When you have a weird question (e.g. “If someone gained encyclopaedic knowledge of an advanced civilization, how could they improve technology in a medieval fantasy world?”), how do you research it? .–Alpakka
Researching for fiction depends on what the writer needs to know. That sounds really obvious, but you don’t always know what it is you don’t know and need to find out. It depends on what kind of story you’re writing. Lewis Carroll didn’t need to research actual medieval knights to write Through the Looking Glass, but he did need to know how chess pieces move. Someone writing an alternate Earth where dinosaurs survived and developed a technological society would need to know about the biology of dinosaurs, geography, and geological eras (surviving the ice age would have had a big impact on the technology and civilization dinosaurs developed, I would think…) but researching human history might not help them much.
And if you are making up a medieval-world-with-magic that you want to look realistic, you need to know where it’s starting from. New technology depends on three things: 1) what resources are available (including labor—pre-industrial societies frequently did not have a lot of people available to work on things that didn’t produce food-clothing-and-shelter), 2) what infrastructure and technology already exists (you can’t invent a microscope lens if glass-making still produces glass that’s cloudy and full of bubbles), and 3) what the perceived need for it is (history is full of inventions/discoveries that didn’t get used for decades because the average person didn’t see why they should bother with them, or judged them “too expensive” to be worth it).
A fantasy writer can fudge a lot with magic, but you still have to know what resources can be had, what the society already knows how to do, and what things people want (or could be persuaded to want) right now because they’re in the middle of either a golden age or a disaster (war, plague, famine, drought).
“Medieval fantasy world” covers a lot of potential ground when it comes to their technological level. If you want it to be as realistic as reasonably possible, you can’t just throw together technologies and social structures from different centuries and geographical areas. You need to either 1) pick an arbitrary century and location, and do a bunch of research about what life was like and what they knew how to do, or 2) start with reference material on the timing and spread of inventions and their impact on medieval society, and then pick a place and time where your main character can have the greatest impact.
Either way, you nearly always want to begin with broad, general background reading, and narrow it down once you have a better idea of what you really need to know. There are lots of books (and websites) with names that start “Timelines of…” (History, Science, World History, Everything) that can give you a general idea of what was invented where and when. Keep in mind that new developments did not spread quickly or evenly, especially if you are looking at periods where transportation was uncertain and/or dangerous, and even more especially in areas where there was a lot of conflict and therefore kings/emperors/chieftains were reluctant to share anything that gave them a military advantage.
Frances and Joseph Gies’ Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel is a recommended overview that follows the development of European technology in the Middle Ages (and where some of it was actually invented and imported from). (Joseph and Francis Geis have a bunch of other highly useful books for anyone wanting to write a more authentic medieval-European setting: Life in a Medieval City, Life in a Medieval Castle, etc.) The A History of Private Life series is enormous, dense, and expensive, but may be worth tracking down at a library if you decide to do a deep dive. Dorothy Hartley’s Lost Country Life is another common resource for what it says on the tin.
There are also loads of possibly-interesting books that focus on very specific areas, like the history of medicine, or spinning, or random “inventions that changed history,” though you will probably need to limit your searches to “in the Middle Ages.” Web pages for reenactors often have useful bibliographies. There are books and web sites on recreating historical dress for theatrical productions that go into great detail on how they were constructed.
You may also want to look at the choices different authors made in their alternate-history and time-travel novels (H. Beam Piper’s Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen and L. Sprague de Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall come to mind—one author chooses gunpowder as the major game-changer, the other picked a smorgasbord of things ranging from the printing press to double-entry bookkeeping).
My Fantasy Worldbuilding Questions might also be helpful, though they’re more general than specific to a time-travel book. They are basically a list of “do I need to know this?” things that I may want to make up or do some research on while putting a world together. I have never needed to know everything on the list, and I occasionally need to know something that isn’t on the list, so it shouldn’t be taken as a rigid do-all-this-and-it-will-be-enough thing—they’re not supposed to be an exhaustive listing.
The other question you need to address is one you can’t research: How does magic work, and how much difference does the existence of magic make? You get to decide this, and you can go either way. Magic-substitutes-for-tech can give you a society that is significantly more advanced in some areas than others (a medieval society using cold spells to extend their food storage as, in essence, magic-based refrigerators), or a dead ringer for an industrialized nation (magic carpets as airplanes, dragons incinerating the trash, enchanted mirrors as cell phones…) in spite of having no real-life technology. Magic-is-difficult/rare means that the common people will be using the same technology that was used in the real world, and your main character will have a lot more to invent.
The lovely thing about being a fiction writer is that everything is material in some way—that interesting bit of trivia about the Roman Empire having toys powered by steam engines (that they never thought to apply to anything else) may not fit into this book, but it will turn out to be useful for some other book eventually.
Something else to consider, and I’ve gotten an entire novel out of is the relation of magic to feudalism.
The highest quality body armor in medieval times was very labor-intensive, and you needed a lot of wealth to afford it. Which meant knights pretty much had to be at the top, or near it, of a pretty steep pyramidal society. Lots of peasants, a few guys with the best armor.
Because the best armor gave the wearer a huge advantage in combat.
Now compare that to magic. Is magic rare, where only a few have it? Won’t that tend to force them into an equivalent position, at the top of some sort of hierarchy?
The answer doesn’t have to be yes, but how you answer it can give you a slant on your story that will really power a plot.
Are they all hermits? Perpetual wanderers, so they don’t get drawn into power plays? Is every mage a tyrant? Or belong to one?
Lots of possibilities.
Two quotations from John Crowley that seem particularly pertintent:
“I am going to ask my students to read one book of travel, history, cultural anthropology, or similar account that will illustrate this contention, and shame them out of concocting another pseudo-medieval non-society peopled by folks like themselves (and a few dragons and vampires, also much like themselves).”[LiveJournal, 6 Jan 2007]
“To be a book, it would have to have a plot; it would have to be very different from what’s usually called a history, it couldn’t be a simple addition of facts, or any kind of arithmetic at all, no it would almost have to be a sort of calculus, a differential calculus of self and history, inside and outside; it would require one to play history in the same way that chess masters play chess, not laboriously working out the consequences of possible moves, but perceiving as by a sixth sense the powers of the pieces to be or to do: a thing that can’t be done by logic or training or application, no, it’s an ability you have to be born with. It’s a knack. A gift.” [The Solitudes]
I recommend reading lots and lots and lots of primary source. It gives you a good start in what societies are like.
It not only gives hints what various conditions would go together, it really helps knock your block off so you don’t write down the exclusively modern thing without noticing.
I remember once reading a crit of a story where the critiquer was asking what sort of society let princes gallivant and kept princesses under watch, and my first, instinctive thought was — a normal one. That’s what you want. To know when modern times are abnormal.
I’d say it’s also important to understand the theories-why behind the non-modern customs. That way you can either justify having modern-style customs in a fantasy setting, deliberately avoid the sort of magic that would justify those modern-style customs, or justify having old historical customs return in a high-tech science fiction setting.
I prefer the intuitive feel because there is a long history of such theories being wrong.
Thanks for answering my question! Very interesting post.
Ruth Goodman’s Domestic Revolution is an excellent book tracing the history of coal in the UK.
It started with the Elizabetheans’ adopting coal to warm their homes. A LOT of things followed.
And yes, it enumerates a lot of precursors to the Industrial Revolution.