Witch Persecutions, Women, and Social Change: Germany 1560-1660

PART FOUR, Last in a series

Read Part One, Part Two, and Part Three
.

The late 16th and early 17th century was an era of radical social, economic, and religious change. As women had much to lose, they had reason to rebel. And they remained a threat to the new social order. Art of this period often depicted women as insubordinate and wanton: beating their husbands, swilling wine, and lustfully dragging men to bed (Merchant 133). Reformer John Knox was of the opinion that if a woman was presumptuous enough to rise above a man, she must be "repressed and bridled" (Ibid 145). This was one of the most bitterly misogynistic eras ever known.

Political and religious leaders seemed terrified by their fear that witches had organized themselves into a secret female society, as described in Kramer and Sprenger's Malleus Maleficarum and King James's Daemonologie, among other works.

During witch trials, the witchfinders obsessively tried to force the accused to describe what went on at the alleged sabbat and to name the other women she had seen there. Georg Pictorious, a physician and scholar at the University of Freiburg in Germany, believed that witch persecutions were the only way humanity might be saved from these evil women. He maintained that if all the witches "are not burned, the number of these furies swells up in such an immense sea that no one could live safe from their spells and charms" (Midelfort 59).

In the 1970s and 1980s, some feminist historians such as Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English drew on Margaret Murray's study from the 1920s, The Witch Cult of Western Europe, to try to prove that there was indeed a secret society of women who practiced magic as part of an organized pagan cult. (See Ehrenreich and English's Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers)

While these speculations are very interesting, scant evidence exists to support this theory and most of it is based on torture-induced confessions.

It is, however, safe to state that people during the period of the witch persecutions sincerely believed and feared the existence of a secret female society.

Witches were believed to be a threat to both Christianity and to the middle class as it struggled to gain social authority (Hoher 46). The anti-puritan, plebian culture of lower class women stood in the way of the new values of the emerging bourgeois society. The stereotype of an organization of women out of control of society, women who cursed their enemies and mocked Christianity with their bizarre orgies, is perhaps indicative of an actual grain of reality behind the public fears. Hoher suggests that the rapidly changing society in Early Modern times, the role of the individual in a world that seemed increasingly confusing and uncertain, led to a collective insecurity--a fear that society would regress into old feudal traditions and chaos.

This fear was taken out brutally on those who would not integrate into the new order. The continuing disorder of the rural plebian culture and the refusal to conform to the new system took shape in the paranoia of the witch craze. Women, who according to Thomas Aquinas, Kramer, Sprenger, and others, were by nature weak-willed and sensual, were feared as the chief representatives of this rebellion--the chaos of uncontrolled nature and sexuality that must be subdued. Thus, it was these disorderly, uncontrollable women who were the most feared and hated. For the new order to survive, these women must be brutally exterminated (Ibid 42).

In examining the chronology of the witch trials, we see that the first trials targeted mainly poor, elderly women. As time went on and rich people and men started being accused, the witch hunts were considered to have got out of hand and they lost popular support. By this time, however, the new capitalism and religious order had been firmly established and the persecutions were no longer necessary.

This chronology reveals clearly what interests were at stake. The earliest trials of the 1560s focused almost exclusively on poor, older women. In the early trials of Wiesensteig and Rothenburg, 95 to 100% of the accused fit this stereotype. As the witch hunts progressed and the accused were tortured to name other witches, more and more men and upper class people were implicated (Midelfort 179). In Ellwangen in 1615, "accusations and convictions of highly placed and undoubtedly honorable men must have shaken people into recognizing that something had gone wrong" (Ibid 105).

