Where do your ideas come from?

[elfs]

A common question from so readers: Where do your ideas come from? Today, those ideas came from Fifteenth Century Nuns!

By poring over contemporary letters, diaries, and legal documents, historians have established that Venetian nunneries were the most liberated in Europe. In the 1400s, the skyrocketing cost of dowries meant that many of the city's noblest families were obliged to place their teenage daughters, regardless of their wishes, in convents. Few of these developed a spiritual calling. It was openly accepted that the top convents were a "safety valve" for Venice's surplus of well-born single women, who could go on to enjoy a level of sexual freedom unique for the time.

The nunneries were run like luxury boutique hotels. Novices were given duplicate keys so they could come and go as they pleased from their palatial apartments, which were filled with artwork and overlooked the Grand Canal. Wearing the most fashionable, low-cut dresses, they would entertain male visitors with wine-fuelled banquets, then invite their beaux to spend the night in their rooms. They took romantic gondola rides with admirers to private picnics on the islands of the Venice Lagoon, and went on poetic moonlit walks in the secluded gardens. The most passionate eloped - presumably with men who were not obsessed with dowries. The mature-age abbesses rode the city in luxury carriages and oversaw their girls' activities with a maternal eye.

Hmm, something to work into Janae, if I ever get around to it.

Comments

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

I think there's a mention of this buried in Dorothy Dunnett's Niccolo series: her books are filled with odd little quirks, such as a foodstuff that is (roughly) worth its weight in gold.

And you do sometimes wonder about slash fanfic set within the universe. Lymond is rather ambiguous at times, and not just because of the way the fashion of the time interacts with our present-day assumptions. (Clothing-signals, of all sorts, are not something I recall a lot of from your stories. There are some historical roots for the idea that a particular colour means that you're a whore trolling for business, but in sci-fi the usual reaction is a shocked "No!")

[lovingboth]

Saffron, probably. (The valuable one, not the whoring colour!)