You did it! We figured this one out! It is a truth universally acknowledged (by me for certain) that the Bitchery pretty much knows everything, and really, it's true. Scroll down to see the solution for this HaBO - and many thanks!
From Caitlin comes this HaBO request of a book with a plot that clearly went to Dunkin’ Donuts and got a power shot of CrazySauce. Really. I read this twice and still didn’t believe it. Caitlin, are you makin’ this up?!
This was the first romance novel I ever read and it was lent to me by a
friend in middle school (so around 1997 or so). The book at an emerald green
cover, took place in the middle ages and was part of a series.
The heroine was ostracized from society and lived in a small hut in the
woods. One day while out scavenging (or something) she finds this knight who
was hanged, but the limb broke under his weight before he died, so she puts
him on the horse she found wounded several months earlier and takes him
home. As he heals they (of course) find they are attracted to each other,
although she is clueless about what she’s feeling. He realizes the horse is
actually one of his lord’s favorite stallions, stolen months before and
accuses her. He finally accepts that she didn’t steal the horse, but takes
it with him when he leaves her (pregnant) to return to the castle and his
life.
He’s out riding one day a few weeks later (I think he was riding because he
missed her and needed to think) and sees her running toward the woods being
pelted by rocks and chased by mean village kids (a common occurrence, she
had a star shaped? scar on her face from a rock) and rides to the rescue,
marries her and they live happily ever after.Memorable moments:
-Bathing with hero in the river and notices her nipples are hard, she isn’t
cold so why?-He comes in her mouth during a racy scene and she wonders whether the baby
would come out of her mouth if she got pregnant that way. Told hero she
wants a kid when he says she can’t get pregnant that way.-May have been ostracized because her mother/she was believed to be a witch
-I think the heroine had long curly hair, maybe red
There was also an excerpt to the next book in the series that showed the
heroine and a friend douse the hero with pig bladder water balloons dropped
of a balcony.That’s all I can remember, would appreciate any help!
OK, those moments are so memorable, I haven’t even read this book, and I will remember them for ages to come. In fact, I think I’ve aged just reading it again. For REAL? This is a REAL BOOK? Who am I kidding, of course it is. And many of you already know which one it is, don’t you?
Yes, I am who you think I am! I avoid using my real name online these days. Remember my tigress signature drawing? Do you still have the grey cat signature I drew for you?
How nice to come across you again; I hope all is well with you.
😀
I TOTALLY read that book – probably around the same time Caitlin did! I don’t remember the title either! I was 12 or 13 and my mom got mad saying it was too racy (a statement I didn’t understand – I was all , “What? It’s not racist!?!?”)
When I got to “she finds this knight who was hanged”, ‘Wild’ by Jill Barnett (I LOVE JILL BARNETT’S HISTORICALS!!!!!!!111 ‘Wicked’ is my FAVORITE!!!!!!!) came to my mind. When I finished reading the whole post, I’m absolutely positive that I’m correct!
Ah, the pig bladder water balloons. Such fond memories. 🙂
very84 < Hey, I’m born in 1984!
@Ann Somerville: I’m going to bake me a Knightly Nipple Tart. I’m thinking a mix of cherries and spicy sausage in the recipe, sauce spiced with star anise, followed by rocky road ice cream for dessert.
@AgTigress
That’s because, according to Jewish belief at least, sex is all about the woman and it’s the man’s job to pleasure her. Even if she can’t have children.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again – Rabbis have actually sat down and listed, according to the man’s job, how many times a year he must bring sexual pleasure to his wife. (But only if she wants it.) Judaism is the first religion to actually make it illegal for a husband to rape his wife.
More then that, while he is only allowed to ejaculate in her vagina, she can demand sex in any manner that brings her pleasure. So technically oral and anal IS allowed IF it brings HER pleasure. It’s just on him to hold back his own orgasm until he penetrates her vaginally.
Sex is seen as so important to a healthy marriage that the “naptime” on the Sabbath day is set aside for love making. Children are not allowed to bother their parents for anything short of a life threatening emergency.
If he doesn’t please her in bed, the wife is allowed to divorce her husband.
That’s why there’s no prohibition against having sex with barren women. Because the man has to do it to make her happy.
