Poetry guided me towards a book once before, the great Tang Dynasty poets leading to Under Heaven years ago. So it isn’t a new thing for me that François Villon is a major part of the origin story here. And his most celebrated line, “Ou sont les neiges d’antan,” is likely embedded in my instinctively starting in the depths of a winter. The snows of yesteryear, indeed. Villon’s tendency to write mocking bequests in verse is also here, of course. Writing is not usually “fun” for me, but riffing on those poems was. Two of the books that offered renderings of the poems and helped unpack the (scanty) information we have about his life were Danse Macabre by Aubrey Burl and Poems: François Villon by David Georgi. There are others, but the details of his life remain sketchy.

And, yes, there’s an echo of Christine de Pizan in this novel, too. Poets, what can I say?

Another part of the inception here was reading Blood Royal, by Eric Jager: a recounting of the assassination of the Duc d’Orléans in Paris—and the chasing down of who was behind it, amid the chaos of the Hundred Years’ War. The book is a bit of a bait and switch, as it needed to segue from that investigation to a more general history of the time, but was of real use and inspiration.

I never knew it, but it seems I might have had a desire to “save” Joan of Arc, though those who have read me before know how much the notion that doing so might exact a price (on someone else, often) is a part of how I think and write. I also took the opportunity afforded to reverse the victory of Henry V at Agincourt. I hope I am forgiven, perhaps even indulged.

On Burgundy and the Burgundian dukes—especially, of course, John the Fearless, who inspired my Laurent de Barratin—I was very much taken by Bart van Loo’s The Burgundians. It is (and he notes it himself a few times) a very much “on their side” book, written with flair and wit. Alternative takes and readings of people and events can be found elsewhere, easily.

I recommend (if you have a birthday coming up?) the newest edition of Johan Huizinga’s masterwork, which I reread for this novel. This version uses Autumntide of the Middle Ages as its translation of the title. It is a sumptuously presented and illustrated rendering of a classic. I also reread the relevant volume of A History of Private Life, edited by the great Georges Duby, and a few works I admire on daily life at the time. Chiara Frugoni’s books on this, for example, are useful and entertaining, both.