I'm afraid this entry is quite a bit later than the last one because I recently lost a good friend and cowriter, Judith Doloughan to cancer. We wrote a book called Fraterfamilias that came out with publisher Virtual Tales as a serial last year and an ebook in May. It will come out in print toward the end of the year.

I'm going to talk this time about the book a little bit and then launch into a little rant about some of the issues we encountered writing it--specifically, historical issues--and then a bigger rant about the perils of historical research--the real ones.

Fraterfamilias is a mystery SF thriller set in the spring of 2001 in New York City. But it also has a strongly historical (and prehistorical) backstory, including medieval events (yes, of course it has Templars in it).

Why the spring of 2001 and not the fall? Well, we originally started the book during that period. When 9/11 came around, it obviously changed history and culture to a large extent. We didn't want to deal with that. This approach worked fine, as it turned out. We wanted to place the characters (who were all outsiders of some type under some kind of suspicion) in the older complacent America where most Americans did not feel like targets. And it led well into the historical fin de siecle aspect of the backstory.

I'm sure that somebody from NYC will note some inconsistencies, despite the research that we did and the fact that we'd both been through JFK a few times both before and after 9/11. Much of the information that we were looking for at JFK, for example, involved situations that no longer exist due to heightened security. We felt quite a bit more sympathy for those trying to write accurate medieval fiction after researching the JFK background. It's hard enough trying to figure out where the lockers used to be in Terminal 1 (before they were apparently closed down) and the procedures surrounding them. Try taking a best guess on what Alfred the Great would have eaten for dinner over Christmas and what utensils he would have used.

Of course, one may argue, it's much safer to research Alfred the Great's dinner than the current status of locker space at JFK. People are far less likely to wonder why you want to know that (so much for freedom of information). But I would disagree. The medieval and the modern are not so neatly separated, especially in Europe.

I had a very uneasy moment in Lleida in Catalonia, Spain a few years ago. Medieval sites in Spain show idiosyncratic survival patterns that have everything to do with their history. In Barcelona, it's all about how useful old buildings were to new owners and what those owners wanted to put in place of the old buildings. The terrible siege of the city by Castilian troops on September 11, 1714 (now commemorated as "Diada") that ended Catalonian independence, killed some four thousand Barcelonans and resulted in death by starvation of thousands more over the ensuing year, probably didn't do the medieval part of the city any wonders, either. Thus, only a small Templar chapel survives of the huge Templar quarter, but large portions of the massive Roman-built city walls remain standing. I wrote an article about the history of the site for Templar Magazine a couple of years back.

In Tarragona, the old Roman capital on the eastern coast south of Barcelona, some "medieval" buildings are actually Roman structures maintained more or less in continuous use for two thousand years. This includes the Templar-turned-Hospitaller house there, in small courtyard not far from the Forum (which has an nice little farmer's market in spring and summer). One third of the city is also dominated by the extensive ruins of Tarragona's circus/arena, the largest such structure in the Roman world.

In Zaragoza in Aragon, Renaissance-era building projects razed the medieval city but carefully preserved Roman ruins. Delicate Mudejar towers stand next to plentiful ruins of the Roman city theatre, forum, public baths and river docks.

In Catalonian Tortosa, most of the old medieval city down by the river, including the entire Templar quarter which survived outside the medieval city walls into the 20th century, was burned right to the ground during a bloody, vicious siege by Franco's troops during the Spanish Civil War. A gaunt metal statue in the middle of the river commemorates this disastrous event.

Novillas, a small but thriving agricultural town near the border between Aragon and Navarre that has been settled for nearly 4000 years, has only two structures older than the 1960s--a 19th century church and the old Templar commandery house in the northwestern corner of town. The latter, which appears to be a 15th-century Mudejar yellow-brick structure built around the original house, remains well maintained by the government as an historical site and in use by the local agricultural cooperative. I have a highly entertaining (and unique) photo of the old medieval building--with an enormous green John Deere tractor parked in the square, open doorway. The 15th century meets the 21st.

The only extant call (the Catalan term for a medieval Jewish quarter) survives embedded in the Old City on a hillside in Girona in northeastern Catalonia for reasons that I have yet to determine.

At the top of the hill in Barbera north of Tarragona, the Templar preceptory, which was built along a design similar to Lleida/Gardeny's, survives intact, and the layout of the vineyards and olive groves around the town still echoes their medieval predecessors. In nearby L'Espluga di Francoli, some cave shelters and their remnants go back 800,000 years, to when the first humans came over from Africa.

But let's get back to my scary research story in Gardeny.

Lleida, nestled in a valley between two ridges by the Segria River in southeastern Catalonia, first appears in history as a fort in Caesar's Civil War. Well-preserved medieval structures are scattered generously throughout the city, including the royal castle (La Suda) on the larger hill and the Templar preceptory on the smaller ridge (Gardeny) to the west.

And here's where it got ugly for little old researcher me--because, you see, the structure listed behind and to the north of the preceptory on the ridge as "Turo de Gardeny" on the tourist map is, in fact, a very modern military barracks. Still commissioned. Manned by armed soldiers and everything.

Now, imagine you're trying to take pictures post-9/11 of these medieval buildings and fortifications without taking any pictures of the big, honking barracks surrounded by chain-link fence behind them, without even appearing to take any pictures of the big, honking barracks surrounded by chain-link fence behind them. And further imagine that these medieval buildings are wide open to the public because they are an immensely popular evening stroll for dog walkers--who keep glancing at you, obviously wondering what the heck you're doing. And imagine that you can speak all of 50 words in Catalan--badly--and about as much again in Castilian. And that some 25 of those words are really-useful-in-a-police-interrogation verbiage like "col*leccio diplomatica des musulmanes".

My visit occurred not long after those poor plane-spotters got arrested in Greece. Was I paranoid? Is the Pope still Catholic?

Now, some of you who have been on research trips--especially on a shoestring budget--are probably nodding your heads and reminiscing about a few travel horror stories of your own. Medieval research is always a weird experience. Try, for example, to locate a site based on a photo in an academic book. The convention, invariably, is to photograph and present the site as if it were still medieval.

Well, newsflash, sportsfans: It's NOT. It's a medieval building, showing hundreds of years of wear, in a modern setting. That's a totally different thing. Such a photo may look pretty and conform to a pleasing antiquarian convention. But it doesn't really give the reader a good idea of what the structure looked like 800 years ago. All it does is make it ten times harder for anybody trying to duplicate and expand beyond your research, because taking photos at kinked angles to leave out every modern feature also makes it awfully hard to find the place. Those modern features are called "landmarks", my friend, and you need 'em to find your blessed medieval site, especially in 80-degree heat while hauling around a heavy backpack. It's amazing that we can obsess so much about the appropriate way to do footnotes, yet we're so sloppy about making photos similarly useful to anyone following behind us.

So, folks, the next time you take photos for your next book, for the love of God and the poor sod who tries to use your book to find the same sites, include the modern landmarks. Enough with the faux-medieval shots, already!

Paula R. Stiles