TODAY WE HAVE CHOCOLATE

My guest is Elizabeth Loupas, author of several sumptuous historical novels, full of court intrigue and danger. She shares the reality of love, sex, and power of women in renaissance period.

We love to watch The Borgias and The Tudors and The Other Boleyn Girl and every richly-costumed, intrigue-and-romance Renaissance drama we can find. We (well, I) even watch Reign, which is way more fantasy than history but does have a lot of pretty people and gorgeous (if inaccurate) costumes. We read thick, luscious books set in the Renaissance, and go to Renaissance Faires. There’s just something about swanning around in long silk dresses and glittering jewels, living in palaces covered with magnificent art and honeycombed with peepholes for spies, nibbling on honeyed cakes and hummingbirds’ tongues and playing games of love, sex and power with kings and dukes.

Wait. It wasn’t really like that?

No, it wasn’t. Even royalty and noblewomen didn’t live the glamorous lives we imagine. And the vast majority of women—the storekeepers, artisans, washerwomen, farmers’ wives and nuns—lived lives so far from what we think when we see the word “Renaissance” that they might as well have been on a different planet.

Love, sex and power? When you have the church on one side thundering about the sin of Eve and the inherent evil of all women, and men on the other side controlling everything you do whether you like it or not, love is hard. Sex is harder. Power is the hardest thing of all.

But women managed. Women always manage.

What women of the Renaissance thought of as “love” wasn’t the same thing as what we think of as “love” today. Marriages were business arrangements, even among the peasant, artisan and merchant classes, and parents pretty much always chose their children’s spouses. Marrying for “love”—meaning physical attraction or emotional attachment—was considered unseemly. Love was something that flowered in a woman’s heart after she was married, and it was a matter of duty and dignity and affection for her children. Scripture instructed men to “love” their wives, and wives to “submit to” and “reverence” their husbands.

Even so, women did love their husbands. The number of marriages made when the woman was already pregnant tell us that was true.

And that brings us to sex. Sex in the Renaissance was wonderful (as sex has been since time began), pleasurable (ditto), and deadly dangerous.

To begin with, there was no reliable contraception—women used everything from squeezed lemon halves to magic spells, with predictably uncertain results. Pregnancy outside marriage meant the girl was bundled off into a forced marriage, outcast from her family and left homeless, or turned into a whore or a drudge. Abortifacients existed, but they were about as reliable as the contraceptives, and in some cases were deadly poisons. Pregnancy outside marriage for a woman of the royal or noble classes was unheard-of—which doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, just that it was covered up with vicious efficiency.

So much for love and sex. Did women in the Renaissance (barring the occasional outlier like Elizabeth I or Catherine de’ Medici) really wield any power of their own, or did they grasp what crumbs they could from the men they belonged to—their fathers, brothers, or husbands?

The surprising thing here is that women in the lower classes—peasants, artisans and merchants—actually had more personal power than most of their royal and noble sisters. Women in these classes (and I hate that I keep talking about classes, but that’s how it was behind all the dazzle of the Renaissance) brought their own labor and household-management skills to the marriage, and this gave them value as both workers and teachers of the next generation. Personal value translated into personal power, at least to some extent. It’s in the lower classes that one finds widows and single women actually living and earning independently.

Royal and noble women had less freedom. Their persons and their property belonged to their birth families, and after marriage, to their husbands. It’s here that you find the quintessential “power behind the throne” sort of power for women. In some cases, what they whispered in their husbands’ ears carried weight and authority. In most cases, sadly, it did not.

If you had no love, no sex for pleasure, and no power, you turned to chocolate, right?

Well, the Spanish conquistadores did bring cacao beans back from the New World around the middle of the sixteenth century, ground them up, and made a bitter coffee-like drink out of them. Needless to say, nobody liked chocolate much until some unknown person (thank you, unknown person!) thought of sweetening it and mixing it with milk. Even so, it was a closely guarded secret in the Spanish court for at least a hundred years. So you didn’t live in the highest echelons of the Spanish court? Too bad. No chocolate for you, even if you were Queen Elizabeth.

Ah yes, the glamorous Renaissance. Love you had to struggle for, sex that could kill you, and personal power that was pretty much nonexistent unless you were a very lucky artisan-class widow or could find a way to twist your nobleman-husband around your sweetly submissive little finger. And you know, some of that sounds mighty familiar to some of us women in the twenty-first century.

At least today—and with Valentine’s Day tomorrow—we have lovely, lovely chocolate.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

Elizabeth Loupas returns with her most ambitious historical novel yet, a story of intrigue, passion, and murder in the Medici Court...

April, 1574, Florence, Italy. Grand Duke Cosimo de’ Medici lies dying. The city is paralyzed with dread, for the next man to wear the red lily crown will be Prince Francesco: despotic, dangerous, and obsessed with alchemy. 

Chiara Nerini, the troubled daughter of an anti-Medici bookseller, sets out to save her starving family by selling her dead father’s rare alchemical equipment to the prince. Instead she is trapped in his household—imprisoned and forcibly initiated as a virgin acolyte in Francesco’s quest for power and immortality. Undaunted, she seizes her chance to pursue undreamed-of power of her own.

