Mertensia mystery solved

[hedda62]

I think I posted on LJ about the Mertensia nomenclature problem a while back - I finally figured it all out today. You can also read there about my adventures in vermicomposting, if you are so inclined.

Someday (and it is something I should take notes for as I go along) I need to write an essay about how historians fail fiction writers, without meaning to of course, but oh dear God it should not be so difficult to find out when things happened. Though the above example is more about people who blindly copy from Wikipedia failing fiction writers who are eccentric enough to name people after plants.

Speaking of historical fiction, I'm launched on reading another mystery series, which I'm quite impressed by: C.J. Sansom's Matthew Shardlake novels, which I found out about by looking Thomas Cromwell up on Wikipedia (which is good for lots of things, really) after reading Wolf Hall. They are set slightly later (starting with Jane Seymour's death) but concern a lot of the same people and events (the first one is called Dissolution; you get the drift).

Early voting this evening! I would really have time on election day (next Tuesday) but I will be gardening all morning and getting on a plane in the early evening, and I don't want to count on fitting it in. And my 18-year-old will not be here then so has to vote now (his first time!), so I'll do it now too. We have been moved to a new congressional district, which provides some minor drama.

Comments

[dhae_knight_1]

LOL, well, with a historian friend, I can say with absolute certainty that deciding when something happened is *not* always straightforward. The historical sources might disagree (then, who do you believe in?) and many cultures have practised calendars-by-way-of-ruler, so that you need to figure out when a given ruler started his reign; but of course, that's recorded in the number of years reigned by the previous ruler.

And that's without even touching on the mess that was the change between the Julian and the Gregorian (I think that's what they're called in English, too?) calendar systems, not to mention the many and varied crackpot dictators who want to make their own calendrical system. :-)

[hedda62]

There is indeed all that. I'm more frequently stymied by the tendency of historians to obfuscate the chronology of minor events by deciding to write in grand thematic sweeps rather than put in the damn date, for happenings for which it is actually available. But I admit what matters to fiction writers is not often the same thing that matters to those concerned with the long-range impacts of history.

[dhae_knight_1]

I consider *that* a common problem of academia. One of the reasons I suck at being an academic. I have very little patience with using 15 fancy words to describe something that can be explained in 5 plain ones. :-D