It is a stereotype that women in the Middle Ages had two career options: mother or holy woman, with prostitute or chattel filling in the gaps between those two. Whether we like it or not, for the most part this stereotype is accurate and the status and role of women in that era… Read More »A Woman Detective in Medieval Wales? by Sarah Woodbury
I am a trained professional historian. I received a doctorate in history from the University of California, San Diego, in 1982. I then spent nearly thirty years teaching full time at the college level as a professor of U.S. and U.S women’s history. The historical profession expects its practitioners to… Read More »The story in History is important: Why I write historical fiction by M. Louisa Locke
Normally I write a mystery series set in eleventh century Japan. This invariably causes strangers to ask me, “Why Japan?” Their curiosity is due to the fact that few people take an interest in Japanese history before WW 2. In a way, it is even stranger that I chose to… Read More »Splendor, Scandal, and Murder by I. J. Parker
MEDIEVAL UNDERPANTS AND OTHER BLUNDERS by Susanne Alleyn, one of our Historical Fiction Cooperative authors, is designed to do two things–make writers of historical fiction aware of the pitfalls of the genre and help them avoid some of the worst of them. Here’s the link in case you’re interested. It’s… Read More »Medieval Underpants? Really? by Peg Herring