Slowly the caricature of the witch as an old peasant woman was breaking down, "leaving society with no protective stereotypes, no sure way of telling who might be, and who could not be, a witch" (Ibid 182). Witch hunting so thoroughly shook up normal bonds of social trust that the most respected members of the community were no longer immune. The trials began to draw more and more criticism. Finally in 1672, the council of Altdorf in Schwaben declared all accusations of witchcraft illegal (Ibid 82). By this time, the persecutions had accomplished their original goal--the subjugation of rebellious lower class women and firmly entrenching those who survived the witch hunts into a subordinate domestic role. By the late 17th century we have no more illustrations of threatening, insubordinate women asserting their power.

Why this emphasis on poor and elderly women and why the last half of the 16th and first half of the 17th century? This period was crucial for the development of modern capitalism, a stricter moral code, and the placement of women into a narrowly defined domestic sphere, with utter economic dependence on their father or husband. The women who would most likely resist, at least in the early years of the persecutions, would be the older peasant women who remembered and clung to the old ways of plebian agrarian culture, the domestic economy, and the social and economic power they enjoyed. Such women would not easily relinquish their economic independence, their right of subsistence, or their personal freedom. The young woman beating her husband with her distaff, the symbol of her economic independence, in the early 16th century, became the old woman accused of witchcraft fifty years on. Note that in the 16th century illustrations I have included here, the old witch is depicted not with a broomstick but with her distaff.

Post-menopausal women were unburdened by pregnancies and childbirth. This gave them more freedom, time, and energy to stir up trouble. The accused witches' descriptions of the sabbat sound like the witch hunters' perversion of the joys of plebian peasant culture--drinking, dancing, and uninhibited celebration and sexuality. The earthly pleasures of the older generation became the evil heresy of the next. Since the descriptions of the alleged sabbat were drawn by torture, we must be cautious when drawing conclusions, but it makes a certain amount of sense in this historical context.

The women who had been strong, economically independent, and pleasure-loving members of the previous generation would not throw away their old privileges easily, so they became the witches of the new generation, a threat to society that had to be violently subdued for the new order to become established.

Sources:

Hoher, Friederike, "Hexe, Maria und Hausmutter--zur Geschichte der Weiblichket im Spaetmittelalter," Frauen in der Geschichte (Vol III) Kuhn/Rusen, (eds.). Padagogischer Verlag Schwann-Bagel, Dusseldorf, 1983.

Merchant, Carolyn, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1979.

Midelfort, Erik, H.C., Witch Hunting in Southwest Germany 1562-1684: The Social Foundations Stanford, 1972.

Ruether, Rosemary, New Woman/New Earth: Sexist Ideologies and Human Liberation, Seabury Press, New York, 1975.

Note: This essay was my Senior Paper I wrote in 1988 while an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota. Some of the sources may seem dated, but I think most of the history still stands up.

In recent years some serious scholars have revisited Margaret Murray's contention that there was indeed a secret female society in Europe during the period of the witch persecutions. See Carlo Ginzburg's book Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath and Emma Wilby's brilliant new book The Visions of Isobel Gowdie.

This website provides an interesting and well-researched view into medieval folk magic and possible pagan survivals in evidence before the beginning of the witch persecutions.

The Pendle Witches and Their Magic, Part 1

In 1612, in one of the most meticulously documented witch trials in English history, seven women and two men from Pendle Forest in Lancashire, Northern England were executed. In court clerk Thomas Potts’s account of the proceedings, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, published in 1613, he pays particular attention to the one alleged witch who escaped justice by dying in prison before she could come to trial. She was Elizabeth Southerns, more commonly known by her nickname, Old Demdike. According to Potts, she was the ringleader, the one who initiated all the others into witchcraft. This is how Potts describes her:

She was a very old woman, about the age of Foure-score yeares, and had been a Witch for fiftie yeares. Shee dwelt in the Forrest of Pendle, a vast place, fitte for her profession: What shee committed in her time, no man knows. . . . Shee was a generall agent for the Devill in all these partes: no man escaped her, or her Furies.

