Guest Post: Cecelia Holland, author of 'The King's Witch'
Yesterday I posted a review of Cecelia Holland's latest book, The King's Witch. (I have also previously reviewed her book The Secret Eleanor.) In this special guest post, she has shared some of her thoughts about writing a book about the Crusades, and medicine in the 12th century.
The Crusades fascinate everybody, especially now, with the clash of cultures in the Middle East. The Third Crusade maxed out the whole emotional range of the holy war. Richard the Lion-Hearted's campaign in the East really showcases the zeal and sacrifice, the brutality and delusion of the long and bloody struggle.
My problem, writing about this, was in coming up with characters who could make something good of all this desperate doomed wrong-headed courage, and a plot that would somehow find a happy ending in the chaos of the failed adventure.
THE KING'S WITCH follows after THE SECRET ELEANOR, my novel about Eleanor of Aquitaine, and so I had some characters from that. Richard the Lion-Hearted was irresistible, of course, and his sister Johanna, the Queen of Sicily. The earlier novel provided a wonderful hero, a knight with a dark secret.
But my heroine was elusive. She started out very young and innocent, with a talent for fortune-telling; in following drafts she got older and wiser, and I thought perhaps she was Jewish. But she didn't begin to talk to me until her knack for fortune-telling became an interest in medicine.
Then suddenly she was alive and kicking. I did a lot of reading up on Galen and Avicenna and Medieval practice; it helps that one of my daughters is a nurse. This gave my heroine character and work, and the rest of the book fell in around that angle.
In the Middle Ages ideas about and knowledge of the body, health, medicine and healing were radically different than they are now. Yet often in books set in those times, the healers and medics don't know this: a cavewoman knows about the circulation of the blood, or an Egyptian diagnoses heart disease.
This does a disservice to those previous times. Their medicine was not simply ignorant superstition: they practiced true healing, within the limits of their world-views and their resources. (In times to come people may look in horror at our 21st century medicine--cutting into people! giving people toxins! But I digress.)
So when I wrote about a physician on Crusade I wanted to express as much as possible her understanding as a woman of the 12th century. This meant Galen, Avicenna, Maimonides, the whole theory of humors, the Platonic universe in which everything is part of a seamless web, from the planet Jupiter to an ailing liver.
-- Cecelia Holland
Thank you, Cecelia, for your insight on life in the 12th century!
If you haven't done so already, please visit Cecelia Holland's website for a complete list of her published works:
http://www.thefiredrake.com/