What research have you been doing?

When I went to the library yesterday I picked up Midwest Medicinal Plants, but I haven't even looked at it yet, because I've been trying to get through this thing called Keepers of Life which said it was about discovering plants, Native American stories and children's activities. And I thought, hey that sounds fun, interesting and on topic.

But, alas, most of the book is very, very dry "what you need to know about plants so that you can teach it to the kids". The kids get fun hand-on learning. The adults have to suffer. :(

LOL.

Poor you ;)

I do very little research. The advantage of creating worlds from scratch LOL.

Sure, sometimes I'll need to look specific stuff up, but it's fairly rare.

Last thing I researched IIRC were different room names in medieval manors.

I needed variety as my character was set to explore one such manor. I found a few cool lists online and it ended up being a really fun story to write (the second installment in my series, "House of Wizardry").

>2 slarken: "I do very little research. The advantage of creating worlds from scratch LOL."

Err...

Of the six worlds/universes I have been working in, five were created "from scratch". Only one is a version of our world. (And it's an alternate history.)

But because I build my own worlds, I need to know how everything works. Climate and ecosystems, Political-Economics and Sociology, crafts and professions... I firmly believe that the more I know, the better job I do of making things up.

...
Here's a cool coincidence. In the last fantasy book I wrote, I had to do something very similar to your research, only I was focussing on middle-eastern medieval buildings, because of the climate. :)

I used this book for medicinal uses of at least one plant. It's very technical, but when there aren't other sources available. . .
Wood, H. C. (Horatio C.)., Wood, H. C. (Horatio Charles). (1908). Therapeutics: its principles and practice. 14th ed. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott. p.94.
There are public domain versions of this available online.
I have also found Native American museums to be the best sources of information on forage-able plants, as they have displays on how things are/were prepared, like acorns.
University of Washington has a Native American museum with online texts that describe the seasons and migratory movements of various tribes in that area based on what edibles were growing. Fascinating.

I'm researching and working on a new book, Gifted Child's Journal. It's about bullies and how to deal with them. The research is very interesting and rewarding. This is a complicated subject, and I hope my story will be helpful to others.

>4 jdaneway:
I like the sound of that museum, but even when I'm doing crazy cross-country hops, I don't usually get quite that far west. (My family lives in Alberta, mostly.) Speaking of which, in Southern Alberta there is an awesome "Interpretive Center" at Head-Smashed-In, which is the site of a Buffalo Jump used from pre-historic times.

But I need Eastern Woodlands, not Plains. :(

I did a google on "Indian Museum" and found a top ten Native American Museums list. The closest one to me looks like it is in Indianapolis, with another one in the opposite direction that might also be possible, but maybe not until after my daughter's wedding this summer. I might want to check for smaller places a little closer, but we have scanned all the museums listed as being in our ordinary driving distance, and the best we have nearby is Fort Ancient... about which archeologists actually know a lot less than they want to admit.

(But it's an awesome hike. You go up and around the the hill, and get to the top, and realize that the mounds and humps of the hilltop terrain around you are actually ancient earthern walls. The state park I go to nearly weekly to take walks has another set of earthenwork walls, where they found evidence of wooden palisades having been on top of them, and having been burned -- but I only know this because I read another big tome on the pre-history of Ohio. There are no interpretive signs or anything on that site -- if you don't know what your are looking for, you probably wouldn't even realize that the contours of the land are man-made.)

There is a short list of medical plants in Keepers of Life but I haven't got around to checking which ones are native to this area yet. Other than that, I am done with that tome. Although, it actually isn't that thick, just slow going -- the children's activities actually sounded like they would make a great program... but I can't imagine anyone being allowed to do them. Sitting alone in the woods with no adult (or anyone else) in sight, doing very large and very messy craft projects... Those sorts of things don't seem very popular anymore. :(

I enjoyed the Native American stories the most, I think, but there weren't that many of them. I will probably look for some more later. :)

>5 GaryBabb:

Is this a work of fiction? Mostly you write Science Fiction, as I recall, although the one of yours I have picked up so far leaned more toward the fantasy.

Kudos on tackling such a tough subject!

>5 GaryBabb: thats a tough subject, hope your writing goes well

I spent a significant chunk of yesterday doing data-entry for the wildlife database. But I'm done with Keepers of Life, and I have started on Midwest Medicinal Plants.

I think my next non-fiction book needs to be on some other topic, though. ::rueful:: Maybe something that would be useful to me for the Fantasy Epic. In Vol. 5 my hero is going to end up in charge of a city that is desperately short on food. If it was just a fortress I could look up famous sieges, but I'm not sure where to look for reading material on starving cities.