Quite impressive for an eighty-year-old lady! In England, unlike Scotland and Continental Europe, the law forbade the use of torture to extract witchcraft confessions. Thus the trial transcripts supposedly reveal Elizabeth Southerns’s voluntary confession, although her words might have been manipulated or altered by the magistrate and scribe. What’s interesting, if the trial transcripts can be believed, is that she freely confessed to being a healer and magical practitioner. Local farmers called on her to cure their children and their cattle. She described in rich detail how she first met her familiar spirit, Tibb, at the stone quarry near Newchurch in Pendle. He appeared to her at daylight gate—twilight in the local dialect—in the form of beautiful young man, his coat half black and half brown, and he promised to teach her all she needed to know about magic.

Tibb was not the “devil in disguise.” The devil, as such, appeared to be a minor figure in British witchcraft. It was the familiar spirit who took centre stage: this was the cunning person’s otherworldly spirit helper who could shapeshift between human and animal form, as Emma Wilby explains in her excellent scholarly study, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits. Mother Demdike describes Tibb appearing to her at different times in human form or in animal form. He could take the shape of a hare, a black cat, or a brown dog. It appeared that in traditional English folk magic, no cunning man or cunning woman could work magic without the aid of their spirit familiar—they needed this otherworldly ally to make things happen.

Belief in magic and the spirit world was absolutely mainstream in the 16th and 17th centuries. Not only the poor and ignorant believed in spells and witchcraft—rich and educated people believed in magic just as strongly. Dr. John Dee, conjuror to Elizabeth I, was a brilliant mathematician and cartographer and also an alchemist and ceremonial magician. In Dee’s England, more people relied on cunning folk for healing than on physicians. As Owen Davies explains in his book, Popular Magic: Cunning-folk in English History, cunning men and women used charms to heal, foretell the future, and find the location of stolen property. What they did was technically illegal—sorcery was a hanging offence—but few were arrested for it as the demand for their services was so great. Doctors were so expensive that only the very rich could afford them and the “physick” of this era involved bleeding patients with lancets and using dangerous medicines such as mercury—your local village healer with her herbs and charms was far less likely to kill you.

In this period there were magical practitioners in every community. Those who used their magic for good were called cunning folk or charmers or blessers or wisemen and wisewomen. Those who were perceived by others as using their magic to curse and harm were called witches. But here it gets complicated. A cunning woman who performs a spell to discover the location of stolen goods would say that she is working for good. However, the person who claims to have been falsely accused of harbouring those stolen goods can turn around and accuse her of sorcery and slander. This is what happened to 16th century Scottish cunning woman Bessie Dunlop of Edinburgh, cited by Emma Wilby in Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits. Dunlop was burned as a witch in 1576 after her “white magic” offended the wrong person. Ultimately the difference between cunning folk and witches lay in the eye of the beholder. If your neighbours turned against you and decided you were a witch, you were doomed.

Although King James I, author of the witch-hunting handbook Daemonologie, believed that witches had made a pact with the devil, there’s no actual evidence to suggest that witches or cunning folk took part in any diabolical cult. Anthropologist Margaret Murray, in her book, The Witch Cult in Western Europe, published in 1921, tried to prove that alleged witches were part of a Pagan religion that somehow survived for centuries after the Christian conversion. Most modern academics have rejected Murray’s hypothesis as unlikely. Indeed, lingering belief in an organised Pagan religion is very difficult to substantiate. So what did cunning folk like Old Demdike believe in?

Some of her family’s charms and spells were recorded in the trial transcripts and they reveal absolutely no evidence of devil worship, but instead use the ecclesiastical language of the Catholic Church, the old religion driven underground by the English Reformation. Her charm to cure a bewitched person, cited by the prosecution as evidence of diabolical sorcery, is, in fact, a moving and poetic depiction of the passion of Christ, as witnessed by the Virgin Mary. The text, in places, is very similar to the White Pater Noster, an Elizabethan prayer charm which Eamon Duffy discusses in his landmark book, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580.

