Virginia Cox's Blog
November 1, 2019
Historical fiction: craft, commerce, choices
To mark the publication of my second novel, The Peril, a sequel to my 2013 The Subtlest Soul, I wanted to talk a little about an experience I had in connection with my first novel which taught me some interesting things about the way in which the world of agents and publishers think about historical fiction.
In the autumn of 2014, shortly after The Subtlest Soul won the Historical Novel Society’s inaugural Best Indie Novel award, a novelist acquaintance of mine kindly put me in touch with her agent, who is quite a prominent figure in the fields of literary fiction and historical fiction. The agent read my novel with a view to possible representation. She liked the novel and said some very flattering things about it; but she declined to take it on, for two reasons. One was purely circumstantial (that it was too close in its setting to another novel she was representing), but the other was more general: that she felt it didn’t fit with publishers’ selection parameters. Here are her exact words: On the topic of market, I do feel as though your novel is falling slightly between two stools – it is too subtle to be straight commercial, but too straightly-told to be literary. It is not clearly for men (not quite enough in the way of battles and military tactics) and not clearly for women (not enough strong female protagonists.)
This wasn’t exactly news to me, as I had heard similar things before. Regarding the gender question, an editor for a major fiction publisher who works as a reader for a literary consultancy gave me advice which is similar in some ways. She told me I should cut most of the scenes relating to war and political intrigue out of the novel, if I wanted to get it commercially published, since women were the main readers of historical fiction and they weren’t interested in that kind of thing. She also suggested that I think about making the first-person narrator a woman, rather than a man, presumably to appeal to the same female readership. The same reader also told me that my writing style was better suited to literary fiction than genre fiction, and that I should aim for that end of the market.
As a keen reader of fiction, as well as an occasional writer, I am intrigued by these insights into the thinking of the gatekeepers of the literary world. It helps me understand certain frustrations I feel with the choices I am presented with as a reader. I read mainly literary fiction, including a fair amount of historical literary fiction (some examples would be Wolf Hall, Casanova in Love, The Anchoress, Burial Rites, The Miniaturist.) Sometimes, though, I feel like reading something less self-conscious and more plot-driven, though still intelligent and written to a high standard. I have real problems locating contemporary books in that category, and I find myself going back to earlier literature, published at a time when dividing lines between literary and commercial fiction were less rigid.
Much classic historical fiction seems to me to fall into this elusive, crossover category: not just Scott and Dumas, but series like Robert Graves's I Claudius novels, Mary Renault's Alexander novels, and Sigrid Undset’s wonderful Kristin Lavransdatter novels. These last three series would now all probably be categorized as literary fiction—Undset won the Nobel Prize for literature, after all—but they are all relatively “straightly told,” to use the terminology of the agent I cite above. They are written in a fairly plain style, without the extensive, lingering descriptive passages and the flagging up of broad philosophical themes that tend to be taken as the hallmark of literary fiction today.
There are a few recent publications I would place in the crossover category I am trying to define here, such as Robert Harris's Cicero novels, or his novel on the Dreyfus case, An Officer and a Spy, or Bernard Cornwell’s The Fort. Most of the books currently positioned as upmarket genre fiction, however, such as the many historical detective series, are too formulaic to be very interesting to me, even if they are well written. You essentially have to like modern detective fiction or police procedurals if you are going to like works in the same genre set in the Tudor court or ancient Rome.
As for the gender issue, I do wonder whether publishers’ notions about what men and women look for in a book are excessively cautious and stereotypical. I use Goodreads a fair bit (under a pseudonym), and I know I am not the only female reader who is not put off a novel by the absence of “strong female protagonists,” or by narratives centring on politics or war. Robert Harris’s Cicero and Dreyfus novels are political in theme and overwhelmingly male in their cast-lists, yet it’s far from true that they only appeal to male readers, as the Goodreads response attests.
Coming back to my own novels, since I have the luxury of not needing to write fiction for a living, I have concentrated on writing the type of novel I want to write (and sometimes read), rather than one that will meet publishers’ criteria. In genre terms, I think my novels approximate to the kind of crossover historical fiction I have been attempting to describe in this post. They are not written with a particular, gendered male or female, readership in mind, and, in terms of style and narrative technique, they are pitched pretty much in the gray area between literary and commercial fiction, the “subtle” and the “straightly-told.”
It has been interesting for me to see the response from readers to The Subtlest Soul. The reviews of my book, and the occasional book group I have discussed it with, do seem to bear out what I have been suggesting in this post: that real-life readers are more open-minded and less fixed in the expectations they bring to their reading than the “template readers” that publishers work from. I think the reason may be this. Most readers, I imagine, other than real, hard-core genre fans, do not limit themselves to reading what the contemporary publishing industry produces: they might read a Victorian novel, followed by something from the 70s, followed by something from that year’s Booker shortlist. We all carry models of fiction in our heads that date from long before the time when divisions between literary and genre, “male” and “female” novels became quite so fixed. I think this helps us “get” novels that straddle or blur these categories far more easily than publishers might fear.
In the autumn of 2014, shortly after The Subtlest Soul won the Historical Novel Society’s inaugural Best Indie Novel award, a novelist acquaintance of mine kindly put me in touch with her agent, who is quite a prominent figure in the fields of literary fiction and historical fiction. The agent read my novel with a view to possible representation. She liked the novel and said some very flattering things about it; but she declined to take it on, for two reasons. One was purely circumstantial (that it was too close in its setting to another novel she was representing), but the other was more general: that she felt it didn’t fit with publishers’ selection parameters. Here are her exact words: On the topic of market, I do feel as though your novel is falling slightly between two stools – it is too subtle to be straight commercial, but too straightly-told to be literary. It is not clearly for men (not quite enough in the way of battles and military tactics) and not clearly for women (not enough strong female protagonists.)
