Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village

Earlier this week, I picked up Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! from the library and spent a very enjoyable few hours traveling back in time to the Middle Ages.

Laura Amy Schlitz, a school librarian, wrote the monologues collected in this book for her students to perform. These little gems - in prose, blank verse and rhyme - portray 23 young people living near an English manor in 1255.

The characters sprang from the pages, brought to vivid life by Schlitz's lyrical writing and Robert Byrd's evocative illustrations. I was completely absorbed in the day-to-day happenings of their medieval village. I didn't just read this book; I experienced it. After I closed it, the villagers lived on in my mind with all their joys and struggles.

Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! had an absolutely authentic feel. Schlitz did not write dumbed-down or cleaned-up medieval history. Her villeins worried about growing enough food on their strips of land to survive another year. Her women remembered the perils of childbirth and fretted over feeding another hungry mouth. And Lowdy, daughter of a hound-keeper, scratched, slapped and prayed, "God save us from the fleas!"

Schlitz included helpful, unobtrusive notes and essays on medieval life, covering such subjects as the crop-rotation system, falconry and pilgrimages. These fit so well with the main text I was never torn away from the villagers' struggle for survival, but only more enlightened about their lives and their world.

This absolute jewel of a book won the 2008 Newbery Medal, which it more than deserved. My words can't do it justice. Read it, then share it with a child. My grade: A+

Splendid Slippers: A Thousand Years of an Erotic Tradition

Early in Lisa See's novel, Peony in Love, Peony and her mother assist in binding the feet of a young girl whose mother is too soft-hearted to do the job properly. The scene made me squirm, but what I remember most about it is a stirring speech made by Peony's mother about the importance of footbinding as she mercilessly manipulates the child's broken bones.

She reminds the women in the room they are Han women: proud, refined and altogether superior creatures to the big-footed ruling Manchus. Footbinding is essential, she says, for a woman to be thought respectable, to marry well and to have a good life, and the Manchus cannot make them stop binding their feet

This depiction of fierce cultural pride in footbinding stayed with me after I'd finished the novel. I realized Chinese people once viewed this practice much differently than Westerners do, and I wanted to know more.

Beverley Jackson's book, Splendid Slippers, served as a wonderful introduction to the subject. Jackson makes a real effort to understand footbinding from the perspective of the Chinese. She does not flinch from the horrified reactions it inspires in Westerners, but she also probes the Chinese psyche to reveal how the practice became so essential and desirable.

For a thousand years, Chinese mothers bound their daughters' feet, molding them into unnatural shapes and forcing the bones to break in pursuit of the ideal, three-inch "Golden Lotus." The mothers and daughters then spent hours sewing exquisite, embroidered shoes to cover their crippled feet, creating an erotic mystique men found captivating.

Splendid Slippers contains numerous photographs of these "lotus shoes." The care and attention to detail women put into these tiny works of art were nothing short of amazing.

For the Han Chinese, a woman's bound feet represented security. Desirability. Refinement. Sex appeal. Bound feet played important roles in marriage, prostitution, the theater, the arts and literature. Husbands used their wives' feet to achieve pleasure in the bedroom. Succumbing at least partially to the allure, Manchu women, while they did not bind, wore platform shoes designed to give the illusion of tiny feet.

Some of the elderly Chinese women Jackson met, who tottered on their tiny, misshapen feet, wept when the author showed them pictures of lotus shoes. Jackson portrayed footbinding as a complicated cultural practice, both horrifying and strangely beautiful.

For those who aren't squeamish, this Web site features photographs of an old woman's ideal lotus feet, similar to pictures in Jackson's book.

In Splendid Slippers, Jackson described a meeting Tzu Hsi, the last empress of China, had with a group of European diplomats. The Westerners criticized her for not doing more to end footbinding among her Han subjects, and the Manchu empress responded, Why do you cage your women in corsets, constricting their lungs so they cannot breathe?

This anecdote made me wonder, are the fad diets, plastic surgery and other fashions modern women embrace so much more civilized than footbinding?

My grade for Splendid Slippers: A.

The last queen of France

I have not yet made time to watch Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette. But early this summer, I finished three books in a row about the much-maligned queen and her family.

Marie Antoinette: Princess of Versailles by Kathryn Lasky is part of the Royal Diaries series for young readers. The novel provided a good introduction to the tragic queen's life.

Maria Antonia's diary begins just before she must journey from Vienna to marry France's dauphin. She leaves everything Austrian behind -- her clothes, jewels, even her name -- only to find her dream prince is an awkward, unattractive youth. Then she must navigate the rigid, often ridiculous etiquette of the court of Versailles.

Kathryn Lasky presents a credible portrait of Marie Antoinette as a girl struggling to hold onto her own, unique identity in a world of royal duty. I only wished the book had shown more of Antoinette's inner feelings as she left her native Austria forever to become a French princess. I am always fascinated by what princesses went through in leaving their homes and countries forever to marry strangers in foreign lands.