It appears that Mother Demdike was a practitioner of the kind of quasi-Catholic folk magic that would have been commonplace before the Reformation. The pre-Reformation Church embraced many practises that seemed magical and mystical. People used holy water and communion bread for healing. They went on pilgrimages, left offerings at holy wells, and prayed to the saints for intercession. Some practises, such as the blessing of the wells and fields, may indeed have Pagan origins. Indeed, looking at pre-Reformation folk magic, it is very hard to untangle the strands of Catholicism from the remnants of Pagan belief, which had become so tightly interwoven.

Unfortunately Mother Demdike had the misfortune to live in a place and time when Catholicism was conflated with witchcraft. Even Reginald Scot, one of the most enlightened men of his age, believed the act of transubstantiation, the point in the Catholic mass where it is believed that the host becomes the body and blood of Christ, was an act of sorcery. In a 1645 pamphlet by Edward Fleetwood entitled A Declaration of a Strange and Wonderfull Monster, describing how a royalist woman in Lancashire supposedly gave birth to a headless baby, Lancashire is described thusly: "No part of England hath so many witches, none fuller of Papists." Keith Thomas’s social history Religion and the Decline of Magic is an excellent study on how the Reformation literally took the magic out of Christianity.

However, it would be an oversimplification to state that Mother Demdike was merely a misunderstood practitioner of Catholic folk magic. Her description of her decades-long partnership with her spirit Tibb seems to draw on something outside the boundaries of Christianity.

Although it is difficult to prove that witches and cunning folk in early modern Britain worshipped Pagan deities, the so-called fairy faith, the enduring belief in fairies and elves, is well documented. In his 1677 book The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft, Lancashire author John Webster mentions a local cunning man who claimed that his familiar spirit was none other than the Queen of Elfhame herself. The Scottish cunning woman Bessie Dunlop mentioned earlier, while being tried for witchcraft and sorcery at the Edinburgh Assizes, stated that her familiar spirit was a fairy man sent to her by the Queen of Elfhame.

Beyond the Marquee: Toward a Common History

This article of mine was originally published in the February 2011 issue of Historical Novels Review.

Come and visit our panel "Are Marquee Names Really Necessary" with star authors Margaret George, C.W. Gortner, Susanne Dunlap, and Vanitha Sankaran at the 2011 Historical Novel Society North American Conference in San Diego, on Saturday, June 18.




Recorded history is wrong. It’s wrong because the voiceless have no voice in it.
These are the words of the late, great Mary Lee Settle, author of the classic Beulah Land Quintet, published in the 1950’s when both academic history and most historical fiction were narrowly focused on the elite. So many people have been written out of history: not only the vast majority of women, but also people of the peasant and labouring classes, and most people of non-European ancestry. In Settle’s day, a more inclusive history seemed a far off dream.

“There’s a revolution going on out there!”

Sarah Dunant, acclaimed author of The Birth of Venus and In the Company of the Courtesan, remembers this time. Speaking at the Bluecoat School in Liverpool in May 2010, Dunant described how she first fell in love with historical fiction when she was a twelve-year-old in postwar Britain, which she remembers as “a grey, colourless, bleak place” where nobody wanted to talk about the war. On the brink of adolescence, she found a wonderful escape in Jean Plaidy’s novels of the crowned heads of Europe. These books not only opened up another world that was colourful and glamorous but they inspired Dunant’s lifelong love affair with history. She went on to study history at Cambridge. “The history I learned,” she recalls, “was the history of great battles, great empires, great men.”

But what inspired Dunant to become a historical novelist were the sweeping developments in academic history that occurred after she left Cambridge in 1972. This new history embraced people who did not belong to the elite. She cites Joan Kelly-Gadol’s 1977 essay, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” as one of the turning points in the development of how we look at history.