This wasn’t exactly news to me, as I had heard similar things before. Regarding the gender question, an editor for a major fiction publisher who works as a reader for a literary consultancy gave me advice which is similar in some ways. She told me I should cut most of the scenes relating to war and political intrigue out of the novel, if I wanted to get it commercially published, since women were the main readers of historical fiction and they weren’t interested in that kind of thing. She also suggested that I think about making the first-person narrator a woman, rather than a man, presumably to appeal to the same female readership. The same reader also told me that my writing style was better suited to literary fiction than genre fiction, and that I should aim for that end of the market.
As a keen reader of fiction, as well as an occasional writer, I am intrigued by these insights into the thinking of the gatekeepers of the literary world. It helps me understand certain frustrations I feel with the choices I am presented with as a reader. I read mainly literary fiction, including a fair amount of historical literary fiction (some examples would be Wolf Hall, Casanova in Love, The Anchoress, Burial Rites, The Miniaturist.) Sometimes, though, I feel like reading something less self-conscious and more plot-driven, though still intelligent and written to a high standard. I have real problems locating contemporary books in that category, and I find myself going back to earlier literature, published at a time when dividing lines between literary and commercial fiction were less rigid.
Much classic historical fiction seems to me to fall into this elusive, crossover category: not just Scott and Dumas, but series like Robert Graves's I Claudius novels, Mary Renault's Alexander novels, and Sigrid Undset’s wonderful Kristin Lavransdatter novels. These last three series would now all probably be categorized as literary fiction—Undset won the Nobel Prize for literature, after all—but they are all relatively “straightly told,” to use the terminology of the agent I cite above. They are written in a fairly plain style, without the extensive, lingering descriptive passages and the flagging up of broad philosophical themes that tend to be taken as the hallmark of literary fiction today.
There are a few recent publications I would place in the crossover category I am trying to define here, such as Robert Harris's Cicero novels, or his novel on the Dreyfus case, An Officer and a Spy, or Bernard Cornwell’s The Fort. Most of the books currently positioned as upmarket genre fiction, however, such as the many historical detective series, are too formulaic to be very interesting to me, even if they are well written. You essentially have to like modern detective fiction or police procedurals if you are going to like works in the same genre set in the Tudor court or ancient Rome.
As for the gender issue, I do wonder whether publishers’ notions about what men and women look for in a book are excessively cautious and stereotypical. I use Goodreads a fair bit (under a pseudonym), and I know I am not the only female reader who is not put off a novel by the absence of “strong female protagonists,” or by narratives centring on politics or war. Robert Harris’s Cicero and Dreyfus novels are political in theme and overwhelmingly male in their cast-lists, yet it’s far from true that they only appeal to male readers, as the Goodreads response attests.
Coming back to my own novels, since I have the luxury of not needing to write fiction for a living, I have concentrated on writing the type of novel I want to write (and sometimes read), rather than one that will meet publishers’ criteria. In genre terms, I think my novels approximate to the kind of crossover historical fiction I have been attempting to describe in this post. They are not written with a particular, gendered male or female, readership in mind, and, in terms of style and narrative technique, they are pitched pretty much in the gray area between literary and commercial fiction, the “subtle” and the “straightly-told.”
It has been interesting for me to see the response from readers to The Subtlest Soul. The reviews of my book, and the occasional book group I have discussed it with, do seem to bear out what I have been suggesting in this post: that real-life readers are more open-minded and less fixed in the expectations they bring to their reading than the “template readers” that publishers work from. I think the reason may be this. Most readers, I imagine, other than real, hard-core genre fans, do not limit themselves to reading what the contemporary publishing industry produces: they might read a Victorian novel, followed by something from the 70s, followed by something from that year’s Booker shortlist. We all carry models of fiction in our heads that date from long before the time when divisions between literary and genre, “male” and “female” novels became quite so fixed. I think this helps us “get” novels that straddle or blur these categories far more easily than publishers might fear.
November 18, 2017
Moderata Fonte (1555-1592)—A Woman For Our Time?
The late sixteenth-century Venetian writer and feminist theorist, Moderata Fonte, is having a storming twenty-first century so far. She entered the new millennium in print once again, for the first time in centuries, with her greatest work, the dialogue The Worth of Women (Il merito Delle Donne) available in Italian (1988) and English (1997). German, French, and Spanish editions have followed since (2001; 2002; 2013.)
Fonte and The Worth of Women are having even more of a moment now, though not for entirely happy reasons. I was involved earlier this year in a new English-language staging of the dialogue in New York, by the Kairos theater company, put on as part of Carnegie Hall’s magnificent Venice-themed festival, La Serenissima. The performance took place in February, shortly after the Women’s March on Washington following Donald Trump’s inauguration, and several of the actors, and many audience members, had been on the march. In the discussions following the staging, it was clear how relevant and topical the defiant words of Fonte’s speakers were feeling for many women—uncomfortably so, four hundred years on.
Not long after that, around April, the University of Chicago Press approached me to ask whether I would be interested in collaborating on an abridged version of my 1997 translation of Fonte’s dialogue for them, pitched to a general-reader audience. The project was, again, based on a sense of the new topicality of the work. I accepted with alacrity, and the book has now reached proof stage. It will be out early next year (with a new title, The Merits of Women forced on us by Amazon, whose algorithms don’t seem up to managing two separate editions of the same work with the same press.)
