Watermark (27 page)

The following bibliography is presented for the reader who wishes to read more about the factual history and influences behind this novel.

Anonymous.
Aymeri of Narbonne: A French Epic Romance
. Edited and translated by Michael A. H. Newth (2005). New York: Italica Press.

Barber, M. (2000).
The Cathars.
Harlow, UK; New York: Pearson Education.

Bayley, H. (1967).
A New Light on the Renaissance, Displayed in Contemporary Emblems.
New York: Benjamin Blom.

Bogin, M. (1980).
The Women Troubadours.
New York: Norton.

Caille, J. (2005).
Medieval Narbonne: A City at the Heart of the Troubadour World.
Hampshire, UK: Ashgate Publishing.

Cantor, N. F. (1999).
The Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages.
New York: Viking.

Cheyette, F. L. (2001).
Ermengard of Narbonne and the World of the Troubadours.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Duby, G. (1991).
France in the Middle Ages 987–1460: From Hugh Capet to Joan of Arc.
Oxford, UK; Cambridge, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Emery, R. W. (1967).
Heresy and Inquisition in Narbonne.
New York: AMS Press.

Gies, F., and J. Gies (1999).
Daily Life in Medieval Times: A Vivid, Detailed Account of Birth, Marriage, and Death; Food, Clothing, and Housing; Love and Labor, in the Middle Ages.
New York: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers.

Gui, B. (2006).
The Inquisitor’s Guide: A Medieval Manual on Heretics.
Translated by J. Shirley. Welwyn Garden City, UK: Ravenhall Books.

Halsall, Paul, ed.
Internet Medieval Sourcebook.
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/sbook.html

Hunter, D. (1943).
Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft.
New York: Knopf. Lindberg, D. C. (1992).
The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, 600
B
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to
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1450.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

McEvedy, C., and C. McEvedy (1992).
The New Penguin Atlas of Medieval History.
London; New York: Penguin.

Ong, Walter J. (2002).
Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word.
2nd ed. London: Routledge.

Scully, T. (1995).
The Art of Cookery in the Middle Ages.

Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK; Rochester, NY: Boydell Press.

Siraisi, N. G. (1990).
Medieval & Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

FROM
VANITHA SANKARAN
AND
AVON A

When I decided to write my first novel, I knew right away it would be about papermaking. Paper has always fascinated me. As a child, I was forever asking for a clean sheet; in old photographs, I’m often clutching that empty page. Sometimes I actually wrote on the paper, but most times, just holding it gave me a sense of comfort.

My search for the story behind papermaking focused primarily on the craft’s spread during the Middle Ages. I’ve long thought that, if not for the plague, the Middle Ages would have blossomed into the frenzy of thought, reason, and discovery that characterized the Renaissance. The later part of the medieval era was ripe with change; it was teeming with growing tensions between the burgeoning middle class, the corrupt Church, and a nobility worried about its own power, which makes the perfect backdrop for a compelling story. How would paper, an invention brought to Europe by the Moors and deeply distrusted by the Church, have fared in such a chaotic environment?

In order to pick the right location to host my tale, I looked at small towns along the prominent trade routes that led from Spain—where the Moors built some of Europe’s first paper mills—to France, Italy, and England. Today, each of these towns, a gold mine of history, still proudly boasts to history-savvy travelers of surviving the turmoil and destruction. I chose a French town, Narbonne, as my setting. Situated in the heart of heretical France, where alternate religious philosophies often thrived alongside the Church, Narbonne remained a haven for heretics, Jews, and other undesirables, even during the Inquisition. Compared to the thousands who were consigned to the flames in
neighboring cities, very few people burned in Narbonne. And the town has a colorful cultural story of its own: its rise as a prominent trading town and its surprising demise, brought about by the flooding of its river.

Much of medieval Narbonne exists today. Though the
vicomte
’s palace has been lost to time, the archbishop’s palace, which went through centuries of construction, remains an impressive edifice. The donjon has also been preserved with eerily little degradation. St. Paul’s, in the bourg, looks little different than it would have in Auda’s time. Her namesake, the river Aude, still flows through the city. So much of the medieval flavor has been preserved in Narbonne that when I walked down the old cobbled Via Domitia, sniffing the smells of myrrh and incense in St. Paul’s, I almost felt my characters come to life. I felt their excitement at introducing the new craft of paper making into their world as if it were my own.

