11 March, Chapter 27:
The artist [Hieronymous Bosch] had covered the outside panels [of the triptych] with a velvety black pigment. A wizened tree shimmering in the moonlight spanned the two front panels. A tiny wolf crouched in its roots, and an owl perched in the upper branches. Both animals gazed at the viewer knowingly. A dozen other eyes shone out from the dark ground around the tree, disembodied and staring. Behind the dead oak, a stand of deceptively normal trees with pale trunks and iridescent green branches shed more light on the scene. Only when I took a closer look did I see the ears growing out of them, as though they were listening to the sounds of the night.
Hieronymous Bosch did several large altarpieces – though none like the one I described in the book. Instead, I used this Bosch drawing for inspiration, and imagined how it might have been a study for a large-now-lost piece of art.
The Trees Have Ears and the Field Has Eyes by Hieronymous Bosch.
24 March, Chapter 28:
‘It’s an automaton, Jack,’ Matthew said, picking the thing up. When he did, the stag’s head sprang open, revealing the hollow chamber within. ‘This one’s meant to run down the emperor’s dinner table. When it stops, the person closest must drink from the stag’s neck. Why don’t you go show Annie what it does?’
The automaton, Diana and the Stag, that Rudolf sent Diana was based on a piece owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. It is by a German maker, Joachim Freiss, from about 1620. Automata were popular in the period, and were made in many European cities.
http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/193623
24 March, Chapter 28:
The man bowed. ‘Joris Hoefnagel.’
‘The calligrapher,’ I said, thinking back to Pierre’s remark about the ornate penmanship on Matthew’s official summons to Rudolf’s court. But that name was familiar . . .
‘The artist,’ Gallowglass corrected gently.
Joris Hoefnagel was one of the foremost artists of the late sixteenth century. Here is a portrait, and some of his artwork including a calligraphic manual and an illustration of Diana and Actaeon. Many museums have pictures by Hoefnagel. Here is a partial list: http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/hoefnagel_joris.html.
4 April, Chapter 29:
Back at the Three Ravens, I was still taking my cloak off when an eight-year-old boy and a flying mop practically knocked me off my feet. The mop was attached to a lively pink tongue and a cold black nose.
The breed that inspired Lobero: the Komondor. This is a younger dog, whose coat hasn’t fully grown into the long, mop-like strands. It is probably just about the age that Lobero was when Rudolf sent him to Diana.
4 April, Chapter 29:
Then we crossed over a wide street and passed through a gate into the Jewish Town. More than five thousand Jews lived in this small enclave smashed between the industrial riverbank, the Old Town’s Main square, and a convent.
I visited Prague when I was researching locations for Shadow of Night. Here are a few photos I took of the Jewish Town, also known as Josefov and the Jewish Ghetto.
The back of the Old New Synagogue, Prague, completed around 1207, and an old metal sign near Herr Maisel’s house indicating a synagogue.
The grave of Rabbi Lowe and the Jewish Cemetery.
8 April, Chapter 30:
‘In spite of her name, Diana doesn’t like hunting. But it’s no matter. I will fly the merlin,’ Matthew said.
This small, feisty bird of prey was the model for Šárka.
8 April, Chapter 30:
‘Master Habermel stopped by. Your compendium is on the table.’
Erasmus Habermel (c.1538-1606) was one of the sixteenth century’s most prominent mathematical instrument makers. I used elements from several of his known instruments, and combined them into a new device.
Listed below are the instruments from which I drew inspiration. The first was not by Habermel, but another period instrument maker named Johann Anton Linden, and it provided me with the general structure of Diana’s compendium, on to which I then projected Habermel’s style.
Johann Anton Linden’s compendium held by the British Museum: http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/pe_mla/a/astronomical_compendium.aspx
Compendium by Erasmus Habermel, once owned by Johannes Kepler, c. 1600. National Technical Museum, Praha Inv. No.: 57 921 6,4 x 1,6 x 8: http://frombork.art.pl/wp-content/uploads/sites/InventoryWVN/view/jk_ins.html
Erasmus Habermal’s Astronomical Compendium, Louvre: http://cartelfr.louvre.fr/cartelfr/visite?srv=obj_view_obj&objet=cartel_15944_18673_ov019208.003.jpg_obj.html&flag=false
20 April, Chapter 31:
On the day of the performance, servants dragged every spare candelabrum in the palace and cathedral into the echoing expanse of stone to provide the illusion of a starry night sky and spread fresh rushes on the floor. For the stage we used the base of the stairs leading up to the royal chapel.
Here are more photographs I took when visiting Prague to research Shadow of Night. The first is of the staircase in the great hall of Prague Castle, and the second is Diana’s view of the great hall from her vantage point on the stairs.
20 April, Chapter 31:
‘I was greatly entertained, La Diosa – much more than I expected to be. You may ask Zeus for a reward,’ Rudolf said, his eyes drifting over my shoulder and down to the swell of my breasts.
