Religious Beliefs: Nice Guys, Jerks, and the Romance Writer

By Anna C. Bowling

The topic of religious beliefs comes to Unusual Historicals at a very appropriate time. Right now, I am moderating an online workshop on writing the inspirational romance, and preparing to give the message (others might use the term "sermon" or "teaching") at house church this week. Faith is an important part of my life, and that carries over into my writing. Though I haven't written for the inspirational market before, who knows what the future will bring? For the moment, I'm having fun with general market historicals and dabbling in time travel.

A little personal information before we get into the topic proper. I consider myself nondenominational Christian. I prefer a more intuitive sort of worship, but the DH likes more structured prayers. Among our friends, we have those of the Jewish persuasion; secular, Reformed and Messianic sorts; others who would class themselves as some combination of Buddhist, Wiccan or different pagan paths; the not-really-spiritual; plus Catholic and various protestant and non-denoms. When I wore my Blackbeard t-shirt with the infamous pirate's flag on it into a local store this past autumn, the clerk commented that it was the "time for the scaries" celebrations back in his home in India, around the same time as we have Halloween here in the USA. I've learned a lot from all of them, even though we don't agree on everything. Some things, yes. Some things, maybe. And some, well, we have to agree to disagree, and carry on carrying on.

Today, we might call such a mix of friends normal and have, as I did, an interesting discussion with the clerk over different celebrations. Some of the best conversations can be among friends of differing outlooks, sharing why they walk the path they do. In that, I think I can safely say we're blessed (or lucky, if you prefer), but in previous times (and some parts of the world even today, sadly) where different faiths might make friendships difficult, not to mention love affairs and even--gasp--marriage. Families on either side might have something to say against such a relationship, and even take drastic measures to keep it from happening, while others might prefer to find common ground and respect differences.

Henry VIII broke from the Catholic church so he might divorce his barren first wife and seek a more fertile bride...and kept on seeking. Houses in England constructed during that time might have had priest holes--secret rooms, sometimes no more than a closet or the size of a coffin, where Catholics hid from those seeking to do them harm. Catholics and Puritans didn't mix well during the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell, and yet both found themselves faced with losses during the English Civil War.

Merely being Jewish during the time between world wars in Europe meant incredibly high stakes, never knowing when the knock on the door would end life as they knew it. Even so, bonds of friendship, love and marriage have formed across faiths for centuries, with no signs of stopping. Similarly, ask any member of a congregation, meeting, synagogue, coven, etc, about the group dynamics, and you'll hear about annoyances, betrayals, pet peeves, and bad habits, as well as heartwarming stories of support, generosity and going the extra mile. At a given moment, that depends largely on the individuals involved. This is what I've found most important in exploring a character's spirituality: the individual.

Plainly put, there are nice guys and jerks in all belief systems. While it's easy to rely on stock figures--the wise, mystic Easterner who sounds like he moonlights as a fortune cookie writer; the dour Puritan who never smiles, hates everything, and probably has never read his Bible because he's too busy smacking people with it; and so on--a writer can get far more mileage by showing the individual rather than the stereotype. For example, what images come to mind when I say "the Pope"? For some, the leader of their faith. For others, someone they wouldn't invite to dinner unless something lethal were on the menu.


For me, the first thing that I think of is Pope John Paul II wearing Bono's sunglasses, with both men looking appropriately impressed. That picture touches on a side of the man many may not think of at first, but doesn't it make him all the more human?

Which, of course, is a great tool for writers, especially those of romance. One of my favorite uses of spirituality in romance is Laura Kinsale's SHADOWHEART, where Allegretto, the hero, believing himself to be damned already, finally gives in to the heroine's pleas to go to confession. She won't until he will, and he believes there's still hope for her. He won't put her soul in jeopardy, and so he changes. Annette Blair's Amish historical, THEE I LOVE, shows an Amish community making a difficult decision to place what is right above a circumstance that might force them to do otherwise. Francine Rivers' "Mark of the Lion" trilogy shows a wide spectrum of first-century spirituality and good, bad and ugly behavior among not only the early Christian Church, but Jewish, Roman and German communities of the period.

It's the variety of the individual that makes every relationship unique, and as romance writers, that's one of our biggest goals: to make our couples stand out as lovers, so that readers will long remember them and want to visit again and again. Religion may play a small, large or somewhere-in-between part in a particular character's life, and those around them may have a wide range of faiths, but all have the same needs: to love and be loved. Individuals read our stories, and that's a special relationship, one to nurture. No matter what a character's religious persuasion (or lack thereof), if we as writers can make a reader connect with their deepest feelings, cry with their losses and rejoice in their triumphs, then we've done our job.