@AgTigress. I’m pretty sure that tradition so steeped in Biblical belief would have also frowned on stuff like bumping off your nephews so you could be king and lying and screwing around with the non-wife. But it went on big time.
I so want to read this. Although, I remember another book that was quite similar to this, but wasn’t the Jill Barnett. I haven’t read her. Had the woman living in the hut and being chased by the village kids thinking she’s a witch. And I think it was middle ages too.
In terms of the WTFery of the thinking she could have a baby by oral sex. Within the last five years I knew a girl who was going into a very prestigious Ivy league MEDICAL school after attending a very prestigious Ivy league college, at the age of 22, and did not know you could get STDs from oral sex. Frankly, people can be smart as anything and still be dumb as stumps when it comes to sex. Sex is the great stupefier. I could gladly go on my soapbox about the atrocity that is sex education in the US, but that story seems to speak for itself.
BTW, she is going to be doing family practice and considered ob/gyn work for awhile. Glad I had that little talk with her. 😛
Rhiannon, one of the books in Roberta Gellis’s Roselynde series has a Welsh “witch” as the heroine. However, Gellis is sensible enough to not have her raised by wolves. Still one of my favorite books—it was my first experience with really well-written romance.
Anna Lee Waldo’s Circle of Stones. The whole blue woad tattoo thing. So much fun. And doesn’t each society have its own conveneient definition of witch?
You miss the point. The breaking of civil and moral laws is obviously endemic in all human societies. Nobody is suggesting that murder, adultery, theft and other offences against law and morality do not and did not take place, simply because they are and were illegal. There would be no need for strictures against them if nobody committed them. But people who are not complete sociopaths feel very different about doing something that is perfectly socially acceptable and something that they know is prohibited by law, or that they believe to be profoundly sinful, and for which they will have to pay in this life or the next.
I do not doubt that oral sex took place in secret in Medieval Christendom — as did buggery, homosexual acts and so forth. But I suspect that those who practised it felt extremely stressed and guilty, and that it was probably much less common than it is today, when it is no longer regarded in most circles as a crime and a sin.
As I have not read the book in question, I cannot say quite how the oral sex scene is presented, but if the most memorable thing about it was that the heroine was worried about ‘oral childbirth’, I would guess that neither party was depicted as suffering from agonies of guilt, shame and fear because they had committed a serious sin. If that is the case, then I suggest that the scene, set in the 13th century, was historically unrealistic.
Is that ‘the’ legendary Rhiannon, from the Mabinogion, or another Rhiannon?
🙂
Stevie Nicks, maybe?
@AgTigress. I don’t think I missed the point. You say that whenever anyone disagrees with you. You always act like you were there. C’mon. When I was younger I did sexual things that I was pretty sure my boyfriend and I were inventing at the time. Was kinda disappointed to find out other people did it too. You can’t really research whether Elizabeth Wydville really told her daughter to give Richard III BJs so he’d like her more, can you? And, yeah, I know people disagree on the spelling of her name.
You’ve kind of answered your own point. *Today’s* ignorant teenagers are the product of post-Victorian prudishness and modern fundamentalism. Even the Amish don’t require the degree of innocence regarding sexual matters that modern Catholics and other Christian sects demand. In pre-Victorian times, while female chastity was valued and enforced, there was no doubt as to which sexual acts were procreative and which not, even if the actual mechanics of things like the menstrual cycle were a mystery (for instance, the time of the flow was considered the woman’s most fertile, which is the opposite of the truth.) In a world where unbridled fertility is rarely a good thing even in the most primitive societies, working out which acts were fun but not likely to lead to yet another dangerous or expensive pregnancy, would be an early priority, whatever the priests told you.
All I’m saying is that an emphasis on continence and female chastity is *not* the same thing as sexual ignorance (and even the supposed Victorian attitude towards sexual matters was no way near as ubiquitous as assumed.)
Yes, this female protag *might* have somehow escaped the prevailing frank understanding of sexual matters, and never heard a priest fulminate against deviant sex because of its lack of procreative potential. After all, this isn’t the only wildly unrealistic aspect of this set up. It is, however, wildly unrealistic for that time. It’s hard to overemphasise how pointless it is to point to modern examples of clueless teenagers (of whom I was most assuredly one), to in any illustrate prevailing attitudes in the thirteenth century.
