Novelist Edmond Thornfield explains why literary travel is essential to writing historical fiction, from Knossos and Mycenae to Florence and Cortona. There is a question I am sometimes asked, usually by readers who have noticed something in the novels that feels too precise to be invented. How did you know what the road from Knossos […]
Literary Travel as Research: Why I Must Go There Read More »
If you have ever read a novel set in the ancient world and found yourself wondering how much of it is true—how the author knew what a Mycenaean palace smelled like, or how a Minoan priestess dressed, or what Linear B actually says—then you have already crossed the threshold from reader into something more. You
Five Works of Classical Scholarship Every Historical Fiction Reader Should Know Read More »
In the summer of 1952, a young English architect and philologist named Michael Ventris made one of the most extraordinary announcements in the history of scholarship. He had deciphered the writing on the clay tablets recovered from the ruins of Knossos, Mycenae, Pylos, and Tiryns—tablets inscribed with a script that had resisted decipherment for half
Speaking Bronze Age: Linear B and the Language of Mycenaean Greece Read More »
