The Man Booker and 16th Century Soap

The subject of this year's Man Booker Prize winning novel, by Hilary Mantel, is the relationship of King Henry Tudor and Thomas Cromwell. The judges described it as "a contemporary novel, which happens to be set in the 16th century".

It struck me that the popular TV series The Tudors might have had something to do with it. It's a rollicking good drama, whose characters happen to be the movers and shakers of 16th century England. Thomas Cromwell is a shady character, who features prominently as King Henry's advisor in the second series. He's not the most hyped figure in history, which is perhaps why he inspires curiosity and sparks the imagination.

I'm sure the literati would deny making any connection with the grubby TV genre...but the subconscious is a tricky thing.

Sweating Sickness

I'm a big fan of The Tudors. I do mean, as it happens, the TV series depicting the lives of King Henry VIII and his entourage and not vice versa, though I suspect few will jump to the opposite conclusion.

It's a rollickin' good ride - the sex, the drugs, the sixteenth century court music. But, never mind the debauchery, what particularly struck me was an episode in which the Sweating Sickness decimated London's population, sending all people, rich and poor, into mass panic, terror and abject hopelessness. This virulent plague was entirely unknown to me.

Unsettled by such a significant gap in my education, I went straight to the oracle wikipedia. I discovered that not only was the Sweating Sickness, or 'English sweate', as prevalent and feared as depicted in The Tudors, but that, to this day, no one knows what caused it, or what it was. Terrifying. The SARS of its day, or worse, as it was utterly mysterious.

I wonder if British schools over the years buried knowledge of this Sweating Sickness. We learn about The Plague and, in period novels, there's always a smattering of consumption, but these diseases, in contrast, have known causes and treatments.

Perhaps it's deemed unseemly to frighten children with incurable plagues. In childhood, all is black and white. There's no problem that can't be fixed by an all-powerful grown up, no illness that can't be cured by a knowledgeable physician. The Sweating Sickness breaks the natural order of things - in creeps uncertainty and indeterminacy. Mustn't frighten the horses.

Season 2 of The Tudors starts tonight. Count me in.