SHADOW OF NIGHT real-time reading, 29 December 1590 (chapter 16): When Matthew turned us toward the city, I looked up. There was St. Pauls. Im not likely to get lost with that in the neighborhood, I murmured. As we made our slow progress toward the cathedral, my senses grew accustomed to the chaos and it was possible to pick out individual sounds, smells, and sights. Bread baking. Coal fires. Wood smoke. Fermentation. Freshly washed garbage, courtesy of yesterdays rains. Wet wool. Of all the things Ive enjoyed about writing the All Souls Trilogy, what Ive enjoyed most was a chance to bring late sixteenth-century London--the London I spent more than 15 years researching as a scholar--to life for my readers. I know a lot about the city during the reign of Elizabeth. Not everything, but a lot. Some of it made its way into my history books and articles, but not all of it. My challenge in SHADOW OF NIGHT was to paint a portrait of the city that was as round and real and three-dimensional as possible. It was all the more important to me because the Elizabethan city is barely perceptible in modern London. Much of what Diana and Matthew would have known was destroyed by fire in 1666 or by bombs in World War II. I did what I could to reconstruct it with words, and hoped your imaginations would fill in the rest. Then, in 2013, almost a full year after SHADOW was published in the US, a group of six students from De Montfort University entered a contest to bring a map to three-dimensional life. They chose a pre-Fire map of London--in other words, a map of Diana and Matthews London. Here are the results. The first time I saw this video, it brought tears to my eyes. It was so faithful to the London I knew--the pride people took in their houses, the way they shined the windows and repaired the facades, the street cafes where people ate in the open air, the market stalls, the mix of residential and business in every street, the leafy churchyards that belonged to the more than 120 churches in one square mile, the warehouses on the quays by the river. Enjoy your time in Elizabethan London! youtu.be/SPY-hr-8-M0
Posted on: Mon, 29 Dec 2014 17:20:03 +0000
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