It was an interesting experience for me to have a brush with the sharper, more market-driven end of publishing. I have been doing a little more crossover work recently, especially my A Short History of the Italian Renaissance for I. B. Tauris, but “crossover” in that case just meant writing in a more accessible, though still basically academic, style. When I submitted my 3,000 word, footnote-less new introduction to the Fonte abridgment to my Chicago editor last summer, she made it politely clear that she thought I spent too much time on boring old historical context and not enough telling readers how wonderfully vibrant and contemporary the work was. The publicity material for the volume probably gives an idea of how she would ideally have liked me to pitch it (this dialogue unfolds not among ironically misandrist millennials venting at their local dive bar, but rather among sixteenth-century women attending a respectable Venice garden party … A must for baby feminists and “nasty women” alike.)
To be fair, my (very nice) editor did back down, and the introduction will be published as I wrote it, and I hope will supply what readers need. Essentially, I have used the introduction to answer all the questions that an educated, but non-academic, New York audience asked me last February when I gave a talk on Fonte’s dialogue before the performance of the theatrical version.
In addition to my introduction, there’s also a foreword by the great Italian novelist and feminist thinker Dacia Maraini. I was immensely pleased that Dacia agreed to do this. It was a real privilege to bring these two iconic Italian women writers together in this way, in this little volume, and I hope it will serve to introduce English-speaking readers to Maraini, as well as to Fonte. She is not as well-known as she should be, even though several of her works are available in English translation.
One extraordinary aspect of my experience with this volume, which I wanted to share in this blog post, was the abridgment process. The Press was asking me to reduce the original 80,000 words of my translation to 27,000, so the abridged version would come out as just under 35% of the whole. This seemed quite a steep cut, but I plunged into it and did an initial run-through, keeping all the passages I felt were most important and representative and engaging. The Press keyed this new draft version for me, and it still came to 49,700 words!
This began a long and interesting editing odyssey for me, which raised questions not only of method but of authorial ethics. It became obvious to me as I tried to pare a further 23,000 words from my already pared-down version that I was not going to get anywhere with my existing method, of choosing extracts and presenting them in their entirety. So, I began micro-editing, at a sentence-by-sentence and paragraph-by-paragraph level, cutting words and phrases that could be cut without impeding the sense of the whole.
This felt almost sacrilegious at first. This kind of abridging is not merely abridging, but also rewriting, intruding oneself into the very shoes of the author (which in this case, would probably be those vertiginous Venetian platforms sometimes called chopines, which necessitated the wearer being semi-carried along in the street by two attendants, one on either side.)
Once I had got over my scruples, however, I must say I rather enjoyed the process of taking my red pen to a classic. Two facts we know about Fonte, from the contemporary biography by her uncle by marriage Giovanni Niccolò Doglioni, are that she wrote very fast, in her few spare moments (in deference to the prejudice that women should spend their whole time attending to their households, according to Doglioni), and that she had no time to revise Il merito delle donne. Doglioni tells us, very poignantly, that Fonte finished the dialogue the night before her death from childbirth, at the age of thirty-seven, in 1592.
Thinking of Il merito as a draft, rather than a fully revised and pondered work, made me feel more comfortable in cutting redundancies in the text (or what can look like redundancies to those more accustomed to a sparer prose style than most authors favored in 1590.) I also assuaged my guilt by considering that Chicago plans to keep my complete 1997 translation in print, footnotes and all, so that the new abridged edition is not a substitute, but rather something in the nature of a sample.
One final word, on the author’s name. As those of you who know Italian may have been thinking from the start of this post, “Moderate Fountain” is a highly improbable name for a writer. It is a pseudonym, of course; Moderata was born simple Modesta Pozzo, meaning “Modest Well." Fonte’s self-transfiguration from silent, passive well to irrepressible fountain, and from modest young lady to self-moderating Stoic sage says so much about her feminist thinking that her two-word pseudonym (now there’s an abridgement!) serves as the perfect introduction to her thought.
Here is a link to the new edition: The Merits of Women: Wherein Is Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men.
Fonte and The Worth of Women are having even more of a moment now, though not for entirely happy reasons. I was involved earlier this year in a new English-language staging of the dialogue in New York, by the Kairos theater company, put on as part of Carnegie Hall’s magnificent Venice-themed festival, La Serenissima. The performance took place in February, shortly after the Women’s March on Washington following Donald Trump’s inauguration, and several of the actors, and many audience members, had been on the march. In the discussions following the staging, it was clear how relevant and topical the defiant words of Fonte’s speakers were feeling for many women—uncomfortably so, four hundred years on.
Not long after that, around April, the University of Chicago Press approached me to ask whether I would be interested in collaborating on an abridged version of my 1997 translation of Fonte’s dialogue for them, pitched to a general-reader audience. The project was, again, based on a sense of the new topicality of the work. I accepted with alacrity, and the book has now reached proof stage. It will be out early next year (with a new title, The Merits of Women forced on us by Amazon, whose algorithms don’t seem up to managing two separate editions of the same work with the same press.)
It was an interesting experience for me to have a brush with the sharper, more market-driven end of publishing. I have been doing a little more crossover work recently, especially my A Short History of the Italian Renaissance for I. B. Tauris, but “crossover” in that case just meant writing in a more accessible, though still basically academic, style. When I submitted my 3,000 word, footnote-less new introduction to the Fonte abridgment to my Chicago editor last summer, she made it politely clear that she thought I spent too much time on boring old historical context and not enough telling readers how wonderfully vibrant and contemporary the work was. The publicity material for the volume probably gives an idea of how she would ideally have liked me to pitch it (this dialogue unfolds not among ironically misandrist millennials venting at their local dive bar, but rather among sixteenth-century women attending a respectable Venice garden party … A must for baby feminists and “nasty women” alike.)
To be fair, my (very nice) editor did back down, and the introduction will be published as I wrote it, and I hope will supply what readers need. Essentially, I have used the introduction to answer all the questions that an educated, but non-academic, New York audience asked me last February when I gave a talk on Fonte’s dialogue before the performance of the theatrical version.