Can anyone think of any famous ancient and/or medieval famines I could read up on?

The Kanki famine of the early 13th century, in Japan, was pretty rough: somewhere between 1.5 and 2 million people, a third of the country's population, died. But that one wasn't limited to a single city. I don't know how "ancient" you want to get, but the Old Testament, and historians of the OT period, attest to some pretty dreadful famines, like the seven years' famine predicted by Joseph. (But they were prepared for that one, so it's not the best example.) What's interesting in a famine is not just the dreadful cases of starvation, but the lengths to which people are driven: law-abiding folks become thieves and murderers, parents sell their daughters into prostitution, cannibalism breaks out, etc. I thought of some other famines, but they were in modern times, like Biafra or Ireland.

Thanks for the reference. I will take a look.

Unless the city is under siege or something like that blocking of transportation routes, I don't think there could really be a "single city' famine. Cities are inherently unable to feed themselves anyway. Everyone around the city is also desperately short on food.

But I tend to think of it as being "the city" as having the problem, because its so big. There are other smaller cities dotted about the surrounding countryside in the exact same situation, but they are completely overshadowed.

(Which reminds me, I should probably put together some population figures to get a more precise picture of the scale of what is going on.)

Apparently new member ElizabethRAndersen has recently purchased Wounds and Wound Repair in Medieval Culture. I have book envy. :)

So, Elisabeth, what is the scariest thing to the modern reader that you have found out so far? Was there anything that seemed surprisingly up-to-date?

>9 LShelby: Not sure this applies- but I just finished reading The Dovekeepers which is set in ancient middle east- Roman siege of Masada. Really interesting- they are in the dessert and holed up on a mountain hold- famine, fire, warfare...maybe some inspiration there-- the story is told from 4 different women's perspectives- focus on witchery, religion etc.

>12 LShelby: By far, the scariest and most fascinating/horrifying thing that I have been reading in Wounds and Wound Repair is an article by Timothy May on the Mongol usage of a freshly killed carcass to treat shock wounds. If your mind immediately went to that scene in The Empire Strikes Back where Han Solo puts Luke Skywalker inside of his own tauntaun...you would be exactly correct. I won't go into detail because it's a little disturbing, more so because it actually appears to work fairly well to control shock response and catastrophic bleeding.

As far as medical practices that are up to date, I would say that I'm finding more instances of the opposite: modern medicine is starting to pay attention to the wisdom of medieval herbalists. My son had an accident involving a bicycle that required months of wound care and rehabilitation at Seattle Children's hospital. The two most effective therapies they used for his wounds (which went to the bone) were silver and medicinal honey (he made a full recovery and is running and climbing trees again). There is the fascinating case of the cure for MRSA discovered in Bald's Leechbook, which is more effective than antibiotics, and the medieval use of copper as a preferred metal for drinking vessels because it has antibacterial properties.

Sigh. I wish I had a whole other life to live so I could become a medieval medical historian.

The medieval history graduate specialty I was enrolled in (at an R1 institution) was shuttered because there are no jobs for medievalists. So you should probably live that other life in the 20th century.

Edited to add: Maybe there's a place for a self-defined medievalist within the medical history field--that's pretty far out of my orbit.

1560-1650 British Texts Were the Product of Six Collaborative Ghostwriters

According to the computational-linguistics author-attribution method I invented, all 284 texts I tested from the British Renaissance were ghostwritten by only six professional writers: Benjamin Jonson, Richard Verstegan, Josuah Sylvester, Gabriel Harvey, William Byrd and William Percy. Just one of these re-attributions explains how William Percy was the dominant tragedy ghostwriter behind the “William Shakespeare” pseudonym. I prove these conclusions with overwhelming evidence across my “British Renaissance Re-Attribution and Modernization Series” https://anaphoraliterary.com/attribution. This site includes Wichita Falls Times Record News, Vernon Daily Record, Quanah Tribune-Chief and Armed with a Book blog articles I published on components of this study with handwriting samples that confirm the linguistic findings. The series also includes 12 volumes of the first-ever translations into Modern English of Renaissance plays, poetry and historical non-fiction. I am interested in learning what readers think about my conclusions after reading these freely-available articles. Is there any volume of evidence that would convince you that “Shake-spear” was only a pseudonym (including “his” six forged variedly-spelled signatures) without a real corresponding person? Please post your responses here or email me at director@anaphoraliterary.com.

>13 HelenGress:
Masada would be a good siege to look up. I may end up going there.