Families & Children: Who's Your Daddy

By Anna C. Bowling

When I was in kindergarten, back when the dinosaurs roamed, I remember my teacher asking another child in the class what his mother's last name was, and thought that was the silliest question I'd ever heard. Today, such a question is fairly common, due to changes in many families. A child today may have one or two parent/stepparent combinations or other domestic arrangements that were even less common only a couple of decades past. Which might give such a child something in common with their colonial counterparts.

In any society where the mortality rate is higher than usual, it's a part of life that not every individual will live to raise their own children to adulthood. Especially in the early days of the American colonies, any number of factors might cause what we'd call premature death. The weather and climate of a strange land, scarce or unfamiliar food, disease, injury, death in childbirth or other factors could turn a two parent family into a one parent family. Widows or widowers with young children often began the search for a new mate within weeks or in some cases, even days of their previous spouse's death. A Dutch proverb even states "the best time to court a widow is on the way home from the funeral."

For colonial families, this made sense. Beside the companionship of another adult, two extra hands to feed, bathe, and generally wrangle the young ones came in, pardon the pun, handy, and a widowed mother would find life far easier economically with the help of a husband. A widowed father, also, could benefit from having someone to care for the homestead while he worked at providing for the blended family. Before anyone gets an image of a buckskin-clad Brady Bunch, these step families of course faced the same issues blended families face today; grief for the late parent or spouse, adapting to new ways of doing things they'd always done another way, or perhaps moving to a new home and leaving their old one behind. An only child might now be the youngest, or a pair of boys might find themselves overrun by a passel of girls or vice versa. Not so different from today?

There's one exception: the high mortality rate.

Let's say John and Mary came over from England to build a new life and produced bouncing baby Elizabeth. Unfortunately, their first year didn't go well, and John did not survive a hunting accident. Mary marries Thomas, and Elizabeth gets little brother, Luke, though Mary does not survive Luke's birth. Thomas now has two children under five he has to raise, and marries Abigail, a widow slightly older than himself, with daughters Ruth and Jane. Ruth is sixteen and a comely lass, and soon catches the eye of Jacob, a young man with his own small farm. Ruth and Jacob marry, and welcome the birth of son Samuel at the same time Thomas and Abigail have baby Josiah. Things are getting crowded at Thomas and Abigail's home as Abigail is expecting again, they've had to take in her elderly mother, and it's not the best year for farming, so there's a family discussion and Luke will go live with Ruth and Jacob. Plus cousin Ezekiel's wife doesn't exactly believe he somehow found an orphaned Indian child all by itself in the woods, and really, the toddler does have Ezekiel's nose, and there is the matter of Christian charity, as well as the stipend Ezekiel is willing to give whichever family will take in the poor dear.

Phew. That might not be the last adjustment for Elizabeth and her family; subsequent deaths and remarriages anywhere along the above lines could change things yet again, or one or more of the children might leave the family home(s) for indenture or apprenticeship, or even military service for the boys once they are old enough. By the time Elizabeth is ready to start her own family, probably in her late teens to early twenties, she may have acquired a few more branches to the family tree. If her teacher asked the class to draw family trees, Elizabeth might well raise her hand to ask for more paper, and she might not be the only one in her class, either.

Maladies & Treatments: Writing with Folk Cures

By Anna C. Bowling

Growing up as the child of older (both were over forty when they adopted me; the photo is of me, at three, on the blacktop where I skinned pretty much everything) first generation American parents must have hardwired me for unusual historicals right from the start. Many of the treatments for the minor childhood illnesses or injuries I had in the 1960s/70s were as likely to come from the traditions my mothers and aunts, one of whom who worked as a nurse, learned from their mother, who learned them from her mother back in Italy in the early 20th century.

As a child, I'd often wondered what my mother grew that patch of mint for (aside from the delightful smell) but when puberty hit, I found out it was a natural remedy for menstrual cramps. By then we had moved away from the house with the fresh mint in the garden, so it had to come from a store, but it still worked, and the mint tea also worked to help with nausea.

Sore throats were as likely to be treated with licorice as commercial medications, which may be why I still like licorice today, and I will long remember the discussion my parents had when my father wanted to give me a hot toddy (mostly rum) to help ease the discomfort of a bad case of chicken pox when I was ten. They left it up to me, and I declined.

