On the difference between historical fiction with mythological elements and historical fantasy—and why the distinction matters I. A Question of Ontology This is the governing principle of my fiction, and it took me some years to articulate it: I do not write the ancient or Renaissance world as we understand it. I write it as […]
I Did Not Invent the Gods Read More »
There is a difference between visiting a place and being taught by it. Tourism gives you impressions. Fieldwork—the kind that involves returning in different seasons, taking measurements, sitting alone in churches until the silence becomes uncomfortable—gives you something harder to name and more difficult to acquire: an understanding of how a place works upon a
Five Things Cortona Taught Me About Writing Sense of Place Read More »
A Tale of Paris and Paris: Echoes of Troy, in the Chronicles of Cortona by Edmond Thornfield, follows Lorenzo di Ranieri, a militia sergeant in Cortona, when inquisitors from Perugia arrive to pursue charges of heresy. Lorenzo forms a backstairs circle with Matteo at the Ranieri stable and relies on Costanza Briani to care for
Do you miss stories that feel alive, where the world breathes, where every word has been chosen by a human hand that hesitated, reconsidered, and chose again? Have you grown weary of fiction that tells instead of shows, of worlds that feel thin and formulaic, assembled rather than imagined? In an era when AI-generated content
Support Human Authors: Four Tales by Edmond Thornfield, Available Now Read More »
I first became aware of Cortona as a teenager, poring over the history of the Etruscans, those singular people who were neighbors of the ancient Romans. Their art held me fast from the start. I remember dreaming of their magnificent bronze casting of the Chimera and of the feasting scenes painted on the walls of
Cortona: The City That Calls to Me Read More »
By law, by Church doctrine, and by the unspoken consent of a society, power was a man’s possession in the Florentine Republic of the Quattrocento. A woman passed as property from her father to her husband. Her purpose, as the age defined it, was procreation and domestic service. Non-conformity was frowned upon, and in extreme
Women’s Power in A Tale of Paris & Paris: Echoes of Troy Read More »
There is a Latin pun at the heart of medieval Dominican identity so perfect it could only have been God’s own joke—or the devil’s. Domini canes: the Hounds of the Lord. It sounds almost exactly like Dominicanus, the Latin name for a member of the Order of Preachers founded by Saint Dominic in the early
The Hound of the Lord Read More »
William Morris believed the book as physical object was itself a work of art, that typography, layout, and illustration were not secondary to the text but coequal with it. I agree with him. Unconditionally. This is not a fashionable position. The publishing industry has spent decades treating book design as a downstream function. It is
On Being Your Own Designer, Typesetter, and Publisher Read More »
There are scenes in A Tale of Paris & Paris: Echoes of Troy that unsettle readers who arrive with their assumptions intact. The inquisitors who descend upon Cortona in 1450 are not the black-and-white Dominicans of legend, the Domini canes, the Hounds of God, the scholastic terrors immortalized in every gothic retelling of the medieval
The Inquisition Was Not Exclusively Dominican: Franciscans Also Investigated Read More »
In my visits to Cortona, I always enter the citadel at the beginning of Via Nazionale, still known by the Cortonesi as Via di Ruga Piana, as it has been for centuries, the only leveled street in the whole city. The first time I did, the moment I laid my hands upon the remaining stones
Building the World of A Tale of Paris & Paris: Echoes of Troy | Cortona, 1450 AD Read More »