Portrait of Rudolf II, c. 1594, painted by Joseph Heintz the Elder. Now at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
30 April, Chapter 31:
I lifted the ouroboros so that I could study the enameling. It wasn’t an ouroboros, exactly, because it had feet. It looked more like a lizard or salamander than a snake. A bloody red cross emerged from the lizard’s flayed back. Most important, the tail was not held in the creature’s mouth but wrapped around the lizard’s throat, strangling it.
‘It is a mark of respect, Herr Roydon.’ Rudolf placed a subtle emphasis on the name. ‘This once belonged to King Vladislaus and was passed on to my grandmother. The insignia belongs to a brave company of Hungarian knights known as the Order of the Defeated Dragon’
Below is the emblem of the Order of the Defeated Dragon, based on evidence from textiles in Austrian museum holdings. The order was founded in 1408 and, yes, Vlad the Impaler and Vlad II Dracul (his father) both belonged to it.
20 May, Chapter 34:
The fourth-floor tower room in Greenwich Palace afforded a sweeping view of the gray river, muddy ground, and England’s stormy skies.
Historic marker on the site of the former palace, where now the Greenwich Old Royal Naval College stands.
27 May, Chapter 36:
Bedlam was an oubliette in all but name – a place for forgetting, where the insane were locked up with those interred by their own families on some trumped-up charge simply to be rid of them.
The treatment of the mentally ill in Elizabethan England centred on containment rather than meaningful therapy. For those interested in learning more, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England by Michael MacDonald is a good place to start.
22 June, Chapter 38:
Matthew treated me to dinner at the famous Belle Savage Inn just outside the Blackfriars on Ludgate Hill. More than a simple eatery, the Bell Savage was an entertainment complex where customers could see plays and fencing matches – not to mention Marocco, the famous horse who could pick virgins out of the crowd.
Marocco, also known as ‘Bankes’s Horse’ after his trainer William Bankes, was a popular London attraction. Born around 1586, the famous horse worked the London inns and traveled throughout the country and even into Scotland until his death around 1606. Marocco was known for being able to walk on two legs, play dead, and was sometimes called ‘the politic horse’ because he would bow when the Queen’s name was mentioned and bare his teeth an
d chase his master off stage if the name of the Spanish king, Philip II, was uttered. And yes, one of his most applauded acts was picking out the virgins in the crowd of onlookers.
This is a contemporary image of Bankes and Marocco, performing their act.
23 June, Chapter 38:
‘Life is the strong warp of time. Death is only the weft. It will be because of your children, and your children’s children, that I will ‘live forever’.’
‘Live Forever’ is the song that inspired Stephen’s letter to his daughter, a beautiful song from Drew Holcomb & the Neighbors that celebrates love and family and friendship. Enjoy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUf4FEiimwg&feature=kp
24-30 June, Chapter 39:
And so Thomas Harriot, mathematician and linguist, made scientific history in the courtyard of the Hart and Crown while sitting in a battered wicker garden chair pulled down from our attics. He trained the long metal tube fitted with two spectacle lenses at the full moon and sighed with pleasure.
Portrait of Thomas Harriot (1602)
3 July, Chapter 41:
Matthew’s house in Amsterdam turned out to be a seventeenth-century mansion on the most beautiful stretch of the Herengracht.
Image of the Herengracht by 17th-century artist Jan van der Heyden.
4 July, Chapter 41:
A Spyker Spyder. Marcus collects cars named after arachnids.’ Matthew activated the car doors and they scissored up like wings on a jet fighter. He swore. ‘It’s the most conspicuous car imaginable.’
Marcus has a thing for sportscars – dark blue sportscars in particular – and he has quite a collection stored in garages all over the world. This is his Spyker C8 Spyder, the car he left for Diana and Matthew so they could drive from Amsterdam to Sept-Tours.
30 May 1593, Chapter 42:
‘Love’s Labour’s Lost,’ he wrote in large letters.
Yes, Shakespeare mused, he’d definitely use that one day.
Title page of the first quarto (1598) of William Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost
*For all the songs referenced in the notes, please support these amazing artists who have inspired me throughout the All Souls trilogy and purchase their music through legal channels.
The Inspiration for and the
A conversation with Deborah Harkness
Diana is an appealing heroine, determined, accomplished, and yet aware of her own weaknesses. In what ways, if any, does Diana reflect your own experience or personality?
There are some similarities – Diana is also a historian of science, also interested in the history of alchemy, and shares some of my passions (including television cooking programs, tea, and rowing). Really, all the characters have some element of me in them. I think that’s how authors create imaginary people who nevertheless feel real. The rest of Diana’s character comes from a combination of qualities I admire in others, wish fulfillment, and my completion of the following statement: ‘Wouldn’t it be great if a heroine in a book was . . .’
You’ve written two well-received scholarly books. What inspired you to write a novel?