In addition to my introduction, there’s also a foreword by the great Italian novelist and feminist thinker Dacia Maraini. I was immensely pleased that Dacia agreed to do this. It was a real privilege to bring these two iconic Italian women writers together in this way, in this little volume, and I hope it will serve to introduce English-speaking readers to Maraini, as well as to Fonte. She is not as well-known as she should be, even though several of her works are available in English translation.
One extraordinary aspect of my experience with this volume, which I wanted to share in this blog post, was the abridgment process. The Press was asking me to reduce the original 80,000 words of my translation to 27,000, so the abridged version would come out as just under 35% of the whole. This seemed quite a steep cut, but I plunged into it and did an initial run-through, keeping all the passages I felt were most important and representative and engaging. The Press keyed this new draft version for me, and it still came to 49,700 words!
This began a long and interesting editing odyssey for me, which raised questions not only of method but of authorial ethics. It became obvious to me as I tried to pare a further 23,000 words from my already pared-down version that I was not going to get anywhere with my existing method, of choosing extracts and presenting them in their entirety. So, I began micro-editing, at a sentence-by-sentence and paragraph-by-paragraph level, cutting words and phrases that could be cut without impeding the sense of the whole.
This felt almost sacrilegious at first. This kind of abridging is not merely abridging, but also rewriting, intruding oneself into the very shoes of the author (which in this case, would probably be those vertiginous Venetian platforms sometimes called chopines, which necessitated the wearer being semi-carried along in the street by two attendants, one on either side.)
Once I had got over my scruples, however, I must say I rather enjoyed the process of taking my red pen to a classic. Two facts we know about Fonte, from the contemporary biography by her uncle by marriage Giovanni Niccolò Doglioni, are that she wrote very fast, in her few spare moments (in deference to the prejudice that women should spend their whole time attending to their households, according to Doglioni), and that she had no time to revise Il merito delle donne. Doglioni tells us, very poignantly, that Fonte finished the dialogue the night before her death from childbirth, at the age of thirty-seven, in 1592.
Thinking of Il merito as a draft, rather than a fully revised and pondered work, made me feel more comfortable in cutting redundancies in the text (or what can look like redundancies to those more accustomed to a sparer prose style than most authors favored in 1590.) I also assuaged my guilt by considering that Chicago plans to keep my complete 1997 translation in print, footnotes and all, so that the new abridged edition is not a substitute, but rather something in the nature of a sample.
One final word, on the author’s name. As those of you who know Italian may have been thinking from the start of this post, “Moderate Fountain” is a highly improbable name for a writer. It is a pseudonym, of course; Moderata was born simple Modesta Pozzo, meaning “Modest Well." Fonte’s self-transfiguration from silent, passive well to irrepressible fountain, and from modest young lady to self-moderating Stoic sage says so much about her feminist thinking that her two-word pseudonym (now there’s an abridgement!) serves as the perfect introduction to her thought.
Here is a link to the new edition: The Merits of Women: Wherein Is Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men.
December 28, 2015
Distilling the Italian Renaissance: a new challenge
This year saw the publication of my new book A Short History of the Italian Renaissance, for the London-based publisher I. B. Tauris. This is my first crossover book, intended for an audience made up not only of students and academics, but also of general readers. It was a new and interesting challenge for me, and I thought I’d take a moment now, as 2015 draws to a close, to reflect on the experience. This blog post draws on a talk I wrote for a book launch in New York in October, the full video of which may be seen on this site.
One difference between writing this general, introductory book and writing the kind of highly specialized scholarly work I am more used to writing is that this Short History was so open-ended. Normally, when I write an academic book or article, I know what I am going to say from the outset. I start from a body of material I have been researching or a text for which I want to offer a new reading; and the task of writing is simply about finding the most effective way I can to communicate my argument.
The Short History commission was a very different experience. No one can give a comprehensive account of the Italian Renaissance in 75,000 words—nor, indeed, in 750,000, or, very probably, 7.5 million! Any “short history” is going to be partial, by definition, and to offer a particular take on the subject. And the publisher was setting no constraints on what should or shouldn’t be included—in fact, that was one thing that attracted me to the commission in the first place. My editor at Tauris, Alex Wright, had been quite insistent that he didn’t want a dutiful, point-by-point survey, but something more distinctive and idiosyncratic: I want our books to be ‘introductions with an edge’ – to go beyond the predictable into new, possibly uncharted territory, and to make their readers think in novel and exciting and unexpected ways about the topics addressed.
So, this was a real “blank page” moment for me: both exciting and rather daunting. I had been researching and teaching the Italian Renaissance for more than a quarter of a century when I began the book in 2012, starting the count from the beginning of my PhD research in 1985. Here was the moment of reckoning. What had I discovered in that time? What was the Italian Renaissance? Why did it matter? Why should it continue to interest people today?
One thing I was certain about from the start: that this would be the first general-reader survey book on the Italian Renaissance to give equal weight—or almost equal—to men and to women. A staggering amount of research has been done in the last twenty years on women’s creative contribution in Renaissance Italy. It has been one of the most vibrant sub-fields in Renaissance Studies over this whole period, and it is not an exaggeration to say that it has uncovered a whole, lost world of cultural production and human experience. Steven Botterill, of Berkeley, captured this dynamic with a nice analogy in a review of my 2013 anthology Lyric Poetry by Women of the Italian Renaissance for Choice magazine:
The scholarly investigation of women’s writing in Italian vernacular during the early modern period … is coming more and more to resemble Schliemann’s celebrated excavation of Troy: as each new discovery is brought to light, another still more startling is laid bare beneath, and what looked at first like an unimpressive feature of the cultural landscape is revealed to have a scope and depth undreamed of by earlier investigators.