One of my strongest memories of my mother's Aunt Anna, who I only knew as an elderly woman who spoke a fast stream of Italian was the time when I'd talked a neighbor child into splitting a bar of Ex-Lax (to be fair, I was five and the grownups had described it to me as chocolate.) Being sorely lacking in my Italian, I can't vouch for anything said that day, but Aunt Anna refused to let my mother take me to the doctor, instead pounding an endless supply of ice with a hammer and pouring it down my throat before depositing me in the bathroom with even more tall glasses of ice. When I asked my mother to translate, she said this was Aunt Anna’s treatment for loose bowels, something she learned back in Italy.

Since I survived and turned out okay, my foremothers must have been on to something, so when characters in my historicals now have the need for doctoring, I turn to the state of the art medical care of their time. Often, such as in colonial settlements, the most advanced medical treatments meant calling in whoever had dealt with the illness or injury before. If the need was something the person hadn't encountered before, common sense was often the best guess.

In my colonial historical romance, MY OUTCAST HEART, the hero, Dalby, suffers third degree burns to one hand. Today, witnesses would call 911 and paramedics would rush him to the burn unit, where trained professionals would examine him and use a variety of treatments and procedures to find out how bad the damage was, how much mobility he might be able to retain and even address cosmetic repair. In 1720, Dalby was lucky this occurred in winter, so heroine Tabetha can drag him outside and stick his hand in a snowbank. The cold would help, but the "everybody knows" medicine of the time--likely coating the burn in butter or bear grease--we now know would have the exact opposite effect.

Looking at the folk medicine of the times I write about, and consulting with several friends who work in the medical field of today as well as visiting living history museums lets my characters have the best--or worst--of both worlds, depending on what the story needs. Good thing a great read is excellent medicine in any time.

Standards of Beauty:The Price of Beauty in the 1860s

By Eliza Tucker

In an essay entitled, "A Lady of Fashion", historian Herbert Asbury looked at the price of keeping couture in the decade following the American Civil War. He detailed the usually painful trends in garment construction and cosmetics, and the price thereof.

"The butterfly of the eighteen-sixties and the early eighteen-seventies staggered forth under the burden of an infinite variety of beautifying apparatus constructed of steel, iron, wire, cotton, wood horsehair, and wool, all attached to her person by straps, tape, and mucilage."

The exaggerated hourglass figure was a must-have for dames of postbellum New York: a small, rounded head, full chest, tiny waist, voluminous skirt, and diminutive feet. The dentist of the day went far above simple teeth-whitening when it came to cosmetic procedures, and would regularly "provide plump cheeks...by filling them out with hard composition pads running upward along each side of the mouth. These were called 'plumpers,' and some were so large as to give the appearance of mumps. They often shifted position, so that a woman wearing them was apt to speak in a sort of whispering mumble."

False calves, cotton or wool padding for the arms, foot wrapping, and pads for "sharp and angular knees" all contributed to the desired effect. Wigs, false curls, and "ratting" were popular, and once the hair was piled, knotted, or braided into place, it was topped with powder, flour, glitter, or gold dust. The "widow's peak" was so vogue that women clipped or shaved their head around the hairstyle.

While tattooing was still improper, it was all the rage to paint the palms of a woman's hands in a vivid color, either solidly or with shapes or patterns, and to delicately trace the veins on the back of the hand with blue ink. Women painted their eyes with India ink and dropped or rubbed Belladonna to dilate their pupils. Not surprisingly, most society women eventually went blind.

The crème de la crème in New York didn't just paint their faces, they had the makeup set with a plastic enamel. Shops advertised the ability to keep the face and bosom enameled for up to a year (this cost $1000, almost $15,000 now), but there are no records to indicate that any woman had this done. Arsenic and white lead were the bases to these skin enamels, and if properly applied it did not interfere with muscle movement. "It was eventually abandoned because the flashier branches of society carried it to ludicrous extremes."

In The Women of New York, George Ellington gives us a very long, very detailed price list of what it took per annum to keep a fashionable woman in New York: approximately $20,000 a year. That's $300,000 of our US dollars. Can you imagine? If you want to check out Mr. Ellington's views of New York's women (and the infamous price list), you can read The Women of New York online.

reference: Herbert Asbury, "A Lady of Fashion", All Around the Town, 1929