Virginia. Not at all. I am not a medievalist. I am merely applying ordinary principles of intellectual analysis and historic judgement. Social norms and mores vary in different human cultures, that is, at different times and places. That is simply a fact. At the same time, many human needs and responses are biologically based, and do not change. That, too, is a fact. Identifying the ways in which people of the past were like us, and the ways in which they were different, is essential for historical understanding. More than that, it is extremely interesting, because it provides a different perspective on our own attitudes.
When people write about a past era, they need to try to understand the differences in mind-set from our own times. Some historical novelists are very good at this, and can evoke the ‘feel’ of a past era vividly, and help us to understand it. Others are not so good at it. One of the most common faults in historical novels is for the author to put contemporary people, people with our 20th/21stC mind-set and habits, into period costume and an historical setting. That is the type of fault I strongly suspect in the book under discussion, but as I have not read it, that is an unsupported inference based only on the descriptions that other people have given.
Anyone over the age of about 50 can track the changes in mind-set in action, because we can observe how attitudes are slightly different now from the way they were when we were younger. It is also easy to perceive the general cultural differences even between related contemporary cultures, like those of the USA and the UK.
I read your original post disagreeing with me as suggesting that there was no great difference in attitude to practices such as oral sex now, and in the Middle Ages. But there is a significant difference in attitude now and in the early 20th century, less than a century ago! That is not the same thing as saying that a given practice did not take place: I am saying only that, if and when it did take place, the participants probably felt very different about it from the way they feel now.
To take a simpler example: sex outside marriage has always occurred. But it happens MUCH, MUCH more now than it did even 50 years ago, because it is now socially acceptable. People do not feel furtive and guilty about it any more. It would be wholly unrealistic to write a novel set in the 1930s, in which a respectable young middle-class woman openly had a string of sexual partners and thought nothing of it. Some young women did indeed have a lively and varied sex-life at that time, but their own feelings about it, and those of people who knew them, would have been very different from the casual acceptance that we feel today.
I guess that is the whole deal for me. You cannot know if you are evoking the correct atmosphere of the particular period if you didn’t live it. I’ve read enough Alison Weir to know that she constantly uses phrases like “it might mean’, etc. That’s actually the only diff between her fiction work and her non-. In the fiction she doesn’t ‘maybe’ around. Well, in truth, AgTigress, I love getting into it with you. Obvious, huh?
Spam filter? No, I am…
I am not good at interpreting abbreviations and acronyms. I had to look up LOL. I think I understand WTF so, WTF is HaBO???
Ah! It was right in front of me when I scrolled to the top of the page! Help a Bitch Out! HaBO!
And just to add to stories of naivete, there were girls in my high school who believed you could get pregnant by shaking hands with a young man who had touched his manhood – they had pregnant cousins to prove it.
entire69 – yes, I graduated in ‘69 and perhaps my entire class believed that!
Actually, I am a medievalist (have a PhD in it and everything), and in 13th-Century England (including Wales) and on the Continent), there was plenty of knowledge about types of sexual intercourse as well as much having of sex for the sake of pleasure (look, for example, at The Miller’s Tale in Chaucer or Boccaccio’s Decameron, which is from an earlier century but still applies to this discussion due to its incredibly randy content). On the other hand, there was very little practical knowledge beyond the Bible about sexual reproduction. It was commonly thought that the male “seed” was the core of all life, and while they knew it needed to be implanted into a woman to produce a baby, the female womb was thought merely to be an incubator. Thus, a “barren womb” was a womb that could not provide fertile incubation (or “ground”) for male seed.
Also, it was unknown how male “seed” transmitted itself to the womb. Therefore, there are truly fascinating theories in this time regarding the transmission of male seed to a female vessel. The most popular comes from men and women imitating the greatest moment of fertilization in the Bible, namely the Annunciation of Mary wherein the Holy Spirit fertilizes Mary by whispering God’s Word in her ear. So, there are quite a number of etchings and illuminations from the 12-15th centuries that show men “fertilizing” (or ejaculating into) women’s ears. Also, because early dogma claimed that the earth sprang from God’s knee (apparently His most fertile appendage), there are also depictions of men ejaculating in the crease of women’s knees. Thus, it is entirely possible for a woman (or even a man) in the 13th-century to worry that a man ejaculating in her mouth might result in pregnancy because of the general theory that the insertion of male seed into a woman’s body, no matter the orifice, could result in pregnancy.
