The Burning Times
A Novel
by Jeanne Kalogridis
List Price: $14.00
Pages: 400
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0684869241
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Jeanne Kalogridis is the author of The Diaries of the Family Dracul, a historical vampire trilogy, and wrote for the bestselling Star Trek series under the pseudonym J. M. Dillard. She lives in California.
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A Conversation with Jeanne Kalogridis
Q: How did you first become interested in the subject of witchcraft, particularly in
fourteenth-century France?
A: As one who has studied the craft, I was extremely interested in the historical period,
as it marked the first time people were officially arrested and burned as witches by the
Inquisition, which in France was just beginning to organize itself.
Q: You say you have studied the craft. Are you a witch?
A: You know, at first I was going to be coy and wriggle out of answering that question
because I was afraid of being attacked. But I've already been attacked, so I may as well
go ahead and say yes, I'm a pagan. Not your standard, run-of-the-mill witch -- I'm heavily
influenced by Buddhism and yoga, but pagan nonetheless. Does this mean I eat babies and
worship the Devil? No, I believe in hugging babies and ignoring the Devil.
Q: Okay, you're a witch. Does that mean you belong to a coven, wear long robes, and
cast spells?
A: I used to, many years ago. (And I'd like to point out that rule #1 in the casting of
spells for my coven was that it could cause no harm.) I'm solitary now, and have dispensed
with all formalities; my beliefs center around the power of compassion to heal and
transform. So if you come at me with a knife, about the worst that'll happen is I'll run
away wishing you well.
Q: Is your book an attack on Christianity?
A: Not in the least. It's an attack on intolerance -- and there are many pagans, sadly,
who are intolerant of sincere Christians. Either we must kill everyone who disagrees with
us (and those of us who believe in compassion, and that includes most of the religions I'm
aware of, are horrified at such an idea), or we must learn to accept, tolerate, and,
finally, love those who differ from us if we are to co-exist in this world.
Q: Pre-Christian beliefs have survived since the founding of the Catholic Church,
and many of these customs and rituals have even been absorbed into the doctrine of the
Church over the years. Why was it during this specific period of the Middle Ages that the
Church decided to react and set the Inquisition in motion?
A: The Church didn't decide; the Black Plague did. Mass hysteria seized the survivors;
desperate to find someone to blame, some way to appease God, they began to accuse their
neighbors of all manner of heinous behavior. (By the way, I should point out here that the
Inquisition was not the great, international machine that we have been led to believe it
was. It was more localized. Different countries had "spurts" of inquisitional
activity at different times, and often followed different procedures.)
Q: When you wrote The Burning Times you had never been to France, yet your
description of the landscape, the villages, and cities come alive on the page. How did you
work this bit of narrative magic?
A: The Internet. Thanks to the French government's virtual tourist sites, I was able to
visit the cities and villages where my characters lived and moved. I had no idea that the
city where I had set most of my action, Carcassonne, had been completely rebuilt, and when
(some five years after beginning the novel) I virtually "walked" down its
cyber-streets and gazed up at its turrets and stone walls, I really did have tears in my
eyes. I went back and rewrote the beginning of the book, giving it much more depth of
detail.
Q: Do you scrupulously adhere to historical fact in your novels, or do you take
liberties if the story can benefit from the change?
A: My characters are entirely fictional (except for Pope Innocent, who is as meticulously
presented as possible; I was fortunate enough to find a portrait of him on the Internet,
so I could give a good description). But beyond that, I'm merciless. Sybille and Luc were
forced to mold to history, not the reverse. (I kept making Sybille older and older in
order to make the dates work correctly.) I especially want to make it clear that the evil,
wicked, downright nasty Cardinal Chretien is fictional, based on no one and certainly is
not intended to represent any Catholic Cardinal.
Q: Parts of The Burning Times are very grounded in the hardscrabble, day-to-day life
of medieval France, and others are steeped in visionary magic. As a writer, is it hard to
achieve a satisfactory balance between realism and fantasy?
A: Not really. I find it no harder to write a scene about a vision than to write a scene
about scrubbing a latrine. What is very, very difficult for me to balance is the fantasy
of writing and the realism of my daily life. It's enormously hard to be deep in
concentration while writing a scene, then force yourself to stop, get up, do the laundry,
wash the dishes, and vacuum -- then go back to writing that scene. It can take me half an
hour to get back into that "writer's concentration zone."
Q: The gruesome details of torture and death by burning, as well as the symptoms of
the plague, leprosy, and other bygone afflictions are painstakingly recreated in the
novel. How did you learn so much about the ways of the past?
A: From several sources, but most notably from historical documents on the Internet and
Barbara Tuchman's wonderful work on fourteenth-century France A Distant Mirror. (Also, I
saw some Internet images of contemporary charity work with African lepers; their horrific
suffering truly cannot be conveyed by words.)
Q: Given all the research involved and the need to get things right, it must be much
harder to write a historical novel than a contemporary one. What attracts you to this
genre?
A: I'm a voyeur. I love peering into the lives people lived in the past. History
fascinates me. I feel that I've somehow lost something very important -- a connection to
those who've gone before me -- by forgetting a certain period of the past. I want to
reclaim it for myself, and this is how I do it.
Q: Do you count any other writers of historical fiction and fantasy among your
influences?
A: Yes: Mary Renault, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Umberto Eco, and a dozen others I can't think
of right now.
Q: Do you think there are parallels between the story you tell in The Burning Times
and events or attitudes in our contemporary culture?
A: Of course. Think of the deaths that are occurring each day, right now, because of
religious intolerance; think of murders that have occurred over the past several years
because of the same; think of the unnecessary fear and mistrust different groups feel
towards each other simply because they don't know and don't understand each other.
Q: Will your next novel also be a work of historical fiction?
A: Absolutely. But it's in its early stages, so I refuse to talk about it. Call me superstitious.
Excerpted from The Burning Times © Copyright 2012 by Jeanne Kalogridis. Reprinted with permission by Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved.
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