Philippa Gregory - Changeling

If you are interested in the background history to the story, including some lovely medieval details on shoes, clothes, food, washing, courtship – almost everything! – you can visit my site orderofdarkness.com. Or you can do your own research; most of the things that I mention can be found in books or on the Internet, and also there is a pack of teachers’ notes available to share in the classroom, which can be downloaded from orderofdarkness.com or simonandschuster.co.uk.

I hope you enjoy the illustrations throughout the book. It’s not an author photo at the top of this note but a version of Christine de Pizan, a wonderful medieval woman, one of the first commercial writers in Europe. The endpapers inside the jacket are based on a section of a map of the world drawn by a monk from Venice, Fra Mauro, around 1450. The version at the front of the book is how he drew it, with the South at the top, which is how the Muslim map-makers showed the world. The version at the end of the book is printed upside-down so that you can see the countries shown more clearly, though the script is wrong reading. You can see a full version of the map on the Internet, or at orderofdarkness.com.

Why is this book different from my historical novels? Mostly my historical fictions are based on everything that we know about a real person, her life and her times. This novel is based on four purely fictional young people, and the world they live in. It reflects the historical reality of their times, but of course nobody but a fictional heroine has such an exciting day-to-day life! And why did I write it? Not because I have finished writing fictional biographies at all – there’s a new novel out this year, The Kingmaker’s Daughter – but I thought it would be fun to write something less rooted in the historical record. I wrote it for the pleasure that it has given to me and in the hope that you will like it too.

PHILIPPA GREGORY

February 2012,

England