armarius: director of a scriptorium
A la vòstra: To your health. (Occ.)
amé notz: with nuts (Occ.)
Au va!: Are you kidding? Come on! (Cat.)
Baiser la veuve: Fuck the widow. (Fr.)
banderii: local guards (Fr.)
Bonhommes: the Good Men;
les Innocents (Fr.)
canonical hours: the liturgical hours, loosely given as
Matins (sunrise)
Lauds (6 A.M.)
Prime (9 A.M.)
Terce (noon)
Sext (3 P.M.)
Nones (6 P.M.)
Vespers (sunset)
Complies (bedtime/nighttime)
cappa: robe
cers: northwesterly wind
consolamentum: baptismal sacrament of the Good Men
denier: medieval penny
domna/dominus: formal title—lady/lord
donjon: prison/vault (dungeon)
du cabre: of a goat (Occ.)
fin d’amour: fine love (Fr.)
garigue: brush and shrubs (Fr.)
houri: fair woman of paradise (Ar.)
jongleur: medieval entertainer (Fr.)
kirtle: woman’s gown or outer coat
la fadata: fey girl (Occ.)
la Vierge: the Virgin
ma filla: my daughter (Cat.)
Mare: Mother (Cat.)
marin: warm marine wind
masco: witch (Occ.)
Michaelmas: a feast signaling that start of autumn; a holy day of obligation
midons: my lord—code name for my lady (Occ.)
monsen: sir (Occ.)
Na: Madame, honorific (Occ.)
oc: yes (Occ.)
oyez: hear; listen (Occ.)
pariage: sum paid to the king for protection (Fr.)
pelardon: sheep’s cheese (Occ.)
perfectus/perfecta/perfecti: perfected Good Man/Woman (priest)
rioja: red table wine (Sp.)
roumèque: a fantastic creature that frightens children (Occ.)
scriptorium: room where manuscripts are read, stored, and copied
simple: a medicine, often taken as a draught or tonic
sou: medieval silver coin
toft: plot of land attached to back of house
trobairitz: female troubadours (Occ.)
troubadour: singer and composer of love songs, especially in medieval Languedoc
trencher: stale or dry bread used as a plate
una mica: a little (Cat.)
verjuice: acidic (fruit) juice used as a condiment
Cat. Catalan
Fr. French
Ar. Arabic
Occ. Occitan
Sp. Spanish
Chronology
Date: 1085
Event: Papermaking in Xativa, Spain
Date: 1209
Event: Pope Innocent III launches Albigensian crusade in southern France; Narbonne fortifies defenses
Date: 1215
Event: Fourth Lateran Council pronounces sweeping Church reforms; has little effect
Date: 1221
Event: Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II declares all official documents written on paper invalid
Date: 1231
Event: Dominican convent in Narbonne established
Date: 1234–1237
Event: Inquisition in Narbonne
Date: 1235
Event: Heretics arrested in Narbonne
Date: 1238
Event: James I of Aragon gains control of Muslim paper mills in Xativa; paper mill starts in Capellades, Catalonia
Date: 1248–1250
Event: Inquisitors probe Narbonne
Date: 1249
Event: Cistercian/Benedictine abbey of Fontfroide acquires milling rights in Narbonne
Date: 1250
Event: Italy becomes major paper producer
Date: 1261
Event: Fontfroide starts keeping house in bourg of Narbonne
Date: 1272
Event: First stone of Cathedrale de St. Juste is blessed and laid
Date: 1276
Event: Watermark invented in Fabriano mills in Tuscany; first paper mill in Italy
Date: 1278
Event: Mirror invented
Date: 1280
Event: Spectacles invented
Date: 1285–1314
Event: Philip IV (the Fair) rules with absolute arrogance; controls papacy
Date: 1288
Event: Fontfroide has land dispute with consuls in bourg of Narbonne; woman associated with Beguines sees visions and is accused of heresy
Date: 1289
Event: Fontfroide charges Narbonne citizens to cut wood; block printing begins in Ravenna
Date: 1290
Event: Franciscan Church in St. Felix starts construction
Date: 1294–1303
Event: Boniface VIII becomes pope; defies Philip IV
Date: 1295–1306
Event: Donjon (part of Cathedrale de St. Juste) built in Narbonne
Date: 1296
Event: Fontfroide takes over one-fourth of Narbonne’s grain-measuring rights
Date: 1298–1315
Event: Spirituals dominate Narbonne’s Franciscan Church Vicomte Amauri II (who is at odds with Narbonne’s archbishop) rules; loses power to the king from 1309–1322
Date: 1305
Event: Clement V becomes pope
Date: 1306
Event: Expulsion of Jews from France (they go mostly to Barcelona and Toledo)
Date: 1307–1323
Event: Bernard Gui is inquisitor in Toulouse, writes The Conduct of Inquiry Concerning Heretical Depravity
Date: 1309–1378
Event: Avignon papacy (moved to Avignon by Clement V)
Date: 1311
Event: Pierre Authiè—the “Last Cathar”—is burned at the stake
Date: 1312
Event: Thirteen guilds in Narbonne appeal to the king claiming consuls are unfairly held by rich families; reforms never take effect
Date: 1314
Event: Philip IV dies; succeeded by three sons
Date: 1314–1315
Event: Dante’s Inferno is complete; he writes Purgatorio and begins Paradiso
Date: 1315–
Date: mid-1800s The “little ice age”
