Reading

A year or so ago I dug up my old copy of Michaela Roessner's The Stars Dispose from my parents' house to reread in preparation for a panel on food in fantasy because I vaguely remembered it as a Fantasy Novel About Renaissance Culinary Arts. However I did not get around to it in time and so I set it aside and genarti picked it up and read it instead, and then we passed it on to another friend who was looking for books in the brief nineties trend of Fantasy Novels about Renaissance-ish Apprentices [a trend I am always hoping will be revived, so far in vain]. Now it has at last returned to me and I thought: well, I didn't read it for the panel on food in fantasy, but perhaps now I'll read it in time for the panel on centering the arts in alt-history --

Well, I didn't actually succeed in doing that either. But I have now reread it! What a weird and charming* book!

*with caveats

So, the fantasy premise of this book is that there are various parallel universes that all impact each other, and some bad parallel universe forces are Out to Get the City of Florence Specifically for ambiguous reasons. The fate of the Medici is all tied into this in some way so it's very important that beautiful wise clever baby Catherine de Medici (yes, that Catherine de Medici) (this isn't quite popehunk but it's not NOT that either) survive and flourish, so the city can flourish, and both the city's chief astrologer and Catherine de Medici's cook are doing different sorts of magic to ensure that happens despite the sieges and plagues and various other dangers that are constantly besetting Florence through this time.

This is the premise, and the plot, more or less, but it's not what the book actually cares about. What the book cares about is a young man named Tommaso (the son of the cook) learning how to cook beautiful Renaissance cuisine, and also then apprenticing in the art of Renaissance sculpture, and then bringing these two fields together for incredible innovations in the world of edible art. Approximately 70% of this book is rich, beautifully researched descriptions of Tommaso's coming-of-age as a young and gifted artisan in Renaissance Florence coming into his own artistically despite the plagues and the sieges and the breakdown in his parents' marriage, and then the other 30% is interstitial scenes reminding us that Tommaso's mom is very concerned about supernatural dangers from another dimension and they'll probably strike via the Pope's bad decisions for some reason.

Now, when I say coming of age, the book starts when Tommaso is eleven or twelve and covers two or three years of his life and, well -- by the end of the book, Tommaso has both graduated from his apprenticeship and is about to take over as a household head chef, and engaged in a sexual affair with Michaelangelo* which Roessner clearly wants us to see as very poignant and romantic .... great position for a promising eighteen-or-so year old food artist to be! Really charming as long as I was careful never to do any math about it whatsoever!

*Michaelangelo like Catherine de Medici is also vitally supernaturally important to the well-being of Florence

But I do think Roessner is interested in, and pretty good at, writing from within a sixteenth-century mindset rather than a modern one; she's certainly interested in and good at writing about the immediate details of carving a roast, casting a medal, baking an extremely fancy loaf of bread, and about the satisfaction of learning to do these things well. I miss this kind of fantasy. It can come back into fashion any day now.

When last we left off in booklogging, I was feeling a powerful urge to read some nice sober nonfiction, so I picked up Ruth Goodman's How to Be a Tudor: A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Everyday Life. genarti has been singing Goodman's praises to me for the past many years and I am glad to say I now wholeheartedly agree! She's very good!

The thing that is notable about Ruth Goodman as a historian is her emphasis on physical, material culture: there's a passage where she walks through a Tudor suit of clothes stored at the (I think?) V&A museum going through all the physical evidence of how it was constructed and what we can learn from it, capping with the charming fact that it was put together in such a hurry that a couple of pins were accidentally left in the lining. In addition to doing the research to look at the prints that show us what it was like to iron the ruffs or use the bread-ovens, she has then gone on to iron the ruffs herself, use the bread-ovens, etc., and she tells you about it and what she's learned from it and what it was probably like to live it in a very straightforward and readable way that lets you follow along with the process of drawing reasonable conclusions from the evidence and practice at hand.

Some of the info is stuff I had general previous knowledge of or aligns pretty well with what I would have guessed, some of it I sort of knew but nonetheless hit me with a "man I never thought about that" (the existence of secular theater in England only predated Shakespeare by like 50 years! he almost missed it completely!), some of it was the full HOO BOY the past is a DIFFERENT country, and some of it was the equally powerful HOO BOY the past is the SAME country. Had a great time! My only real complaint about the book is that it contains various prints of some of her source material but the picture quality is GODAWFUL -- clearly meant to be in color, the contrast in the black-and-white version that I have is so low that I couldn't make out a Dang Thing. "This print shows --" well, okay, Ruth Goodman, if you say so, I will believe you! I certainly can't see for myself!