A Discussion With Ariana Franklin

Q.  When did you become interested in medieval history?

A.  People lump the Middle Ages together, as if they were all the same instead of each of its periods being so very individual. All historians have their favorite centuries, and mine is the twelfth. Maybe it was seeing Chartres Cathedral in France that did it for me, or maybe because there’s a beautiful simplicity to its songs and poetry that makes me feel the breath of God on my neck, maybe it was reading T.H.White’s “The Sword in the Stone” when I was a child.

Whatever it was, from adolescence on I was in love with the second half of the Twelfth Century — the nicest period of all the Middle Ages, the kindest, the most pleasant in its weather, the years when, in England, nobody, neither witch nor heretic, was burned at the stake, when a priest could have a wife or at least live with his “housekeeper” without too many eyebrows being raised, when courtly love entered the lists, when law began to be equated with justice, when…Sorry, I get carried away. Let’s just say that if you had to live hundreds of years away from the nearest aspirin, that was the time to do it. I was fascinated. I read. My arms got longer as I hauled enormous tomes out of libraries and carried them home. I quizzed authorities from London to Ohio until, eventually, in between having babies and bringing them up, I became an authority; I could have told you the phases of the moon at that time, or what three quarters of England’s population was doing on a particular day any time from 1145 to 1189, how they were dressed, how they walked in a landscape without rabbits and without many of the trees we know now. (Sycamores, for instance, didn’t arrive until much later.)

Okay, sorry again. Next question.

Q.  What fascinated you about medieval medicine?  How did you discover that there was a school of medicine at Salerno that actually taught women of the time? Was it as enlightened in that unenlightened age as you portray it?

A.  If you study the eleventh and twelfth centuries, you learn about Salerno’s great school of medicine. It was famous. At that time it belonged to the Norman Kingdom of Sicily, then a realm so liberal and farseeing that Islam, Judaism and Christianity were in harmony, and each brought to it knowledge—the Arabs especially—that took medicine out of the Dark Ages. And, yes, the school accepted women.  The most important medieval treatise on female diseases to come out of Salerno was written by a woman. She was known as Trotula and her book has recently been edited and translated by Professor Monica H. Green of Arizona University.

But because the school accepted women as doctors, because it studied anatomy, it was anathema to the Catholic Church.  The Church was the Taliban of its day as far as women were concerned, and believed that suffering should only be relieved by prayer and holy relics instead of medicine and science. Gradually, we see midwives, female healers, and wise women stigmatized and, eventually, designated as witches. Only records of their court trials show us that they existed.

The Black Death in the fourteenth century, which killed one-third of Europe’s population, was a triumph for a clergy that trumpeted it as divine punishment for sin. It was also the end of female medicine—and the Salerno school that had fostered it. Trotula only survives now in popular memory as the nursery rhyme figure of Dame Trot.

Q.  How did Adelia take shape in your mind as you created her?

A.  Well, the lovely thing is that there are so few records of that time, and nearly all of them written by clerics.  So we can take liberties with it and nobody can prove we’re wrong. Let’s face it, the women doctors produced by that Golden Age of twelfth century Salerno would have had brilliant minds, probably—since even there they must have faced prejudice—more brilliant than the male students. Anatomy was taught at Salerno, so why not a female anatomist? True, Adelia is an extraordinary figure, but she was born into a time and place that was extraordinary.  Where, even now, can you find a country that happily combines Jews, Moslems and Christians in its ruling class? Adelia is ahead of her time, but so was Norman Sicily.

I see her as an academic, a virgin, straitlaced and not at all pleased at the circumstances that take her away from her dissecting table in Salerno to help investigate the murder of children in faraway England. By the end of Mistress of the Art of Death she has lost her heart—and her virginity—but not her displeasure at being virtually marooned in Britain because King Henry II has adopted her as his special investigator.

Q.  You portray Henry II as something of a heroic figure, and oddly charming, despite his ruthlessness. Most historians are not so kind, and most novelists depict him as a villain. What was it about Henry that appealed to you?

A.  I swear there’s a timeless public relations person who manages to represent history’s bad guys as good guys and vice versa. Henry II has gone down in popular history as the murderer of St. Thomas à Becket who, in my opinion, had it coming. Becket was an arrogant, backward-looking man carried away by his own importance as Archbishop of Canterbury.  Becket opposed every reform with which King Henry proposed justice for his people.  Henry protected Jews and other minorities in his realm and while he might have been a bastard in some respects, he was a bastard who was so far ahead of his time that his contemporaries didn’t understand him.  Nevertheless, he made an enormous leap forward in judicial history to become England’s greatest king. 

If you ever happen to become entangled in the legal system and are tried by a jury, go down on your knees and give thanks for Henry II.  Before Henry, people were judged by throwing them into ponds to see if they floated.  Henry II thought it was fairer for men and women to be tried by twelve of their peers.  The system of English Common Law that he instituted still provides one of the world’s great safeguards of human rights.