Authentic Pilgrims by Joy Margetts
This week my books arrive from the printers. I am waiting in eager anticipation to
open that box, redolent with the scent of newly printed paper. Longing to
handle the weight of the book, to hear the pleasing creak of the spine as I flip
through the crisp white pages. And to see the cover in all of its resplendent glory.
I have had an image of the cover in a computer file for
months, and it is stunning. Everyone who has seen it has remarked so. I am
really very pleased with the design, and am eagerly anticipating what it will look
like ‘in the flesh’. Will the colours be as vivid as I hope, will it stand out
in a crowd, will it draw the eyes of potential readers, look good on the shelf
of a bookstore?
In the Trinity Chapel of Canterbury Cathedral there are a series of spectacular stained glass windows, known as the Miracle Windows – thus named for the depictions of miracles attributed to St Thomas a Becket – martyred on the altar steps of that very cathedral. Among these are a few panels that depict pilgrims – those who were among the first to travel to Canterbury – long before Chaucer wrote his tales. And one of those images depicts a group of travellers, unusually several of them on horseback. This fitted perfectly with my tale of pilgrims traversing a well worn pilgrim route on horseback.
The Miracle Windows, Canterbury Cathedral |
We had found a beautifully colourful authentic looking illustration of early medieval pilgrims for my book cover, but I didn’t realise when we did, just how authentic this panel of coloured glass was.
In the late Victorian era, Samuel
Caldwell, a distinguished glazier had worked on the Miracle Windows, replacing
many broken panels and recreating missing stained glass images. Because of the
brightness of the pilgrim image, and the crisp clear colours, modern experts
had assumed that this panel was indeed one of Caldwell’s recreations. But a
modern glass expert, Rachel Koopmans, by chance, found images of the panel
dating from before Caldwell’s restorations. She and her team were given permission
to remove the two and a half foot square panel for further investigation. A
closer examination of the panel determined that the majority of the glass was
medieval in origin, and the painting techniques likewise. Not only was it
medieval, but it was early medieval, dating to around 1180 when the construction
of the Trinity Chapel was completed. This was barely twenty years after Thomas a
Becket’s death.
Even more exciting for me, 1180 was barely twenty-five
years before my novel, ‘The Pilgrim’ is set. I could not have a chosen a more authentic source for my cover image than this. And I did so without knowing it's provenance.
More info about the stained glass panel can be found here:
https://www.medievalists.net/2018/09/discovery-earliest-known-image-pilgrims-canterbury/
Update: happy to say the books have arrived and are just as lovely as I hoped!
Comments
Good luck with the book
Looking for ward to this book, Joy!