http://17thcenturyresearch.blogspot.com/

I hope to see you there.

But as a researcher into history I had quibbles, the greatest being the portrayal of the Protestants as embracers of individualism and light, and Catholics as in the Dark Ages. They had to delineate the good and the bad in true Hollywood fashion, and the movie is, after all, the story of the war of Catholic Spain against Protestant England, and of course Protestant Elizabeth is the movie’s heroine. But my personal impression is that the Protestants were the extremists: no dancing, no festivals, even the celebration of Christmas was outlawed for a time. No frivolity whatsoever. Clothing had to be sober, and in dark colours. Everything so serious. In a Protestant church, the women sat separate from the men and the ministers preached covered.

So that’s my main quibble, making Catholics out to be so terribly cult-like and evil. Another is that the men and women were so often alone: this would have been highly unlikely. The scene of Elizabeth and Sir Walter sitting on the floor together drinking wine was hard to believe. I think proprieties would have been observed. Also, was it true that the men picked the women up from the crotch in dancing? Minor things: no bonnet at bedtime. Men jumping overboard to save their lives: surely they would have been jumping to a certain death. Etc. etc. etc.

But other than that, a wonderful movie — a wonderful Hollywood movie.

Since when has memoir been held to documentary standards? Memoir is a story created from life. I write historical fiction, and in delving into the research, I’ve come to see quite clearly that historians write fiction, as well. The line between fact and fiction is fuzzy, always, and I don’t understand this urge to nail it down. Facts can be misleading, and fiction can be revealing.

Story is how we explain the past—our history—to ourselves. Story is a powerful tool, and it is story that sets us apart from the world of animals (at least insofar as we know!).

Yet I’m guilty myself, I know. I love that “wow” moment when reading historical texts, thinking: Imagine—this actually happened. I think the issue is not whether something is true or false, but the understanding, the contract that is created between the author and reader. The outrage is: “We have been misled.” Frey’s memoir was more fiction than fact, but was marketed as fact. Even so, I have trouble understanding the furor.

One of my first historical reveries was brought on by a diary I read of a Quaker young woman in 18th century England. I was swept away by this “true” account. On my next trip to London, I researched her life; it was there that I learned that the diary was fiction, a novel. I felt disillusioned, let down, but then thought: “What a good novel.” For it drew me into the world of the past in a very real way—and that’s what fiction can do that fact cannot.

However, converting old books to text is challenging because of the irregularity of the printing. An interesting solution makes use of the garbled letters test given to an estimated 60 million internet users a day. By incorporating snippets of a scanned book into the tests—and feeding the “translations” back to the digital library—a digital text version of the book is created.

The visiting card was introduced to Europe in the 17th century during the reign of Louis XIV who was known as the Sun King. In the same century the practice began to take hold in English society. At around the same time, the card moved from its social beginnings to a business purpose with the introduction of the trade card.