Hope this helps!
You also have to keep in mind there’s always been people who have questioned what various religions claim is a sin and isn’t. Which is why so many split off from each other. Some say masturbation is a sin. Others say that it’s only a sin if you’re married because you’re denying your partner pleasure, but if you’re single and it keeps you from having sex outside of marriage, go ahead and pleasure yourself.
Just because he’s a knight doesn’t mean he accepts whatever a priest tells him without question.
Not that I’ve read the book in question, obviously, but playing Devil’s advocate here. Maybe he’s just a Christmas and Easter church type knight. After all, if he was a serious believer he wouldn’t be doing the deed outside of wedlock anyway.
If Wild’s plot is concidered WTF, I’d love to see the reaction to an HaBO for Jill Barnett’s Imagine. An escaped convict who used to be a star baseball player, a single female lawyer from San Francisco, and three red-headed orphan children all wash up on a deserted island in 1896 after a shipwreck. They live off of bananas and find a genie in a bottle, which does not solve their problems as quickly as you might think.
God, I loved that book.
This perfectly illustrates the problem of trying to talk about a medieval story from a modern perspective. Jami, this ‘Christmas and Easter church type’ didn’t exist in 13th century Christendom. The Church, faith, religious observance was ubiquitous. Theologians argued about which aspects of dogma were valid, but lay people didn’t dispute about faith itself, or the existence of God. The concept of ‘knights’ as beloved in historical romance is rather anachronistic for this period, but the whole basis of nobility, royalty, power, rested on their capacity to defend the Church, to uphold Christianity and so on.
When you have a society which firmly believed in the divine right of kings, you don’t have knights who aren’t worried about dying in a state of mortal sin. Not that the nobility didn’t sin, but they would hardly have been unconcerned about what would happen to them if they didn’t get to their confessor and rinse off the stain on their souls. The importance of absolution led to the racket of indulgences, not to people blowing off the need for confession and forgiveness of their sin.
Her innocence and lack of thought for the moral aspect is perhaps realistic. That he wouldn’t be bothered is not.
Here in Australia, the correct grammar has people being hanged and pictures (and other inanimate objects) being hung. Not sure about animals.
AgTigress, I too am Welsh – from a particularly remote region of Snowdonia originally – and the whole getting-the-Welsh wrong thing annoys me intensely. The only thing that makes this bearable is that I am not Scottish and therefore don’t have to be annoyed by the disastrously large number of Highlander romances I am sure get it even more uninformedly wrong.
As a point of interest, if anyone is interested in Welsh romances the best I can recommend is Sharon Penman’s “fact-fiction” series about the last Princes of Wales: Here Be Dragons, Falls The Shadow and The Reckoning. Here Be Dragons has been one of my all-time favourite books for over 20 years but be prepared for major floods of tears if you make it all the way through to the end of The Reckoning.
spamword: trying57 : I am trying very hard right now to work my way through the 57 books in my TBR list and not go back to read Here Be Dragons again.
Joanna S. Yes, what you say is very helpful. Thank you. I always find the Medieval mind far more remote and difficult to grasp than that of Classical Antiquity. I had no idea about the importance of God’s knees.
The evolution of the theory of conception in the Enlightenment remained based at first on the traditional idea that the male provided the new life in its entirety; improving microscopy had revealed the ‘animalcules’ in human semen (the actual sperm cells), and as you probably know, there are charming 17thC diagrams illustrating the complete tiny homunculus which, it was thought, must be contained within the head of the sperm.
Some other curious and ancient theories about reproduction, such as the belief in telegony, survived into surprisingly modern times, at least amongst some animal-breeders.
And it’s hard to explain clearly, isn’t it, without sounding petty and nitpicking? It’s so easy to over-emphasise some things and ignore others when the knowledge is shallow and patchy, and I think it’s that lack of balance that is particularly irritating.
I just think that people should think twice before writing about a culture other than their own, past or present, until they have done some really serious research. In the case of modern countries, many visits, or better still, a few years spent living there, would seem to me essential.