It has been extraordinarily exciting and a real privilege to participate in this “excavation”, and I loved the idea of being able to share some of these findings with a wider public. They really are quite remarkable, and they prove without doubt that, in Italy at least, women did have a “room of their own” well before the twentieth, or even the nineteenth or eighteenth, century—and not only as writers. Within music, art, acting, women enjoyed a prominence in Italy in the later sixteenth century that they would not have again for centuries to come. This is a story that deserves to be much better known.
A second thing I knew about the book right from the start was that it would have a different periodization from most guides to the Italian Renaissance, in that it would take the Renaissance right down to the end of the sixteenth century. That may not sound particularly revolutionary from an English point of view (we don’t have any problem in thinking of Shakespeare as a Renaissance dramatist), but the periodization of Italian literature and culture has always operated differently. A sharp transition is generally posited around the middle of the sixteenth century, with the Council of Trent and the coming of the Counter Reformation. The later 16thC is seen as post-Renaissance or even anti-Renaissance in some ways: a moment when Italian culture turned away from the open, questing, experimental spirit that had characterized the Renaissance and towards something much more dark and dour and oppressive. And as a result, the culture of the later Italian sixteenth century has been massively ignored. It is a virtual terra incognita, even for specialists, with all kinds of startling discoveries to be made.
I think this conventional periodization is a distortion. When you look at the culture of the later sixteenth century, it’s clear that there are very strong continuities with the earlier period; it’s the same culture, though evolving and with different inflections. And there are all kinds of cultural-historical narratives that started in the earlier Renaissance that reach their climax in this later period. I became very aware of that with my work on women. If you have a cut-off point of 1550 or 1560, you only get half the story. The same goes for the story of the way in which the invention and diffusion of print affected Italian culture.
The third thing I knew about my Short History at the moment I began writing it was that I planned to embed some new, primary research within the book—primary in the sense of work on original sources which has not been published before. I don’t think it is particularly common to embed primary research within a general-reader book, but one of the best survey books on the Italian Renaissance does just that: the social historian Peter Burke’s The Italian Renaissance (3rd edition, Princeton University Press, 2014), which incorporates a very interesting analysis of the social backgrounds of artists and writers in this period. I thought that was an interesting choice, and it’s one reason why Burke’s book is so good. It’s generous in academic terms, since we academics generally like to hoard our research findings and publish them first in a strictly “research” context, only then, if at all, summarizing them for a general public. I liked the idea of embedding a piece of new research in my survey.
The research I chose for this experiment was something I had been thinking of working on for a while. I had become quite intrigued by the writings of practitioners of the ephemeral court arts of the sixteenth century, such as cooks, dancing instructors, horse trainers, stewards, virtuoso carvers. The virtuoso carvers, or trincianti, are my favorites of these artists, trained to carve meat “aerially” at table on a fork so that slices showered down on the plate in a kind of culinary ballet—a fabulous example of the Italian Renaissance capacity to convert almost any aspect of daily life into a work of art!
The writings of these minor court artists interestingly mirror the writings produced by the people we now think of as artists (painters, sculptors, musicians), but they haven’t been particularly well studied, or not by scholars outside the various specialist fields they relate to (historians of food or of dance or of horsemanship). I liked the idea of reconstructing the mental and social world of these “other” artists of the court, and hence of getting back to a more period-appropriate, globalizing notion of the creative arts, incorporating many things we now tend to think of as crafts.
So those were the three novel ingredients I had in mind when I began writing the book—the things that I thought would help my book stand out from the very many competing introductory books that already exist on the subject. Of course, in introducing these new elements into the mix, I didn’t want to short-change the more traditional elements people think about when they think of the Italian Renaissance: the remarkable artistic novelties of the age; the passionate re-engagement with classical culture that underlies so many of the period’s cultural and intellectual innovations; the expansion of horizons that the great nineteenth-century Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt captured in his formula of “the rediscovery of the world and of man.” I wanted to write a book that could give space both to the grand old men of Renaissance culture—poets like Petrarch and Ariosto; artists like Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, and Titian; thinkers like Leon Battista Alberti and Marsilio Ficino; patrons like Cosimo de’ Medici and Pope Julius II—and also to quirkier, less well known figures such as the Venetian courtesan poet Veronica Franco, the actress, singer, and playwright Isabella Andreini, the early feminist thinker Moderata Fonte, the street poet Giulio Cesare Croce.
By a happy alchemy, as I found as the book began to take shape, my three novel ingredients (the injection of women’s history; the new periodization; the research on technical treatises on the court arts) fused well together and gave a distinctive flavor to the book. The story of women’s gradual emergence as creative artists in various fields has a clear democratizing trajectory (in that the first secular women writers are aristocrats; then we see the practice spreading outwards more widely in society, facilitated by the dynamics of print.) The story of the diffusion of courtly manners and courtly ways of crafting identity that I wanted to trace through the technical manuals by the lesser artists of the courts is also one of democratization: it is possible there to see men of lower birth status successfully appropriating modes of self-fashioning and self-presentation that evolved within aristocratic circles, and using them to engineer themselves an enhanced social status. And both these stories are stories that can only be told if the periodization of the Renaissance is altered so that the later sixteenth century begins to come into play. Otherwise, they are cut off and don’t even appear significant phenomena.
So, that ended up being the theme of the book, not really one I had entirely seen from the beginning—one of the gradual diffusion, dissemination, and democratization of the originally elite classicizing culture of the Renaissance. By the end of the sixteenth century, thanks to the democratizing effects of print (really the great hero of my book), classical art, philosophy, and literature were not the preserve of an aristocratic elite, but were rather available to a much broader urban elite of professionals, large and small merchants, and skilled artisans, incorporating women to a far larger extent than has ever previously been acknowledged. This is a Renaissance with a strong appeal to a modern readership; yet I am not distorting the historical evidence in any way when I narrate the Renaissance in this manner. The facts were there, hiding in plain sight.
