Virginia Cox's Blog - Posts Tagged "machiavelli"
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....