Developing Auda as a character to love and admire was not as easy a task. I didn’t want to write another historical novel with a heroine whose sensibility is taken from modern times, a feminist who believed men and women are equal and set out to prove it. Nor could Auda be one of the illiterate commoners, with a convenient faith in this incipient art of paper. Her ability to read and write, and her love of paper, had to be born of need as well as desire. Through several incarnations, Auda appeared as an orphan, a cripple, even a healer. Eventually, she emerged as someone who didn’t recognize her own limits, someone who had every reason to use paper, for nothing less than to find her own self.

People often ask me why I write historical fiction, where these characters and themes come from. I was never a particularly good history student in school; dates and names often elude me. The best answer I can give is that historical fiction appeals to both sides of my brain. I love the empiricism of historical research and the creativity of writing. It is a good balance between the real and the imagined, a duality not unlike the one at the heart of Auda’s story itself.

My research for the novel began with a practical experiment trying to recreate paper production from the Middle Ages. For two months, I kept a bucket of molding linens on my balcony, judiciously adding bird droppings, lye made from ashes, and rainwater to help the cloth break down. Each day, I noted the color, consistency, and pH of the mixture in my notebook. Then I would inhale the sharp scents, press the slick material between my fingers, and capture every detail in paragraphs of description. I’m not sure where the scientific explanation stopped and artistic expression began, but I do know that much of what I learned in this experiment made it into my novel.

In many cases, researching the past made the history feel more modern than I ever expected. People of the medieval era seem to me every bit as curious about the world as we are today. Nobles debated the meaning of love in their courts. Learned clergymen discussed heady subjects like whether sex brought one closer to God. Dissidents questioned the feudal system and the meaning of freedom. There were even people wondering what role the written word could have in a culture weaned on oral news and entertainment. And Auda encounters all of these dilemmas, in varying degrees, throughout the story.

My goal in writing this novel was not to write a story that probably did happen, but one that possibly could have. The narrative of history, for me, is just like fiction with some immutable facts thrown in. All I had to do was stretch my imagination and let the story come to life. I hope you will do the same.

The history of humankind is intricately intertwined with our desire to create a record of our thoughts, hopes, and imaginations. Written communication can be traced back to cave drawings and symbols etched into wood and stone; historically, the form it took was manifested in a myriad of ways depending on the resources that were readily available. For example, on one continent you might find papyrus, constructed from the stems of water plants, while on another, rice paper would be the written surface of choice, made not of rice at all, nor pressed out like paper, but cut from the pith of a shrub.

Throughout time, we have gone through an amazing range of writing surfaces, from bark to rock, metal to ceramic to animal skin. Paper is unlike these natural sources in that it is a manmade invention, defined as a thin sheet manufactured from a fibrous pulp made of straw, bark, or old cloth. The fibrous pulp is first macerated until each filament is separated. The filaments are then mixed in water so they can intermingle, or felt. The interwoven fibers are sieved through a screen, dried and smoothed, then sized so as to better accept pigments and ink.

We believe that papermaking began sometime between 100 BC and 100 AD when the Chinese sought a surface with which to capture and perfect their delicate art of calligraphy. The Chinese empire took to paper wholeheartedly, using it not just for handwriting and record keeping but also for ornamental purposes. Although the first papers of China were likely made from disintegrated cloth, cheap and plentiful vegetable materials soon became the preferred source. It was this bark-based paper that passed from China through Korea into Japan that
not only made the first paper printings but also encouraged the establishment numerous paper mills, as well as a guild, to support the emperor’s needs. China, Korea, and Japan elevated not just paper but the papermaking process to an art form. These arts exist to this day. From China, paper also made its way into central Asia, India, and Persia through well-known trade routes and, from there, spread to Samarkand, Baghdad, and Damascus, then into Egypt and Morocco. It took nearly five centuries for papermaking to find Europe, via either Spain or Italy. Although Europe initially regarded paper as an inferior writing material, more fragile than parchment and “invented” by distrusted Jews and Moors, slowly paper became an accepted Western commodity.

The papers of early Europe were made differently than those of Asia. Rather than using vegetable matter, Europeans preferred old rag scraps that had no other use and made hardy pulp. The cloths were macerated into fibers, dried into sheets, and then dipped in gelatin to change the porosity. The result was a material more adaptable to quill and ink than the delicate vegetable-based papers suited for slow calligraphy. This strong rag-based paper was also well suited to the rigors of Gutenberg’s printing press and its use of movable type. As printed books became commonplace and literacy spread throughout Europe, so did paper, a much cheaper and more plentiful commodity than either parchment or vellum. After just a few decades of books printed with movable type, paper not only became an acceptable form of communication, it became the preferred one.