My grade: B

Flaunting, Extravagant Queen is the kind of book that makes me wish history could be changed. Jean Plaidy made me care about the doomed Marie Antoinette and her family. Their story is truly stranger than fiction, and Plaidy wrung every ounce of drama from it, leaving me breathlessly turning pages even though I knew Antoinette would end up sans tete.

Plaidy portrayed the last queen of France as a multifaceted, very human woman: good-hearted, fun-loving, dignified and courageous, yet temperamentally incapable of submitting to the rigid etiquette of Versailles. She also brought to life the glittering French court, the disaffected people of Paris and the terrifying days of bloody revolution. While reading the novel, I felt like an eyewitness to the events of Antoinette's life, right up to her last ride to the guillotine. My grade: A

Plaidy, who also wrote as Victoria Holt, Philippa Carr and others, was luckily quite prolific, and I have many other books of hers waiting on Mount TBR. Incredibly, her books span 835 years of English and European history, from the Norman conquest of 1066 to the death of Queen Victoria in 1901.

The Lost King of France by Deborah Cadbury was the best of these three books, although it was horrifying and heartbreaking to read. It focused on Louis-Charles, second son of Marie Antoinette who became heir to the French throne when his older brother died. Within 5 years, he had lost his parents and became the focus of a nation's hatred and abuse. In 1795, revolutionary leaders declared the boy was dead.

Or was he? Rumors sprang up persistently he had escaped, and in later years, several pretenders claimed to be the rightful kings of France.

Cadbury vividly describes the monarchical missteps that led to the French revolution, the royal family's tense days of captivity, the execution of king and queen and the nearly unbearable sufferings of the son they left behind. She ably guides the reader through the years following the dauphin's supposed death, portraying the various pretenders and the many historians and scientists who struggled to solve the mystery. Finally, she presents the results of recent DNA testing on a shriveled heart, believed to have come from the dauphin's body.

I recommend this riveting book to all history buffs. It inspired me to seek out more information on the French Revolution and the royal family -- more for the TBR pile!

My grade: A+

The Six Wives of Henry VIII and Innocent Traitor by Alison Weir

Early this year, I re-read one of my favorite all-time books, Alison Weir's The Six Wives of Henry VIII. I credit this book, along with Margaret George's brilliant novel, The Autobiography of Henry VIII, with turning me into a full-blown Tudor maniac, and by extension, sparking my interest in the history of the English monarchy.

I took a course on the history of England in college and found it dry and disappointing. It took Alison Weir and Margaret George to truly bring these historical figures to life for me.

Henry VIII had a larger-than-life personality, and his six wives were fascinating people in their own right. Alison Weir lets the reader get to know each of them. Who knew Anne of Cleves, who had the shortest marriage, would end up the luckiest of the wives? Or that Katherine Parr nearly went to the block, like two queens before her?

Besides telling the stories of royalty, Weir's book is chock-full of fascinating tidbits on what life was like in those times.

The book is easy to read yet backed up thoroughly by research and scholarship -- a perfect book for someone who finds history dull and unreadable. Through the engaging biographies of the six wives, Weir illuminates the history of Henry himself and the tumultuous times in which he lived. My grade: A+

In March, I read Weir's captivating first novel, Innocent Traitor, about the Lady Jane Grey, great-niece to Henry VIII and the ill-fated nine days' queen of England.

When Henry VIII's teenage son, Edward VI, lay on his deathbed, nobles who feared the accession of Henry's Catholic daughter, Mary, schemed to put Jane, a Protestant, on the throne in Mary's place. However, after Edward's death, the English populace rallied to Mary's banner, and the plot's instigators were imprisoned. Mary later had Jane, just 16, executed to prevent other plots, although she knew Jane had simply been the pawn of powerful men.

Weir chose to use multiple narrators in Innocent Traitor, which I enjoyed immensely as I learned more about each character through their unique voices. Weir's portrait of Jane Grey was of a brilliant, courageous, outspoken, exasperating, dogmatic and determined young woman, who in a different time might have grown up to become a great scholar or religious leader. Jane's mother, Frances, was portrayed as an intensely pragmatic but ambitious woman who little understood her own daughter, but who in the end discovered her fierce love for her. The Lady Mary, later queen, was essentially kind-hearted and practical, yet fanatical in her devotion to Catholicism and determined to fight for her birthright.

Weir deftly wove historical events and her character's recorded words into her narrative, telling an enthralling, tragic story that had me glued to the book for hours. I expect this novel will be one of my favorite reads of 2007. Grade: A.

I am more than a bit peeved that Weir's latest biography, about Katherine Swynford, mistress to John of Gaunt and ancestor of the Tudors, will not be released in the U.S. until 2009. I believe I will put the U.K. edition of the book on my Christmas wish list.