Date: 1315
Event: Bad weather; crop failure in northwest Europe
Date: 1315–1317
Event: Beguines burn for heresy in Narbonne
Date: 1317–1343
Event: Friars of Narbonne summoned to Avignon to defend themselves for being Spirituals; two burn at stake; Franciscan Church is excommunicated but is appealed by consuls
Date: 1320
Event: Flooding of Aude in Narbonne; port silts up
Date: 1322
Event: Poor of Narbonne crushed at Fontfroide’s gates by Church’s negligence; twenty-one Beguines burn
Date: 1328
Event: Forty-nine people (mostly artisans) accused of heresy in Narbonne
Date: 1332
Event: First service in Cathedrale de St. Juste
Date: 1337–1453
Event: One Hundred Years’ War
Date: 1338
Event: Oldest known paper mill begins in France
Date: 1348
Event: Black Plague; Great Schism for control of papacy between Rome and Avignon
Date: 1387–1400
Event: Geoffrey Chaucer writes The Canterbury Tales
Date: 1388–1470
Event: French monks produce paper for holy texts
Date: 1400
Event: Paper for low-grade textbooks, volumes of sermon, popular tracts, and papal indulgences
Date: 1450
Event: Gutenberg invents printing press; paper becomes popular
Date: 1517
Event: Martin Luther’s Ninety-five Theses; Galileo’s incarceration
Date: 1648
Event: Peace of Westphalia
Selected Bibliography
The following bibliography is presented for the reader who wishes to read more about the factual history and influences behind this novel.
Anonymous. Aymeri of Narbonne: A French Epic Romance. Edited and translated by Michael A. H. Newth (2005). New York: Italica Press.
Barber, M. (2000). The Cathars. Harlow, UK; New York: Pearson Education.
Bayley, H. (1967). A New Light on the Renaissance, Displayed in Contemporary Emblems. New York: Benjamin Blom.
Bogin, M. (1980). The Women Troubadours. New York: Norton.
Caille, J. (2005). Medieval Narbonne: A City at the Heart of the Troubadour World. Hampshire, UK: Ashgate Publishing.
Cantor, N. F. (1999). The Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages. New York: Viking.
Cheyette, F. L. (2001). Ermengard of Narbonne and the World of the Troubadours. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Duby, G. (1991). France in the Middle Ages 987–1460: From Hugh Capet to Joan of Arc. Oxford, UK; Cambridge, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Emery, R. W. (1967). Heresy and Inquisition in Narbonne. New York: AMS Press.
Gies, F., and J. Gies (1999). Daily Life in Medieval Times: A Vivid, Detailed Account of Birth, Marriage, and Death; Food, Clothing, and Housing; Love and Labor, in the Middle Ages. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers.
Gui, B. (2006). The Inquisitor’s Guide: A Medieval Manual on Heretics. Translated by J. Shirley. Welwyn Garden City, UK: Ravenhall Books.
Halsall, Paul, ed. Internet Medieval Sourcebook. http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/sbook.html
Hunter, D. (1943). Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft. New York: Knopf. Lindberg, D. C. (1992). The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, 600 B.C. to A.D. 1450. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
McEvedy, C., and C. McEvedy (1992). The New Penguin Atlas of Medieval History. London; New York: Penguin.
Ong, Walter J. (2002). Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. 2nd ed. London: Routledge.
Scully, T. (1995). The Art of Cookery in the Middle Ages.
Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK; Rochester, NY: Boydell Press.
Siraisi, N. G. (1990). Medieval & Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
A+ AUTHOR INSIGHTS, EXTRAS & MORE…
FROM VANITHA SANKARAN AND AVON A
The Story Behind the Book
When I decided to write my first novel, I knew right away it would be about papermaking. Paper has always fascinated me. As a child, I was forever asking for a clean sheet; in old photographs, I’m often clutching that empty page. Sometimes I actually wrote on the paper, but most times, just holding it gave me a sense of comfort.
My search for the story behind papermaking focused primarily on the craft’s spread during the Middle Ages. I’ve long thought that, if not for the plague, the Middle Ages would have blossomed into the frenzy of thought, reason, and discovery that characterized the Renaissance. The later part of the medieval era was ripe with change; it was teeming with growing tensions between the burgeoning middle class, the corrupt Church, and a nobility worried about its own power, which makes the perfect backdrop for a compelling story. How would paper, an invention brought to Europe by the Moors and deeply distrusted by the Church, have fared in such a chaotic environment?
