"All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered."
A few weeks ago, I wrote a brief outline on the character of Joan of Navarre, the first English Queen to be accused of witchcraft, who was effectively stripped of all her possessions because her stepson Henry V had spent all the crown's money trying...
Although not the first to be tried for witchcraft, Joan of Navarre has the distinction of being the first English Queen to be found guilty of it. She's today's profile on my Patreon. ...
Marguerite Porete, who was condemned for heresy and burned at the stake on June, 1st 1310, was a medieval Christian mystic who wrote around the concept of agape, the Divine Love, in her book The Mirror of Simple Souls. She's today's profile on my Patreon. ...
For a very small and specific part of the novel, I decided to research the role of a specific kind of dancers in medieval Japan, called shirabyōshi. As it happens, their role and characteristics are highly romanticized (i.e., objectified) by male authors of the time:...
Being set on a Dutch East India Company ship, the story I'm writing has to deal with the appalling crimes perpetrated by this and the other trading companies throughout history. And, since I aim to write a Gothic novel, what's more fitting than an imprisoned...
One of my main characters is basically my version of a lycanthrope: at a cycle approximately coinciding with the full moon, they go berserk and transform into the most fearsome creature their subconscious self can think of. In our case, the character is from the...
My main character uses silly rhimes a lot, both as a trick while thinking and when he has to time something. Since the novel is set in 1701, and many nursery rhymes and tunes were not collected until a century and a half later, I...
«He tastes like salt and sweat, flavored with hop like a Dutch beer». This was supposed to be the sentence in my WIP.Gothic Novel. But historical fiction is tricky and I like to get things right, so I had to ask myself the question: did they...
Born in 1598, Giovanni Riccioli was a Jesuit Italian astronomer who liked to throw stuff down from towers (we can't say he experimented with gravity: in the Western world, we'll have to wait for Newton in 1684). Among his researches, he introduced the scheme for...
When we think about Court Fools, the mind immediately associates them with jesters. We might think of capers, jokes and, eventually, physical disability. This is, however, a concept that was consolidated in Elizabethan times, and there's a portion of Early Reinassance in which another kind of...
