Kathryn McConaughy's Feast of Adventures

I've researched heraldry off and on for quite a few years as background for my Faerie Queen series. Of course, depending on when you are setting your King Arthur stories, the modern heraldry system might not yet have existed... but Edmund Spenser certainly did envision his knights and recreants as having distinctive arms. Of course, Spenser's descriptions of his knights' arms are tightly connected with what they symbolize in his allegory. For example, Sir Artegall, the hero of Spenser's story about justice, has a shield bearing a pair of scales. In order to give background characters heraldic arms, I like to figure out options that would be appropriate for them, even if the actual description of the arms doesn't make it into the book. (I can't imagine that many people would want to read about a shield "chevronny embowed of four and per pale Azure and Argent.") Some fun resources to look at for this include Scotland's Lyon King of Arms website, whic...

The stories of King Arthur were written and retold over many centuries, rather than being set in any specific historical time. So, when you read them, you may encounter a real mix of historical arms and armors, as well as place names and cultural details. Still, research is one of my favorite things, so of course I have to at least try to place my stories in history. One of the big problems I struggle with is geography. What places and roads existed at any given time? Of the medieval maps of England that I've found, this one in Latin by monk Matthew Paris (circa 1250 AD) is definitely the most useful. You can find an interactive and translated version of it here:  Matthew Paris Annotated Map - Historia Cartarum While it's difficult to tell how different places are geographically related to each other on this map, it gives a lot of insight into what Paris thought was important. So we get some major geographic features, lots of bishoprics, towns, and occasional notes that just m...

As part of my day job, I once got to teach a course on the Archaeology of Warfare in the ancient Middle East. I really enjoyed it, since we got to talk about nerdy things that I don't usually have an excuse to discuss, and to even re-enact a battle! One article that we read for class was Gabriel and Metz's chapter on "Weapons and Lethality" in From Sumer to Rome . They describe the development of different types of armor in the ancient world, then do the math to show you which weapons of the time could actually get through that armor. Short version? If your enemy is wearing bronze armor and you've got a penetrating axe, you'll probably cut through. With any other weapon, you're out of luck (although you can still cause impact damage, of course; or simply aim for an unarmored area of the body or an unarmored person--most corvee soldiers can't afford armor on their own and aren't supplied with much by their kings). Medieval plate armor, as worn by th...

One of my favorite things about working on the Faerie Queen series is that I can explore arms and armor and call it work! For example, I found images of a really cool exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, focused on shields. You can see it here: Defensive Display Images at the Met . We've got a lot of round metal shields here, but we've also got some funny ones like the German tournament targe or the very narrow Italian targones.  I especially like the German shield, because it's largely made of wood (which a LOT of shields originally would have been, it's just that they haven't survived until today to be put in museums) and has a notch on one side to stick your lance through! The art on the front shows a lady holding a golden shield showing a rampant goat, another rampant goat leaping around above her, and a banner behind her and to the left that has the owner's motto on it: "Take me as I am..."  According to the Met listing, over the yea...