In order to pick the right location to host my tale, I looked at small towns along the prominent trade routes that led from Spain—where the Moors built some of Europe’s first paper mills—to France, Italy, and England. Today, each of these towns, a gold mine of history, still proudly boasts to history-savvy travelers of surviving the turmoil and destruction. I chose a French town, Narbonne, as my setting. Situated in the heart of heretical France, where alternate religious philosophies often thrived alongside the Church, Narbonne remained a haven for heretics, Jews, and other undesirables, even during the Inquisition. Compared to the thousands who were consigned to the flames in neighboring cities, very few people burned in Narbonne. And the town has a colorful cultural story of its own: its rise as a prominent trading town and its surprising demise, brought about by the flooding of its river.
Much of medieval Narbonne exists today. Though the vicomte’s palace has been lost to time, the archbishop’s palace, which went through centuries of construction, remains an impressive edifice. The donjon has also been preserved with eerily little degradation. St. Paul’s, in the bourg, looks little different than it would have in Auda’s time. Her namesake, the river Aude, still flows through the city. So much of the medieval flavor has been preserved in Narbonne that when I walked down the old cobbled Via Domitia, sniffing the smells of myrrh and incense in St. Paul’s, I almost felt my characters come to life. I felt their excitement at introducing the new craft of paper making into their world as if it were my own.
Developing Auda as a character to love and admire was not as easy a task. I didn’t want to write another historical novel with a heroine whose sensibility is taken from modern times, a feminist who believed men and women are equal and set out to prove it. Nor could Auda be one of the illiterate commoners, with a convenient faith in this incipient art of paper. Her ability to read and write, and her love of paper, had to be born of need as well as desire. Through several incarnations, Auda appeared as an orphan, a cripple, even a healer. Eventually, she emerged as someone who didn’t recognize her own limits, someone who had every reason to use paper, for nothing less than to find her own self.
People often ask me why I write historical fiction, where these characters and themes come from. I was never a particularly good history student in school; dates and names often elude me. The best answer I can give is that historical fiction appeals to both sides of my brain. I love the empiricism of historical research and the creativity of writing. It is a good balance between the real and the imagined, a duality not unlike the one at the heart of Auda’s story itself.
My research for the novel began with a practical experiment trying to recreate paper production from the Middle Ages. For two months, I kept a bucket of molding linens on my balcony, judiciously adding bird droppings, lye made from ashes, and rainwater to help the cloth break down. Each day, I noted the color, consistency, and pH of the mixture in my notebook. Then I would inhale the sharp scents, press the slick material between my fingers, and capture every detail in paragraphs of description. I’m not sure where the scientific explanation stopped and artistic expression began, but I do know that much of what I learned in this experiment made it into my novel.
In many cases, researching the past made the history feel more modern than I ever expected. People of the medieval era seem to me every bit as curious about the world as we are today. Nobles debated the meaning of love in their courts. Learned clergymen discussed heady subjects like whether sex brought one closer to God. Dissidents questioned the feudal system and the meaning of freedom. There were even people wondering what role the written word could have in a culture weaned on oral news and entertainment. And Auda encounters all of these dilemmas, in varying degrees, throughout the story.
My goal in writing this novel was not to write a story that probably did happen, but one that possibly could have. The narrative of history, for me, is just like fiction with some immutable facts thrown in. All I had to do was stretch my imagination and let the story come to life. I hope you will do the same.
Papermaking: A History
The history of humankind is intricately intertwined with our desire to create a record of our thoughts, hopes, and imaginations. Written communication can be traced back to cave drawings and symbols etched into wood and stone; historically, the form it took was manifested in a myriad of ways depending on the resources that were readily available. For example, on one continent you might find papyrus, constructed from the stems of water plants, while on another, rice paper would be the written surface of choice, made not of rice at all, nor
pressed out like paper, but cut from the pith of a shrub.
Throughout time, we have gone through an amazing range of writing surfaces, from bark to rock, metal to ceramic to animal skin. Paper is unlike these natural sources in that it is a manmade invention, defined as a thin sheet manufactured from a fibrous pulp made of straw, bark, or old cloth. The fibrous pulp is first macerated until each filament is separated. The filaments are then mixed in water so they can intermingle, or felt. The interwoven fibers are sieved through a screen, dried and smoothed, then sized so as to better accept pigments and ink.
We believe that papermaking began sometime between 100 BC and 100 AD when the Chinese sought a surface with which to capture and perfect their delicate art of calligraphy. The Chinese empire took to paper wholeheartedly, using it not just for handwriting and record keeping but also for ornamental purposes. Although the first papers of China were likely made from disintegrated cloth, cheap and plentiful vegetable materials soon became the preferred source. It was this bark-based paper that passed from China through Korea into Japan that not only made the first paper printings but also encouraged the establishment numerous paper mills, as well as a guild, to support the emperor’s needs. China, Korea, and Japan elevated not just paper but the papermaking process to an art form. These arts exist to this day. From China, paper also made its way into central Asia, India, and Persia through well-known trade routes and, from there, spread to Samarkand, Baghdad, and Damascus, then into Egypt and Morocco. It took nearly five centuries for papermaking to find Europe, via either Spain or Italy. Although Europe initially regarded paper as an inferior writing material, more fragile than parchment and “invented” by distrusted Jews and Moors, slowly paper became an accepted Western commodity.
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