One difference between writing this general, introductory book and writing the kind of highly specialized scholarly work I am more used to writing is that this Short History was so open-ended. Normally, when I write an academic book or article, I know what I am going to say from the outset. I start from a body of material I have been researching or a text for which I want to offer a new reading; and the task of writing is simply about finding the most effective way I can to communicate my argument.
The Short History commission was a very different experience. No one can give a comprehensive account of the Italian Renaissance in 75,000 words—nor, indeed, in 750,000, or, very probably, 7.5 million! Any “short history” is going to be partial, by definition, and to offer a particular take on the subject. And the publisher was setting no constraints on what should or shouldn’t be included—in fact, that was one thing that attracted me to the commission in the first place. My editor at Tauris, Alex Wright, had been quite insistent that he didn’t want a dutiful, point-by-point survey, but something more distinctive and idiosyncratic: I want our books to be ‘introductions with an edge’ – to go beyond the predictable into new, possibly uncharted territory, and to make their readers think in novel and exciting and unexpected ways about the topics addressed.
So, this was a real “blank page” moment for me: both exciting and rather daunting. I had been researching and teaching the Italian Renaissance for more than a quarter of a century when I began the book in 2012, starting the count from the beginning of my PhD research in 1985. Here was the moment of reckoning. What had I discovered in that time? What was the Italian Renaissance? Why did it matter? Why should it continue to interest people today?
One thing I was certain about from the start: that this would be the first general-reader survey book on the Italian Renaissance to give equal weight—or almost equal—to men and to women. A staggering amount of research has been done in the last twenty years on women’s creative contribution in Renaissance Italy. It has been one of the most vibrant sub-fields in Renaissance Studies over this whole period, and it is not an exaggeration to say that it has uncovered a whole, lost world of cultural production and human experience. Steven Botterill, of Berkeley, captured this dynamic with a nice analogy in a review of my 2013 anthology Lyric Poetry by Women of the Italian Renaissance for Choice magazine:
The scholarly investigation of women’s writing in Italian vernacular during the early modern period … is coming more and more to resemble Schliemann’s celebrated excavation of Troy: as each new discovery is brought to light, another still more startling is laid bare beneath, and what looked at first like an unimpressive feature of the cultural landscape is revealed to have a scope and depth undreamed of by earlier investigators.
It has been extraordinarily exciting and a real privilege to participate in this “excavation”, and I loved the idea of being able to share some of these findings with a wider public. They really are quite remarkable, and they prove without doubt that, in Italy at least, women did have a “room of their own” well before the twentieth, or even the nineteenth or eighteenth, century—and not only as writers. Within music, art, acting, women enjoyed a prominence in Italy in the later sixteenth century that they would not have again for centuries to come. This is a story that deserves to be much better known.
A second thing I knew about the book right from the start was that it would have a different periodization from most guides to the Italian Renaissance, in that it would take the Renaissance right down to the end of the sixteenth century. That may not sound particularly revolutionary from an English point of view (we don’t have any problem in thinking of Shakespeare as a Renaissance dramatist), but the periodization of Italian literature and culture has always operated differently. A sharp transition is generally posited around the middle of the sixteenth century, with the Council of Trent and the coming of the Counter Reformation. The later 16thC is seen as post-Renaissance or even anti-Renaissance in some ways: a moment when Italian culture turned away from the open, questing, experimental spirit that had characterized the Renaissance and towards something much more dark and dour and oppressive. And as a result, the culture of the later Italian sixteenth century has been massively ignored. It is a virtual terra incognita, even for specialists, with all kinds of startling discoveries to be made.
I think this conventional periodization is a distortion. When you look at the culture of the later sixteenth century, it’s clear that there are very strong continuities with the earlier period; it’s the same culture, though evolving and with different inflections. And there are all kinds of cultural-historical narratives that started in the earlier Renaissance that reach their climax in this later period. I became very aware of that with my work on women. If you have a cut-off point of 1550 or 1560, you only get half the story. The same goes for the story of the way in which the invention and diffusion of print affected Italian culture.
The third thing I knew about my Short History at the moment I began writing it was that I planned to embed some new, primary research within the book—primary in the sense of work on original sources which has not been published before. I don’t think it is particularly common to embed primary research within a general-reader book, but one of the best survey books on the Italian Renaissance does just that: the social historian Peter Burke’s The Italian Renaissance (3rd edition, Princeton University Press, 2014), which incorporates a very interesting analysis of the social backgrounds of artists and writers in this period. I thought that was an interesting choice, and it’s one reason why Burke’s book is so good. It’s generous in academic terms, since we academics generally like to hoard our research findings and publish them first in a strictly “research” context, only then, if at all, summarizing them for a general public. I liked the idea of embedding a piece of new research in my survey.
The research I chose for this experiment was something I had been thinking of working on for a while. I had become quite intrigued by the writings of practitioners of the ephemeral court arts of the sixteenth century, such as cooks, dancing instructors, horse trainers, stewards, virtuoso carvers. The virtuoso carvers, or trincianti, are my favorites of these artists, trained to carve meat “aerially” at table on a fork so that slices showered down on the plate in a kind of culinary ballet—a fabulous example of the Italian Renaissance capacity to convert almost any aspect of daily life into a work of art!
The writings of these minor court artists interestingly mirror the writings produced by the people we now think of as artists (painters, sculptors, musicians), but they haven’t been particularly well studied, or not by scholars outside the various specialist fields they relate to (historians of food or of dance or of horsemanship). I liked the idea of reconstructing the mental and social world of these “other” artists of the court, and hence of getting back to a more period-appropriate, globalizing notion of the creative arts, incorporating many things we now tend to think of as crafts.