Sarah Dunant is not only a champion of a more inclusive, non-elitist historical fiction—she also became an international bestseller by writing about people on the margins of history. Her most recent novel, Sacred Hearts, explores the secret world of Benedictine nuns in 1570 Ferrara, Italy—a cloistered “republic of women” where each choir sister had a voice and a vote in the daily chapter house meeting.

“Modern historians,” Dunant explains, “know that there is a multiplicity of history—there is more than one history, one fact. The history I’m using has been hard won over the past twenty to thirty years.” And this history allowed her to write novels about a past that simply wasn’t regarded as history even thirty years ago. For Sacred Hearts, she has drawn on two generations of young historians who examined court records of nuns who got into trouble.

Similarly, I could not have written my most recent novel, Daughters of the Witching Hill, which is based on the true story of the Pendle Witches of 1612, without the drawing on groundbreaking social histories, such as Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic; landmark works on Reformation Studies, like Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars and Ronald Hutton’s The Rise and Fall of Merry England; as well as recent studies on historical cunning folk.

Is the tide, then, changing? Will this new history open the door to a Renaissance in the historical novel? Will more and more authors draw on this wider window into ordinary people’s lives instead of rehashing the same old tired tales of Tudor royalty? Dunant believes that historical novelists possess every potential to be on the cutting edge of bringing this new history in an accessible form to a modern audience. “Wake up, there’s a revolution going on out there in historical fiction!” Dunant told Lucinda Byatt in their May 2010 Solander interview.

Marquee names only, please

Although the world of academic history has moved on light years since the 1950s, historical fiction often appears to be stuck in a rut. In these recessionary times, an increasingly conservative publishing market urges new and established authors alike to play it safe by writing about famous historical figures, such as Tudor royalty, instead of drawing on a social history of the less privileged.

Speaking at the 2007 Historical Novel Society Conference in Albany, New York, agent Irene Goodman stressed the importance of “marquee names” in finding an audience for one’s historical fiction. In the May 2010 issue of Solander, Goodman cited author Leslie Carroll’s leap from midlist obscurity to major success with the sale of her trilogy of novels about Marie Antoinette. Goodman is not alone in stressing the importance of marquee names.

“The trend simply cannot be denied,” Bethany Latham, Managing Editor of Historical Novels Review, observes. “For better or worse, publishers seem to prefer marquee names right now. They’re the path of least resistance—easier to market since, in the mind of many publishers, celebrity protagonist equals ready-made audience. There’s even a tendency for successful authors who began differently to evolve into something that better fits the prevailing mold—witness Philippa Gregory, who started out with the Wideacre Trilogy but has ended up with the familiar big-name Tudors and Plantagenets, and will be sticking with them for the foreseeable future.”

Popular fascination with historical It Girls like Anne Boleyn helped launch the incredible resurgence in historical fiction within the past decade, most notably through Gregory’s blockbuster, The Other Boleyn Girl. Literary agent Marcy Posner, speaking at the 2010 Historical Novel Society Conference in Manchester, UK, pointed out how Gregory’s glittering evocation of the Tudor Court inspired a large group of female readers to make the leap from historical romance to mainstream historicals. It seems only natural for agents and editors to look for work that contains the same kind of hook that proved so successful for Gregory.

“My experience was that when I sent some of my work to an agent,” says Elizabeth Ashworth, author of The de Lacy Inheritance, “she thought it was an engaging story and she liked my style of writing but she didn’t think she could sell my work to a publisher because it wasn’t about a well known king or queen. When I mentioned that I was working on another novel set in the reign of Edward III, she replied that if I wrote about Edward and Piers Gaveston, she might be interested. But that story has been written many times before and it was another story I wanted to tell – one about Lady Mabel Bradshaw who lived at that time but is relatively unknown.”

“The marquee name, especially female, has become almost a requirement in historical fiction,” says C.W. Gortner, author of The Confessions of Catherine de Medici. “My novel, The Last Queen, languished unpublished for years, with several of my rejection letters pointing out that Juana [of Spain] was not a ‘known personage’. I persisted and eventually found success, but how many other writers give up?”

