Creative History

            Friday morning begins normally enough.  It is cloudy and overcast, a little gloomy with a slight chill in the air but it is nothing that the residents of New England aren’t used to.  After all, this time of year the temperature does fluctuate rapidly, with one day being warm and humid, summerlike, and the next cold and stark almost like winter. It is May 19, 1780 and the New England and Mid-Atlantic states have been in the grip of America’s War for Independence for over five years.  Much of the countryside is ravaged, many of the cities are still under British control, but led by George Washington, the Continental Army of the United States continues to survive and the spirit of American patriotism is proving resilient and indomitable.  There is reason for both hope and despair, but no one expects what this day is about to bring. At around ten in the morning the overcast sky begins to change colors turning from a pi...

   North of London in the county of Suffolk sits the medieval village of St.  Mary of the Wolf-pits.  The village is equi-distant from the Channel coast and from the town of Bury St. Edmunds which is home to an abbey and a thriving monastic community. St. Mary of the Wolf-pits could be described as rural; the type of place where nothing much has ever happened and where nothing much is likely to ever happen.  The village’s only claim to fame is the large “wolf-pits” for which it is named that ring the outskirts of the community.  The wolf-pits are six foot deep holes dug in fields around the town that are lined with stone and are designed to protect livestock and townspeople alike from the ferocious and marauding wolves who reside in the forest nearby and routinely venture near town looking for easy prey to devour. It is not uncommon for the villagers to awake in the morning and go out to find a helpless wolf trapped in the deep hole, howling and strug...

            It is just after sunrise and the heat is already stifling.  The mid-July sun beats down relentlessly on the medieval city of Strasbourg in the Alsace region of France. Strasbourg is a quaint old city with a vibrant market in the center of town, busy but not quite bustling, large enough to have wares from all over Europe, but still small enough for nearly everyone in the market this morning to know each other by name. It is the summer of the year 1518.  The previous year had been a difficult one for the citizens of Strasbourg.  Drought had come to the region in 1517 and the local harvest had nearly failed completely.  In addition to that, the Alsace region due to its central location, has for generations been trapped in a near perpetual state of warfare, with Strasbourg being at the epicenter of that conflict because of its location on the banks of the Rhine River.  Alsace, and by extension the city of Strasbou...