So those were the three novel ingredients I had in mind when I began writing the book—the things that I thought would help my book stand out from the very many competing introductory books that already exist on the subject. Of course, in introducing these new elements into the mix, I didn’t want to short-change the more traditional elements people think about when they think of the Italian Renaissance: the remarkable artistic novelties of the age; the passionate re-engagement with classical culture that underlies so many of the period’s cultural and intellectual innovations; the expansion of horizons that the great nineteenth-century Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt captured in his formula of “the rediscovery of the world and of man.” I wanted to write a book that could give space both to the grand old men of Renaissance culture—poets like Petrarch and Ariosto; artists like Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, and Titian; thinkers like Leon Battista Alberti and Marsilio Ficino; patrons like Cosimo de’ Medici and Pope Julius II—and also to quirkier, less well known figures such as the Venetian courtesan poet Veronica Franco, the actress, singer, and playwright Isabella Andreini, the early feminist thinker Moderata Fonte, the street poet Giulio Cesare Croce.
By a happy alchemy, as I found as the book began to take shape, my three novel ingredients (the injection of women’s history; the new periodization; the research on technical treatises on the court arts) fused well together and gave a distinctive flavor to the book. The story of women’s gradual emergence as creative artists in various fields has a clear democratizing trajectory (in that the first secular women writers are aristocrats; then we see the practice spreading outwards more widely in society, facilitated by the dynamics of print.) The story of the diffusion of courtly manners and courtly ways of crafting identity that I wanted to trace through the technical manuals by the lesser artists of the courts is also one of democratization: it is possible there to see men of lower birth status successfully appropriating modes of self-fashioning and self-presentation that evolved within aristocratic circles, and using them to engineer themselves an enhanced social status. And both these stories are stories that can only be told if the periodization of the Renaissance is altered so that the later sixteenth century begins to come into play. Otherwise, they are cut off and don’t even appear significant phenomena.
So, that ended up being the theme of the book, not really one I had entirely seen from the beginning—one of the gradual diffusion, dissemination, and democratization of the originally elite classicizing culture of the Renaissance. By the end of the sixteenth century, thanks to the democratizing effects of print (really the great hero of my book), classical art, philosophy, and literature were not the preserve of an aristocratic elite, but were rather available to a much broader urban elite of professionals, large and small merchants, and skilled artisans, incorporating women to a far larger extent than has ever previously been acknowledged. This is a Renaissance with a strong appeal to a modern readership; yet I am not distorting the historical evidence in any way when I narrate the Renaissance in this manner. The facts were there, hiding in plain sight.
October 5, 2014
Writing history, writing fiction
It’s a curious experience for someone like me, who has spent her entire adult life studying the culture of a particular historical period from an academic perspective, to turn to writing a fictional narrative set in that period. In some respects, it is all strangely familiar. Any historian necessarily becomes so immersed in the period she works on that she comes to feel almost as at home there as in the modern world (if not more!) So, trying to get inside the heads of people who lived five hundred years ago was not a particularly novel exercise for me. It’s something I have spent every day of my life doing since the age of around twenty-one.
And yet, and yet, and yet … Writing a fictional work is a very different experience from writing an academic study. Most obviously, the creative freedom involved is vastly different, even if you’re aiming for a good degree of historical accuracy. My novel The Subtlest Soul tracks a five-year period of Italian political history pretty closely, so much so that you could use it as a background primer for the study of Machiavelli’s Prince. The main political events succeed one another in the order that they happened, and I have made only minor deviations from the historical record, all of which are diligently registered in an endnote. That still leaves a considerable leeway for invention, however, in a way that was rather liberating for me after a professional life as a slave to fact. My protagonist is a fictional figure and I have woven in a fictional spy/love/coming-of-age plot, incorporating some fairly outrageous adventure elements, alongside my more sober historical material (not that the historical material is especially sober in this case—we are talking about the era of the Borgias, after all.)
One great novelty for me was that writing a novel forced me to imagine the material conditions of life in the early sixteenth century in more detail than a literary or intellectual historian generally has to: how people dressed, what they ate, how they lit their rooms, how long it took to travel from one place to another in different seasons of the year. All this wasn’t exactly remote for me, as there has been a strong convergence between literary history and material history in recent years. One of the most interesting academic conferences I have attended recently was on Renaissance accessories, with talks on mirrors, scissors, fans, handkerchiefs, etc.—almost all delivered by people who cut their academic teeth on literary studies (here’s the book of the conference: Ornamentalism). Still, however much time I have spent in sixteenth-century minds in my life, this was the first time I had really tried to place myself imaginatively inside a sixteenth-century skin. I found that aspect of writing the novel very interesting, and feel it may even have enriched my academic work.
The period I write about in the novel, the opening years of the sixteenth century, is one of the most dramatic and momentous of this whole period of Italian history. It’s a time when Leonardo da Vinci’s career was at its peak, when Raphael and Michelangelo were starting theirs; when the Borgias were astounding all observers with their audacious political scheming and military adventurism; and when Machiavelli was elaborating the explosive political thought that he would unleash on the world with The Prince. All this leaves a mark on the novel. The political plot tracks the rise and fall of Cesare Borgia, and Leonardo and Machiavelli both appear as characters (Leonardo in a cameo; Machiavelli in a more substantial role). Machiavelli’s writings also inform the plot of the novel in all kinds of ways. At a narrative level, the political plot of the novel tracks events that Machiavelli wrote about in The Prince and in some of his diplomatic dispatches and his shorter essays (especially this one: Description of the Methods Adopted by the Duke Valentino when Murdering Vitellozzo Vitelli. Thematically, as well, the novel engages with one of Machiavelli’s core themes in The Prince: the need for the successful political actor to master "the ways of the lion and the fox"—force and fraud.