Witness to sensuous intrigues and brutal murder plots, Chiara seeks a safe path through the labyrinth of Medici tyranny and deception. Beside her walks the prince’s mysterious English alchemist Ruanno, her friend and teacher, driven by his own dark goals. Can Chiara trust him to keep her secrets…even to love her…or will he prove to be her most treacherous enemy of all? EXCERPT

BUY: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Powell’s Books, Books-a-Million  

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

Elizabeth Loupas was born and grew up in Rockford, Illinois. She has lived in New Mexico, New Orleans, North Carolina, Chicago, Dallas, and Austin, and now makes her home halfway between Dallas and Fort Worth, on the Elm Fork of the Trinity River. 
She hates housework, cold weather, and wearing shoes. She loves animals, gardens, and popcorn. Not surprisingly she lives in a state of happy barefoot chaos with her delightful and faintly bemused husband (the Broadcasting Legend™), her flower and herb gardens, her popcorn popper, and two beloved beagles. Find Elizabeth: Website, Goodreads, and Facebook

THE BLISS OF PEACE AND QUIET

My guest is historical fiction author, Alison McQueen. She spent twenty years in corporate advertising and now writes fascinating stories set in India. Alison's topic highlights the frustration of many writers trying to write while balancing a job and raising children.  It's never easy to find time. Recently, she discovered the bliss of writing in a quiet house sans children.

The holiday season is over, the house now empty, and I feel as though I’ve been waiting for this moment for over 20 years. Every writer out there who is also a mother, perhaps a wife too, will understand what I’m talking about.

I always knew this day would come, although I didn’t quite believe it. That’s the trouble with raising a family. When you’re right in the thick of it, it feels like it will never end. And if you’re trying to write a novel while simultaneously making the dinner and refereeing arguments about who broke the hair straighteners and why you can’t go out looking like that, then you have my deepest sympathy.

My daughters are now in their twenties. They still argue, but these days it doesn’t usually involve throwing things at each other and slamming doors so hard that the house shakes. One of them now lives an hour away with her boyfriend, so the other one has nobody to yell at most of the time anyway. From where I’m sitting, it’s bliss. I can actually hear myself think.

Right now the loudest thing in the house is the tap-tapping of my keyboard. There is a little part of me that is still in deep shock. I keep waiting for a problem to come marching in, or for someone to demand to know where their favourite jeans are, or why there’s no food in the fridge.

Friends say to me, “Don’t you miss the kids?” and “I just don’t know what I’ll do when mine grow up and leave.” And I find myself making noises which can be interpreted either way. It seems so wrong to punch the air and give a victory whoop. There were times in the past when I used to get so frustrated at not being able to write that I would shut myself in the bathroom for a cry. Those days seem far off now.

I live in a small English village with thatched cottages, narrow country lanes and an old parish church with a towering spire. Nearby are miles of canals, ancient woodlands, stately homes and historic family seats, including that of the Spencer family at Althorpe, two villages away. It’s a peaceful place, perfect for writing.

So all I have to do now is write the new novel. There is no excuse not to. No noise, no distraction, no interruptions, yet I find myself staring at the page and wondering what the next sentence is, the next word. It’s torture, and I do it to myself every time. The draft is still at an early stage which means that my house is awash with scraps of paper and cryptic messages that I will have no hope of understanding when they eventually surface.

I’d like to complain to somebody, to sit with a cup of coffee and have a good old moan about how lonely and agonizing the business of writing can be, but there ain’t nobody here but us chickens.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

BUY: AMAZON, B&N, INDIEBOUND,
CHAPTERSINDIGOca

UNDER THE JEWELLED SKY

A breathtaking story of forbidden love and devastating consequences...

The moment Sophie steps onto India's burning soil, she realizes her return was inevitable. But this is not the India she fell in love with ten years before in a maharaja's palace. This is not the India that ripped her heart out as Partition tore the country in two. That India, a place of tigers, scorpions, and shimmering beauty, is long gone.

Drawing on her own family's heritage, acclaimed novelist Alison McQueen beautifully portrays the heart of a woman who must confront her past in order to fight for her future. Under the Jeweled Sky deftly explores the loss of innocence, the urgent connection in our stars, and how far we'll go to find our hearts. Excerpt

                                                                                                                                                                                                            

Born in the sixties to an Indian mother and an English jazz musician father, Alison McQueen grew up in London and worked in advertising for twenty years before retiring to write full time. In 2006 she was selected from an impressive longlist to join The Writers' Circle - a group of 8 top writers chosen to be groomed by the UK film industry as the new generation of British screenwriters. An award-winning blogger, she is also the author of a series of popular novels (published by Macmillan) under a pseudonym. Alison lives in a quiet English village with her husband and two daughters. Her novel, The Secret Children, was selected by The Independent for their alternative 2012 Booker list. You can find Alison: Website & Blog, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook.