{International Giveaway!} Guest Post: Tudor Superstition by Kate Emerson

AT THE KING'S PLEASURE
AVAILABLE JANUARY 3, 2012
Read  Reviews of At The King's Pleasure at Burton Book Review or historical-fiction.com

International Giveaway details at the end of this post.


Please welcome the author of the Secrets of the Tudor Courts Series, Kate Emerson, with her following article:

Tudor Superstitions

by

Kate Emerson

What would make an otherwise rational person risk his life on the basis of a prophecy? People in Tudor times believed in many supernatural things—witches, ghosts, fairies, and the ability of some people to predict the future. Those who claimed to have the gift of prophecy always had followers, although they tended to be so outspoken that they quickly brought disaster down on their own heads. If their predictions were treasonous, for example predicting the death of the king, then they were likely to end up in prison, if not on the scaffold. Casting horoscopes could also be dangerous for the astrologer, even though horoscopes were believed to be useful in the practice of medicine. All the Tudor monarchs employed astrologers at one time or another. If their predictions came true, they were rewarded. If not, not so much. In one famous instance in 1503, a court astrologer to Henry VII predicted that Henry’s queen, Elizabeth of York, would have a long life and that the child she carried would be a healthy boy. Instead, Elizabeth died shortly after giving birth to a girl who also died within days of her birth.

In AT THE KING’S PLEASURE, the 3rd Duke of Buckingham truly believes in the predictions of a prophet. His sister, Lady Anne Stafford, is more skeptical, but she, too, accepts astrology as a legitimate science. The mind set of sixteenth-century people was simply not the same as ours today. Lacking a scientific explanation, Tudor men and women accepted that an unexpected and unexplained death could have been brought about by enchantment, that a comet was a bad omen, and that someone who had been bewitched could go to a local cunning woman to buy a charm that would protect him from the evil spell.

Since people in Tudor times had little idea what caused illness, they were also clueless when it came to ways to prevent disease from spreading. That did not stop them from trying. They came up with all kinds of “preventives” and “cures.” “The stuff” was a traditional Fenland cure for the ague—opium poppy juice coagulated into pellets and swallowed. Hanging three spiders around your neck was also believed to alleviate the ague. What was ague? Possibly it was a form of malaria. It consisted of intermittent fevers and was sometimes confused with typhoid and with pneumonia. The cure that eventually worked was Peruvian bark, first brought to Spain from the New World in 1639.

I have collected far more material on folk remedies than I will ever be able to use in my novels. Many contain ingredients that even the experts cannot identify with any certainty. Some of my favorites are unicorn’s horn, dried mummy, and dragon water. There are treatments for minor ailments as well as deadly diseases. A sixteenth-century Englishman wouldn’t hesitate to apply fried horse dung to a bruise. Or, for a bruised knee, he’d apply green poultice of hot boiled cabbage or leek overlaid with sheep’s wool. Yum! Makes you kind of glad you live in the twenty-first century, doesn’t it?

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Kate Emerson is a cat lover, the author of the Secrets of the Tudor Court Series, and also writes mysteries as Kathy Lynn Emerson. Visit her website for more information, as well as a fascinating Who's Who in Tudor Women!

Thanks so much to the author for offering a giveaway of her newest release, At The King's Pleasure to one lucky follower of HF-Connection anywhere in the world!! Better yet, she is going to autograph it for you!

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Giveaway ends on January 14, 2012.