My narrative territory in the novel has been much explored in recent years. A few months before I published The Subtlest Soul, another, very different novel appeared that exploits some of the same historical material and also features Machiavelli as a character, Michael Ennis’s The Malice of Fortune. There’s also an overlap, of course, with the HBO series The Borgias—a production about which I have rather mixed feelings. On the one hand, I feel goodwill towards anything that popularizes “my” period, and you would have to have a heart of stone not to enjoy the spectacle of Jeremy Irons hamming it up as Rodrigo Borgia. On the other hand, I wouldn’t say The Borgias was exactly outstanding in terms of historical accuracy. There’s a Euro-production on the same subject, called Borgia, which does a better job on that score.
I approached writing The Subtlest Soul in an entirely noncommercial manner. The recommended approach for genre novelists who want to make money by writing is to identify the genre they wish to write in; to gain an accurate idea of its conventions through analysis of successful examples; and finally to craft a successful example themselves. Bernard Cornwell has a very informative account on his website of his own formation, which followed these lines. I approached the task in a far more amateurish manner. I essentially set off to write the kind of historical novel I would personally like to have with me if I were embarking on a long-haul flight (something I do rather a lot). I wanted to write a novel crafted to a decent literary standard, but plot-driven and full of incident and color; sufficiently accurate in historical terms for a reader to learn something about the period, but also true to fiction’s vocation of telling a good yarn. Other than that, I started with no real parameters or guidelines; I just started writing and watched what emerged.
[This is an edited version of a piece I wrote this summer for Helen Hollick's blog: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show....
And yet, and yet, and yet … Writing a fictional work is a very different experience from writing an academic study. Most obviously, the creative freedom involved is vastly different, even if you’re aiming for a good degree of historical accuracy. My novel The Subtlest Soul tracks a five-year period of Italian political history pretty closely, so much so that you could use it as a background primer for the study of Machiavelli’s Prince. The main political events succeed one another in the order that they happened, and I have made only minor deviations from the historical record, all of which are diligently registered in an endnote. That still leaves a considerable leeway for invention, however, in a way that was rather liberating for me after a professional life as a slave to fact. My protagonist is a fictional figure and I have woven in a fictional spy/love/coming-of-age plot, incorporating some fairly outrageous adventure elements, alongside my more sober historical material (not that the historical material is especially sober in this case—we are talking about the era of the Borgias, after all.)
One great novelty for me was that writing a novel forced me to imagine the material conditions of life in the early sixteenth century in more detail than a literary or intellectual historian generally has to: how people dressed, what they ate, how they lit their rooms, how long it took to travel from one place to another in different seasons of the year. All this wasn’t exactly remote for me, as there has been a strong convergence between literary history and material history in recent years. One of the most interesting academic conferences I have attended recently was on Renaissance accessories, with talks on mirrors, scissors, fans, handkerchiefs, etc.—almost all delivered by people who cut their academic teeth on literary studies (here’s the book of the conference: Ornamentalism). Still, however much time I have spent in sixteenth-century minds in my life, this was the first time I had really tried to place myself imaginatively inside a sixteenth-century skin. I found that aspect of writing the novel very interesting, and feel it may even have enriched my academic work.
The period I write about in the novel, the opening years of the sixteenth century, is one of the most dramatic and momentous of this whole period of Italian history. It’s a time when Leonardo da Vinci’s career was at its peak, when Raphael and Michelangelo were starting theirs; when the Borgias were astounding all observers with their audacious political scheming and military adventurism; and when Machiavelli was elaborating the explosive political thought that he would unleash on the world with The Prince. All this leaves a mark on the novel. The political plot tracks the rise and fall of Cesare Borgia, and Leonardo and Machiavelli both appear as characters (Leonardo in a cameo; Machiavelli in a more substantial role). Machiavelli’s writings also inform the plot of the novel in all kinds of ways. At a narrative level, the political plot of the novel tracks events that Machiavelli wrote about in The Prince and in some of his diplomatic dispatches and his shorter essays (especially this one: Description of the Methods Adopted by the Duke Valentino when Murdering Vitellozzo Vitelli. Thematically, as well, the novel engages with one of Machiavelli’s core themes in The Prince: the need for the successful political actor to master "the ways of the lion and the fox"—force and fraud.
My narrative territory in the novel has been much explored in recent years. A few months before I published The Subtlest Soul, another, very different novel appeared that exploits some of the same historical material and also features Machiavelli as a character, Michael Ennis’s The Malice of Fortune. There’s also an overlap, of course, with the HBO series The Borgias—a production about which I have rather mixed feelings. On the one hand, I feel goodwill towards anything that popularizes “my” period, and you would have to have a heart of stone not to enjoy the spectacle of Jeremy Irons hamming it up as Rodrigo Borgia. On the other hand, I wouldn’t say The Borgias was exactly outstanding in terms of historical accuracy. There’s a Euro-production on the same subject, called Borgia, which does a better job on that score.
I approached writing The Subtlest Soul in an entirely noncommercial manner. The recommended approach for genre novelists who want to make money by writing is to identify the genre they wish to write in; to gain an accurate idea of its conventions through analysis of successful examples; and finally to craft a successful example themselves. Bernard Cornwell has a very informative account on his website of his own formation, which followed these lines. I approached the task in a far more amateurish manner. I essentially set off to write the kind of historical novel I would personally like to have with me if I were embarking on a long-haul flight (something I do rather a lot). I wanted to write a novel crafted to a decent literary standard, but plot-driven and full of incident and color; sufficiently accurate in historical terms for a reader to learn something about the period, but also true to fiction’s vocation of telling a good yarn. Other than that, I started with no real parameters or guidelines; I just started writing and watched what emerged.
[This is an edited version of a piece I wrote this summer for Helen Hollick's blog: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show....