(Virtually, of course, there's no time machine tucked away in my basement. ... although I once dreamed I had a corpse tucked in my basement, which totally freaked me until I managed to remember that I don't actually have a basement.) :)

>14 ElizabethRAndersen:
The tauntaun scene always did strike me as being realistic, if icky. I understand how it could treat shock, but I'm a bit baffled by the mechanism by which it controls bleeding. The presence of clotted blood promotes clotting?

Medieval medical historian sounds like a fascinating job.

...Maybe if someone got a large enough following on youtube?

>16 faktorovich:
"According to the computational-linguistics author-attribution method I invented, all 284 texts I tested from the British Renaissance were ghostwritten by only six professional writers"

I find it very difficult to believe that only six writers in the British Renaissance have surviving texts. There were certainly a great many more literate people than that alive at the time, what happened to everything that everyone else wrote?

I've been trying to research travel times.

Which I have done before, but the problem with travel times is that they are so variable. Depends on the mode of transportation, on the terrain, on the weather, on the condition of the traveller...

I eventually decided that the only practical thing to do is come up with some basic "rule of thumb" figures and then adjust as seems sensible.

I decided that my second male lead on a very large, slow-moving and developed river (diking and dredging and so forth which would reduce the number of bends, and sandbars and etc.) and which fortunately should have winds at an acceptable angle for much of the trip could probably with a combination of sails and oars travel upstream faster by boat than he could go by horse...
... but only because he's a really good sailor, and a really terrible horseman, and has dedicated oarsmen. My other male lead does the same trip much faster on horseback a few months later. :)

>20 LShelby: isn't there a thing where a fit runner can out-distance a horse rider over a day, because the horse needs resting (cooling to drink) and the runner can just keep going. Boats defiantly can sail all day. https://www.quora.com/Which-is-faster-a-horse-or-a-human (not sure how accurate!). There's enough 'depends on the' in there to give you wiggle room either way.

>20 LShelby: Writing medieval historical fiction, it's so difficult to figure out travel times! I basically just use a combination of Google maps (walking time from point A to point B) + mode of travel (walking, horse, wagon, etc) + what I know about the roads and territories of that time and place to come up with a rough estimate. For sailing, I use ports.com, which allows you to estimate sea sailing times based on location and wind speed. Might be helpful for you :-)

IRL it frustrates me to have people tell me "it's ten minutes from there" without specifying the mode of transportation. The assumption is personal automobile, I guess (something I don't own and rarely use). If they just said "by car," I wouldn't resent it. But I'm more interested in "by foot" or "by bicycle" or "by light rail."

>21 reading_fox:

The whole trick to the how fast on foot vs. on horse seems to end up revolving on the question of for how long is a single horse/person going that fast?

The pony express averaged 17 miles/hour up to 20 miles/hour over the flatter parts of the route and down to about 2 and half miles/hour for the rougher parts. But to achieve those stats, they were changing horses roughly every 10 miles. Top endurance ride figures have a single horse and rider going 100 miles in less than six hours, but I understand that if you try to get the same horse to do another 100 miles the following day, the results won't be too pretty.
...But my cowboy/rancher ancestors apparently did 140+ mile rides on a single horse in less than two days "no problem" (according to the memories of their children.)

So one of the figures you need to calculate long trips, is how often can they change horses, and what quality will those horses be?

I generally work with a "if we are just travelling and not pushing fast or swapping horses, then roughly 30-35 miles a day on horseback is reasonable." That figure can apparently be duplicated by fit/conditioned people on foot carrying packs that aren't unreasonably heavy. (The most I've ever personally done in one day was 20 miles, but I was in the mountains and I can't really say I was well-conditioned.)

I've been calculating riders in a hurry and able to change horses on occasion as travelling double the distance per day. For large mixed groups of people travelling long distances on foot or for heavy loads, I half the probable distance per day.

And then I use 15miles/hour as my baseline for runs where there will be "posting houses" where the horses can be changed at regular intervals throughout the day.

I think that's probably good enough for fiction. :)

>22 ElizabethRAndersen:
ports.com does look handy, but I'm a fantasy author, so I can't exactly tell them which port I am leaving from or arriving at. ::rueful::

Was there a more generalized tool that I missed?

>23 paradoxosalpha:
That bugs me too.

I do own a car, but I don't use it much. Mostly I walk... to the library, to the pharmacy, to the doctor's office... They're all about 20 minutes away. So is the dentist. But I use a car to get to the dentist.

But as a fantasy/sf author it gets even more unreasonable.

How many "minutes/hours/days" is it from x to y: by elephant, by giant eagle, by were-quetzlcoatylus, by dragon, by gryphon, by ox-powered paddle-wheel boat, by lift-belt, by blip-ship...?

(All actual mode of transportation examples from stuff I've written, but not yet published.)