The spread of paper throughout the world also had a profound impact on how people communicated, not just in correspondence and literature, but also in the way that they spoke. People no longer had to devise long oral narratives that relied on rhyming and rhythm to stay fresh in their listeners’ minds. Now they could be short and precise, or clever and sly; they could even ramble without end because one no longer needed to rely on memory alone to keep track of words. One could now go back and read them.

Society today is experiencing an information upheaval not unlike the one that happened with papermaking and printed books of hundreds of years ago. These days we have an explosion of media that is conveyed digitally; and these audio, visual, and even written communications have given a new twist to how we are able to communicate and share those communications with the world around us. Much like in our medieval past, there is a frenzy of excitement about the leveling of the playing field. Anyone who has access to a computer can now reach out to a worldwide audience. And as the reader, we now have a world full of voices clamoring for our attention. As in times past, we now have to look at the criteria we use to judge the worth of a communication, whether we accept it as truth or distrust the message and the messenger.

It’s not so different from the days of medieval paper after all.

Making paper at home is a fun way to get a feel for how old-time papermakers would have worked in their studios. Paper is such an integral part of our lives today and has such a long history. As a scientist accustomed to research, I wanted to get a feel for the kind of work Martin and Auda would have done in their own studio. How much work was it to make paper pulp? What did the rotting linens feel like? Smell like? Would the finished product bear any resemblance to the paper we use today?

Methods and materials have come a long way since the Middle Ages; however, although there are a number of subtleties that can affect the look and feel of paper, the process is essentially a simple one. In this recipe, we are going to use recycled paper as our starting material so that we don’t have to worry about boiling or macerating our fibers, and about sizing the finished product. As you get more experienced at papermaking, these are some alternatives you might want to experiment with.

Materials Needed

Fiber source (one cup loosely packed scrap or recycled paper)

Kitchen blender

Wood frame (any size will do)

Metal-wire mesh (such as window screening)

Vat or tub large enough to accommodate a horizontally submerged frame

Two pieces of wool felt slightly larger than frame

Laundry line and clothespins

Step 1

We’ll begin by assembling all of the necessary materials.

First, tear the scrap paper into one-inch squares and gather into a pile. You might want to try different types of scrap paper to experiment with color, consistency, and smoothness. Keep in mind that long fibers intermingle better than shorter fibers and thus create a stronger sheet of paper. You can check fiber length by tearing a piece of your scrap paper. Does it tear smoothly (short fibers) or leave a raggedy edge (long fibers)?

Next, cut a section of the window screening and stretch it over the wooden frame. Staple the screening into place. Make sure this screen is flat and clean—the quality of your paper depends on it.

Fill the vat or tub halfway full with water and set aside. Next to it, spread out one of the wool felt pieces.

Step 2

Mix the paper squares you’ve torn with water and pour into a blender, adding four parts of water to one part paper. For smoother pulp, you may want to boil the paper–water mixture for a couple hours ahead of time, or soak the paper overnight. Blend the mixture until the pulp becomes creamy and smooth.

Step 3

Holding the frame over the vat, pour the pulp onto the screen and shake laterally until the screen is covered. Slowly lower the frame into the vat of water and continue shaking laterally until the pulp is dispersed evenly over the screen. Raise the horizontal frame up and out of the tub and let the water drip out.

Step 4

Turn the frame over on top of the wool felt piece next to the vat. The sheet of pulp should fall out of the frame easily; if it doesn’t, tap the frame gently until the pulp falls onto the felt. Cover the pulp sheet with the other piece of felt and push gently on the pile to squeeze out the excess water. Be careful to push evenly. You may want to use a rolling pin or handpress to get out as much water as you can.

Step 5

Press out as much water as you can, then carefully remove the top piece of wool felt. Take two corners of the paper and slowly roll the paper off the other piece of felt. Clip the sheet to a laundry line with two clothespins and let dry in a warm area shielded from any wind.

Drying time can take anywhere from three hours to a day, depending on the thickness of the sheet and the amount of sunlight.

Other Ideas

As you can see, the basic steps to making paper are quite simple. From here, you can experiment with different types of fibers and other additives, such as flowers, glitter, and dyes, which can be mixed with the pulp—just add white glue or startch as you blend the pulp with the additives. If you want to use vegetable matter as your fiber source, be sure not to skip step 2, where you boil the pulp. You may also want to add some white glue or other starch to the pulp to help bind the fibers together. And if you are feeling adventurous, you may even want to give your screen some texture—shape it into a person’s face, for example, and make a paper mask. The possibilities are endless!