Persona/period research...

[Randy Shipp]

On Mon, 8 Jul 1996, Pug wrote:

> > You also have a different tool at your disposal, although it's only useful
> > as a guide to other things, and terribly solid all by itself.  The Brother
> > Cadfael series is set in Shropshire (a whole county to the north of where
> > you are looking) c1100.  It may be possible to backtrack the sources that
> > Ellis Peters/Edith Pargenter used to create her fictional world.
> 
> This sounds great! I will see if I can find more information on this.
> Getting that close to the time period and region could be a miracle.

Yeah, and a lot of fun at the same time.  Anyone who likes a good murder 
mystery should read these.  My favorite so far has been, I think, The 
Rose Rent.  At any rate, there's lots of nice local color.

There's a coffeetable book which contains the first three Brother Cadfael 
stories that might be worth tracking down.  The center section has a nice 
pictorial of Shrewsbury and the surrounding Shropshire countryside, 
including some historical context about Stephen and Maude and some of the 
buildings and so on.  It might be useful.

In the same vein, though I've never perused it myself, there's a Brother 
Cadfael companion book.  While it strikes me more as a concordance to the 
stories and a source of trivia for really diehard Cadfael fans, there's a 
possibility that it might have some more in-depth historical context for 
the stories. 

Hope this helps.

Randy...
aka Antoine d'Aubernoun
rshipp at flash.net