I know many Americans well; I have visited the USA repeatedly over the last 25 years or so, and I lived there for 4 months some years ago. But if I were a novelist, I would not dare to write a story set in the USA, because I KNOW I would get a lot of things wrong — the spoken language, for a start.
I believe 99% that it’s “Wild” by Jill Barnett. I read it a few monthes ago, actually. I liked it, though the end was a bit of anticlimax….
Virginia: I am not sure when you are being serious, and when you are just trying to wind me up.
Obviously at one level, nobody ever knows exactly how another person thinks and feels. But because of our common humanity, we can usually predict with some accuracy how other people in our own culture, the culture of which we have direct personal experience, will react in given circumstances. We start from the baseline of human nature, the needs, desires and fears that are common to all of us, and to many other species as well, and we see how the cultural mores of our society reacts with them.
If we go to the trouble of learning a lot about a different culture, we can also start to understand how people in that culture thought and felt: the beliefs that were instilled into them by authority figures in childhood; the particular aspirations and obstacles created by their social and political organisation. Detailed study of historical periods can and does provide a window into the past and can enable a modern person to get into the mindset of another era, even though it may be very different from our own in some respects.
It becomes more difficult with prehistory, when we have only the remains of material culture to guide us, but even then, there is enough evidence from many sources to build up a surprising amount of knowledge.
If a writer of fiction wants to invent a setting for her characters and their story, then she is absolutely at liberty to do so, and such fantasy worlds are hugely popular with many readers. In such a case, the writer is also free to take some historical elements and weave them into ‘her’ world. What I think she should not do is to take a past (or present) reality, such as 13th-century Britain, populate it with characters that are simply modern Americans in fancy dress (sometimes complete with modern American names), and call the result an ‘historical novel’.
That’s the correct grammar in the US as well. I was trying to make a joke. I apparently failed….
@Sandra
So far I’ve never found a romance hero who wasn’t hung, but only a few have been hanged.
Probably fixing to get my hand slapped over here at SBTB now but here I go, all the same. On the whole issue of historical accuracy I have a hard time understanding why anyone would expect the imaginative world of a work of fiction to be a history lesson. I wouldn’t pick up a Jill Barnett historical romance expecting edification about the Middle Ages in Europe. I also don’t go to Shakespeare for a greater understanding of Ancient Rome. If I want to get my head screwed on properly backwards, I’ll go to a textbook or a work of nonfiction every time.
Regarding the guilt issue, I would think that people in ages past were no more or less likely to be consumed by guilt than people in modern times and sexual urges have always been a part of the human condition. Regardless of our upbringing and teaching, each of us is an individual; and to assume that the uneducated masses of centuries past did not have minds and personalities of their own is presumptuous. A lack of education or ignorance does not equal stupid or non-curious. A character fighting urges, being consumed by guilt, and coming to terms within their own self would make for an interesting book though.
I do see how if you are from a particular culture or country or have a large knowledge base about a particular time period, that misrepresentation in a work of fiction would be irritating at the least and rage producing at the worst. Much like the proliferation of cowboy romances of late can irritate someone like myself who is from the Southwestern United States in the largely rural state of Oklahoma who knows that putting a man in a Carhart jacket “ain’t” necessarily gonna make him a cowboy.
Also, am I the only one who is terrified that Rachel’s acquaintance will probably one day be a licensed, practicing physician.
@Cara McKenna I’m somewhat puzzled as to why this would be considered so WTF also. Seems rather dopey to me. Maybe it’s the residual effects of the recent full moon messing with SB Sarah’s head or perhaps she has a bit of tongue firmly stuck in cheek.