The insistence on marquee names was why author Jeri Westerson says she switched to writing historical mysteries. “I preferred to write about the everyman in an historical setting, but year after year, I was told by editors that my medieval stories needed to be about royalty or other noble personages. The kind of historical I wanted to write translated much better to the mystery genre. So now I write medieval mysteries (after some eleven years of peddling historical manuscripts and not selling them).” Her fourth Crispin Guest Medieval Noir, Troubled Bones, will be released in Fall 2011. However, other historical mystery writers embrace the marquee name trend by choosing a well known figure such as Elizabeth I or Oscar Wilde as their sleuth.

Susanne Dunlap, author of Liszt’s Kiss and The Musician’s Daughter, adds that in Young Adult Fiction, the pressure is to write “something that fits into the high school curriculum,” which may well involve including famous personalities.

The bias can sometimes be found among HNS members themselves. Historical Novels Review Book Review Editor Sarah Johnson has noticed that reviewers tend to clamour for books about big names while novels about less familiar characters and settings can be harder to place.

Not even the most elite literary circles are immune to this trend. Hilary Mantel’s Booker Award winning masterpiece Wolf Hall is set in Henry VIII’s court.

A lack of diversity in the genre?

So does this push to write about marquee names help or hinder historical fiction?

“This is the backwash of celebrity culture,” Dunant states, “and our greed for sensation and scandal. People read about Anne Boleyn when they tire of reading about Paris Hilton. We’ve gone back to kings and queens, a celebrity history, because we’ve squeezed Paris Hilton dry.”

Must we all write like latter day Jean Plaidys and Georgette Heyers in order to meet our publishers’ sales expectations? Bethany Latham laments to think that in today’s climate, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, the bestselling historical novel of all time, might not be published because Scarlet O’Hara is a nobody.

Alison Weir, speaking at the 2010 HNS Conference in Manchester, presents a different viewpoint, arguing that her novels on figures such as Elizabeth I and Eleanor of Aquitaine are a legitimate way of reclaiming women’s history, even though they are focused on elite women. As Keynote Speaker at the conference, Weir explained how she pitched a nonfiction biography of Eleanor of Aquitaine some years ago only to be told that not enough material existed on her to make her a worthy subject.

“I think many readers gravitate toward the familiar,” Sarah Johnson observes, “and historical fiction readers in particular often choose novels that help them gain insight into a real-life character’s mindset or behavior. In that sense, I can see why marquee names are so popular, and why authors are being encouraged to choose them as subjects. It’s an automatic ‘hook.’”

Johnson added that the industry’s insistence on marquee names has the unfortunate drawback of creating a “lack of diversity of the genre.”

“The push for ‘big names’ is primarily about name recognition,” state N. Gemini Sasson, author of The Crown in the Heather. “The casual historical fiction reader scanning the shelves at the local Target store is more likely to linger over a name she recognizes, pick up the book and buy it, than an unknown. I do wonder though when a saturation point for some of these historical persons will be reached and the scales tip the other way.”

“If I see another book on the Tudors, I’ll scream!”

Which begs the question: are historical fiction readers beginning to reach their saturation point with historical celebrities? Eager to ape Philippa Gregory’s success, many authors have tried to follow her formula, with mixed results. How many more novels about Tudor royalty can the public bear?

“Frankly, if I see another book on the Tudors, I’ll scream,” HNS member Monica Spence admits.

“When I’m book-buying, the Not Anne Boleyn Again Syndrome periodically strikes,” Bethany Latham confesses.

Anne Gilbert says that she tends to shy away from fictional biographies. “No matter how well-written they may be,” says Gilbert, “they tend to concentrate on pretty much the same well-known historical people.”