It’s pretty hard not to notice the popular preoccupation with witches, vampires, and things that go bump in the night. But we aren’t the first to be fascinated with these creatures. Today, we often imagine them into fantastic otherworlds, but the people I study believed that such magical beings were living alongside them in this world. So I started thinking, if there are vampires and witches, what do they do for a living – and what strange stories do humans tell to explain away the evidence of their presence? A Discovery of Witches began with the answers to those questions as I essentially re-imagined our modern world through the eyes of medieval and Renaissance people.
Matthew observes that Diana sees her work as a historian as similar to that of a detective. Is this how you approach your own research? Is a novelist also a type of detective?
I definitely see my historical work as a process of detection. Historians fit pieces of evidence together and hope that they eventually form a coherent picture. Often, a historian’s most compelling questions – and the most difficult to answer – concern personal motivations and why something happened the way it did. These are questions we have in common with detectives. Fiction is more like alchemy, though. You take a little of this, a little of that, combine it, and hope that something wonderful occurs so that your creation is greater than the sum of its individual parts. Novelists, like the alchemists of old, know that true creation takes time and patience, and that it’s likely you will have many disasters and failures before you achieve success.
How did you become interested in the intersection of alchemy, magic, and science? Historically, what do you see as the relationship between science and religion or mysticism?
In college, I had a wonderful professor who taught a class on these subjects. To kick off the class, he asked us, ‘How do you know what you think you know?’ I’ve spent the last quarter century trying to answer that question. Because the world is a mysterious place and our relationship to it is not always clear, people have often turned to science, faith, and magic for answers. They help people find responses to the questions of, who am I and why am I here?
Elias Ashmole and Ashmole 782 are taken from real life. Who was Elias Ashmole? Why did you base your novel on this particular manuscript?
Elias Ashmole was a seventeenth-century English antiquarian and scholar. He gave major bequests to Oxford University, including the collection of books and objects that provided the foundation for the Ashmolean Museum (which is still in operation today). Ashmole’s books and manuscripts were first kept at the museum and then moved to the university’s Bodleian ‘Library, Oxford’ in the nineteenth century. The Ashmole manuscripts include numerous rare alchemical texts. One of the manuscripts, Ashmole 782, is currently missing. As a scholar, I’ve done a lot of research in the Ashmole alchemical manuscripts and always wondered what Ashmole 782 might contain.
What was your inspiration for the concept of the Congregation and its trinity of daemons, witches, and vampires?
Both came from my desire to imagine extraordinary creatures into our modern world. I reviewed ancient and medieval ideas about the organization and creation of the universe and was struck by how many of them use organizing principles based on the numbers 3, 4, and 7. Four species of creatures – daemon, human, vampire, and witch – were soon central to the novel. But I was still troubled by the problem of how humans could be surrounded by such beings and not know it. The Congregation was useful in resolving that issue because it’s an organization dedicated to preserving and protecting daemons, vampires, and witches from the majority of the population – which is human.
From the publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula in the nineteenth century to the current Twilight series, vampires have always fascinated the reading public. What is the appeal of the occult novel? What kind of freedom from the ordinary does it provide, both for readers and writers?
Vampires are relative newcomers among the supernatural creatures who have fascinated readers. The word ‘vampire’ wasn’t even used in English-speaking countries until the early eighteenth century. Before that, readers were far more interested in ghosts, devils, witches, daemons (and demons), and exotic hybrid creatures like dragons and the basilisk. The appeal of all these creatures – and vampires, too – is that they help to explain the inexplicable. Readers and writers are given the opportunity to suspend belief and wonder, how do I know there aren’t witches? and even more important, what if there are?
When writing a novel that involves the supernatural, it’s necessary to create a framework for that invented world, a set of rules to maintain consistency and credibility. How difficult is it to establish that kind of structure and to faithfully work within it?
As a historian of science, I study the changing ideas that past generations have had about the world and how it works. Throughout history, most educated people believed in a theory of creation that was essenti
ally alchemical; for example: some combination of opposing elements resulted in new life if subjected to the right celestial and terrestrial influences. This was entirely logical, given their understanding of the world and how it worked. A number of ancient and medieval worldviews helped me create the logic and structure of the world of A Discovery of Witches. Once those were in place, I found them very helpful in imagining what could (and could not) happen in it.
Discover The World Of . . .
VAMPIRES
The common opinion of vampires is that they are cold, focused and dangerous, whereas vampires themselves are proud of their elegance and discipline. They are charming, yet have a tendency to unveil a darker side when they smell blood. Vampires love wine. Given their bottomless bank accounts and the years they’ve devoted to collecting great bottles from the world’s best producers, it’s no surprise that they have terrific cellars. Sparkling, white, red, or fortified – all wine is fascinating to a vampire thanks to their long memories and preternatural palates.
WITCHES
Witches are well known for being the most natural of creatures. Family and strong lineage are incredibly important, though witches also pride themselves on being open and warm when forming friendships. Witches have strong and reliable instincts, and can be relied upon for their worldly knowledge.
The All Souls Real-Time Reading Companion Page 4