@AgTigress. I would never try to write an historical novel. Most of the stuff I write is contemporary and very dialogue driven. I probably read more historical novels than any other type and am huge on Alison Weir, (fiction and non) Anna Lee Waldo, (hated the one about the American guy) Philippa Gregory, etc. And I can’t do the Romance genre per se as I am not huge on the HEA. I just have a lot of ideas about humans and their motivation and weaknesses and whims that I have to incorporate. I do feel the females in the fifteenth century that were sneaking out and meeting their sweeties behind the barn were thinking and doing pretty much the same stuff we do, be she high born or scullery maid. Gregory and especially Weir make their female leads very sexual. Still, trying to understand the stuff they had to put up with from their spouses and their freaking kingly privileges is hard to take. And most of that stuff flies in the face of any ethic—societal, religious, cultural. I relate it all to the cave men trying to strengthen the gene pool, although they did not know what they were doing. And the kings in the middle ages wreaked havoc on that. I am not unable to respect historical aspects, but we’ve talked before about suspending belief. If some authors expect me to do that then they have to allow me to fiddle with the facts a little. But I have no plans to write about a fourteenth century heroine named Debby. Come to think of that, my Asian neighbors that named their daughter Megan hits me in just about the same place. But she’s cute and they are nice. So. . . You can comment on my blog should you wish to so we don’t take over this place. Appreciate your every word, seriously.
Yeah, well getting to the Americans: the Kwakiutl Indians thought big nostrils were a huge turn on and, yeah, they did do ‘that’.
@Lynn S. We’ve gone over this in posts back re: different novels. I think it is the all time favorite. I agree with you that if you have to suspend belief about vampires and stuff then you can be allowed a little leeway with the other facts. There lies the problem. Many want that vampire to be dressed dead on accurately with aboslutely NO POLYESTER.
I love this forum.
“I have a hard time understanding why anyone would expect the imaginative world of a work of fiction to be a history lesson.”
Point well taken, but as a reader I do expect authors to do at least a little bit of research into their chosen location and period of history before writing a historical novel. I used to teach a Research for Writers class and I would always ask the students in the first class meeting: “What kind of thing annoys you in a novel? What pulls your attention away from the narrative?” Often it would be a small detail that they knew was wrong. An example: a writer sets her novel in the wintertime in Southern California. In one scene, she has the hero shoot someone from behind an orange tree. The orange tree is described as being leafless. Now anyone living in SoCal knows that orange trees do not lose their leaves in the winter. So the reader thinks WTF? and loses the thread of the story. Bad research.
As somebody who lives in Scotland, I can’t read Scottish romances (with the exception of Mary Stewart and Dorothy Dunnett). They are, almost universally, horrendously inaccurate, and I include Outlander in that. Plus the attempt of American writers to write dialogue with a Scottish accent (as if there were only one) is hugely cringe-inducing.
spamword know98: I know there must be 98,000 dreadful Scottish romances out there …
Because blatantly bad history pulls me out of the story, most of the time. Especially when it’s something I know about – I care less when it’s a topic I don’t know that much about.
Now, that said, for something like The Tudors where the history bears a rather superficial resemblance, and the costuming, especially in the first two seasons, is really bad, it doesn’t bother me. I just looked at that entire show as set in a parallel universe that resembled ours, but wasn’t quite the same. (Besides, it was pretty. And I’m sad we’ll never get to see Sarah Bolger’s take on Queen Mary I. Because that would be EPIC.)
Exactly. Readers are not asking for ‘a history lesson’ when they read an historical novel (though I have to say, a history lesson is an attractive option for some of us, not something to be avoided!): we are simply asking not to have our attention distracted and our faith in the writer’s competence undermined by some silly howler or glaring anachronism.
I think we all do, BUT, and it’s a big but, if the only thing I ever read about Tang Dynasty China is a modern novel, then I would really, really like it to be broadly correct, so that what little I do know about that place and time is real, not fantasy. I would hate to have some memorable detail become fixed in my mind, only to discover that it’s complete nonsense. In fact, most of what I do know about the Tang Dynasty comes from van Gulik’s Judge Dee novels, and I trust him, because he was a notable scholar.
@ inga
And here in Florida, we also know that orange trees do not shed their leaves… they’re evergreens. That would have thrown me as well.
There’s an author I like, who shall remain nameless, who set a series partially in Palm Beach. At one point, the hero visits a house set on a hill. Um… most of South Florida is swamps, and therefore flat….. Palm Beach is even more so, because it’s basically just an overgrown sand bar. Look at a map, people. Don’t assume that because you live in SoCal, which has beaches with cliffs, that Florida does, too. Do your due diligence before you put fingers to keyboard.
I can manage some suspension of belief, especially in areas where I have no knowledge. And, if I want a totally accurate Regency voice, I’ll read Austin. But I do want my stories to at least appear to belong to the period. And for my heroines to not just be time-traveling American chicks.