“There are only so many ‘ultra famous’ women we can write about, whom publishers find commercial enough,” C.W. Gortner observes. “Take, for example, Eleanor of Aquitaine; as fascinating as she is, how much more can be said about her without it becoming repetitious or whimsical in novelized form?”

A 2009 market research poll conducted by blogger Julianne Douglas on Writing the Renaissance indicates that only 11% of the people she surveyed buy historical fiction based on the appeal of marquee names alone. Readers want so much more out of their fiction: fascinating characters and storylines, arresting and richly realised settings.

Finding an audience

Following the Publisher's Weekly listings of best-selling historical fiction on her blog, Reading the Past, Sarah Johnson mentions Edward Rutherfurd, Lisa See, and Sandra Dallas as just a few commercially successful authors who have bucked the big name trend. Their novels reached a wide audience because they have additional hooks that attract readers, Johnson points out, such as strong book club potential, and they also appeal to many readers outside the core historical fiction audience. Bethany Latham praises Maggie O’Farrell as a successful author with a fresh, original voice, who is utterly unaffected by the celebrity trend, not to mention Kenneth Follett, whose blockbuster Fall of Giants saga depicts ordinary people against extraordinary historical backdrops.

However, HNS member Matt Phillips, who is writing a novel based on his ancestors on the Pennsylvania frontier, still feels that not enough historical fiction based on the lives of “real people” is reaching the reading public. “There are so many stories that can shed light on how the ‘average person’ lived, or might have lived, while also entertaining the reader, engaging his or her imagination and emotions authentically with the thrills and fears and hopes and challenges of living in another time. Yet relatively few such stories find their way to the shelves of our bookstores because publishers continue to emphasize the marquee names.”

What happens when new or midlist authors embrace the lives of people on the margins of history? Gabriella West’s novel Time of Grace (Wolfhound Press, 2002) is a daring work—a woman-centered look at a very male period in history, Ireland’s 1916 Easter Rising, and also a romance between two young women. “It was successfully published but I’m not sure it was published successfully,” West says. “It never really found its audience.”

Joyce Elson Moore’s has had a happier experience with her new novel, The Tapestry Shop, based on the life of Adam de la Halle, an obscure 13th-century musician. “His secular plays and music are still being performed,” Moore explains, “and he was one of the last and greatest of the trouveres (like troubadours in southern France). He penned the first version of the Robin Hood legend, and I felt like his story had to be told. The book is getting a lot of attention, and I think one reason is that it is different.”

Elizabeth Ashworth reports good sales on her own first novel, The de Lacy Inheritance. “I was lucky that my publisher Myrmidon Books was willing to take my novel, although the main character is a leper. It’s selling well and I think that proves the publishers wrong who maintain that readers only want to read about kings and queens.”

“Just give us variety.”

“To be honest, I’m not sure I’d be able to work with the constraints of a documented marquee name,” says Vanitha Sankaran, whose debut novel Watermark explores the life of a woman papermaker in late medieval France. “As a writer, I like the freedom of being able to create my own characters and stories while staying accurate to the era. As a reader, however, I’m interested in reading about all different t ypes of people, from the poor man trying to feed his pregnant wife to the merchant seeing his profits swallowed up by war. I wish publishers would take more risks across the whole genre and not focus on any time, place, or biographical person, but just give us variety.”

Sarah Johnson agrees that “those who stick narrowly to celebrity characters are missing out on some wonderful stories! In particular, the Editors’ Choice selections in Historical Novels Review demonstrate that historical fiction readers’ most highly recommended books don’t follow trends or fit into neat categories.”

N. Gemini Sasson sums it up beautifully: “There are less well known historical figures that have stories worth telling, every bit as compelling and dramatic as those whose stories have been told a hundred ways already. Sharing their lives would do nothing but enrich our view of the past.”

Perhaps we are indeed ready for a revolution in historical fiction.

“Time to Change the Marquee” by Julianne Douglas

“Bestselling Historical Novels of 2009” by Sarah Johnson