what we would think of as a bathroom, and a lot of times these would be in a separate building, as opposed to being in a place near where people slept. And medival monks might have individual cells, but they were nothing like what we would think of as a bedroom, because the purpose would be a tiny space for solitude and prayer, rather than for comfort and lounging about and filling with one's personal possessions.

[kestrell]

It happened room by room, but the first rooms which were differentiated were bedrooms for the family, and this would be pretty much limited to noble and rich families who already lived in large halls, houses, or castles, but I think this didn't happen until the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century. There might also be a ladies' sitting room that began to appear at the same time. I think many of the individually-purposed rooms we think of now, such as dining room, parlor/living room, kitchen, etc., didn't emerge until the Victorian period. Bill Bryson wrote a lovely book about the development of rooms in a large British house--the house he lived in actually--which came out a few years ago.

[negothick]

I think the reflecting glass window is even more of a "throw-me-out-of-story" moment, because it implies such a high level of technology. Even when glass did become available for windows, it was very expensive and quite thick. Just try looking for a reflection in surviving seventeenth-century glass windows. Monastic cell windows weren't glazed until fairly recently.

[kestrell]

Yes, that was the biggie for me. Aren't even Colonial-era houses distinguished by thick glass which often isn't very transparent or smooth?

[negothick]

As usual, you've read my mind. I was going to add that to my post, then decided against it. Yes, I was just visiting the Leffingwell House, built in the early 18th century, and it's barely possible to see through the original glass.

[kestrell]

This fact is driving me a bit crazy, since I am pretty certain that I picked it up from some fantasy novel set in the modern period in a Colonial-era house, and the protagonist makes much of the strange distortions seen through the glass windows. Is this an actual book or just one of the books which lives in my imagination?

[negothick]

Maybe you're remembering Lovecraft's "The Unnameable", about "the impressions left by old faces on the windows through which they had gazed all their lives" and the monster that "someone saw it at the window centuries later and couldn’t describe what it was" or "The Picture in the House" with its "bleared" windows hiding the cannibal owner. There's probably also a more contemporary fantasy as you describe it, and if I think of it, I'll let you know.

[kestrell]

I am almost certain that that memeory comes from Andre Norton's _Lavender-Green Magic_, which is set in a small Massachusetts town that sounds a lot like Salem of the time. This was my favorite children's fantasy book ever: it has witches and herb gardens and recipes for making a sleep pillow, not to mention it conveys the idea that negative expectations tend to become self-fulfilling prophecies. The young protagonist is a black girl whose father is MIA during the Vietname War and her family has just moved from Boston, where the busing riots have been going on, so she's dealing with some pretty big issues. And yet this book never seems to get mentioned during panels of recommended kids's books; was it, like a lot of Sturgeon, so way before its time that by the time it seemed contemporary, it was mostly out of print?