I am in the research phase for the new book, which is set in 11th-12th century Italy, a place and time of which I know very little. So the research is both wide and deep. And my brain being my brain, I have a tendency to follow small factoids down dark alleys and wake up in the morning with a headache and empty pockets. My muse is meanwhile sitting at the bar waiting for me, downing double shots of fortified wine and nibbling on sugared almonds. A few weeks ago I was stressing about forms of address among the medieval Italian working class: how would one artisan or tradesman address another not well known to him/her? They wouldn’t call one another signore or signorina, since those are remnants of a time when it was a term for someone higher up the social food chain. Likewise, I can’t use “madonna” because it means “my lady.” And what would children call adults they weren’t related to? Ser or Messer I could probably get away with, but those are both masculine terms and…

You see what my brain is like? This is why the Muse is in the bar, waiting for me. She’s very sweet when I get back from these academic outings, she says she understands I’m doing it for us, but…I feel bad about it nonetheless. And she’s packing on a few pounds, what with all those sugared almonds, too.

So this week I’m obsessing about water supply for the lower classes. Yes, the Romans left a legacy of aquaducts and baths and stuff like that all over Rome. On the other hand, much of that legacy was reserved to the use of the upper classes or folks with power. Monks may have been sworn to poverty, but monasteries often had their own water supply. The center of municipalities often had fountains, but if you lived in the suburbs, so to speak, did you shlep downhill to the city and then shlep back uphill with a pitcher of water? I find it more likely that there were other water supplies closer to home. And out in the countryside, of course, you likely had spring water. So I’m still taking notes and reading and bothering the librarians–all for a bit of data which is may never be explicitly there on the page, but will be in the back of my head as I write.

And then there are those factoids that keep wandering down those dark alleys. I spent two hours yesterday reading up on the history of the latrine, the crapper, the night bucket, etc. I did a little research of this sort for Petty Treason, in which something thrown into the outhouse provides a clue. But 11th century sanitation is harder to pin down. If you lived in a castle, of course, your sanitary accomodations looked like something in the photo above. That’s luxe, people (particularly because it’s built out over the moat, so the “night soil” drops straight down, neatly avoiding the retrieval issue and making the moat an even more effective barrier to attackers–I mean, eeew). Predictably, of course, there’s a lot less information about the sanitary accomodations of the lower classes. Still, I’m poking around. And in the process discovered that Sir Thomas Crapper who I had long thought as real as Betty Crocker and Aunt Jemima, did indeed exist. Not only that, he advertised.

Well, that’s enough about toilets. I’m going back to the cisterns and fountains again, but I can’t stay too long. Otherwise I’m going to have to carry a drunken Muse home over my shoulder, and she’s been eating a lot of those almonds.