Elaine Cassidy, Matthew Goode, and Tom Hughes as Louisa de Clermont, Matthew de Clermont, and Kit Marlowe in A Discovery of Witches. Photo from Sky.
For those who have read Shadow of Night, it’s no surprise that the stars of the TV series hint at a darker, more brooding tone for Season 2 of A Discovery of Witches. In an interview today for Radio Times, Teresa Palmer said:
“I’m getting to know him again in this time. It feels like a totally different Matthew in moments. It really throws [Diana] for a loop. And again, she feels quite isolated.”
Teresa has another interview out today with HeyGuys.com that’s worth a read– find it here. Despite the shadowy tone of Season 2, we’re thrilled to get a chance to explore the drama and mystery that television can bring to the more melancholy, elemental side of Shadow of Night. We’re planning get in the mood by watching this trailer over and over and by listening to Deb’s Shadow of Night playlist on Spotify.
Deb’s Shadow of Night Playlist is available on Spotify!
We’ll also be dreaming of the pounding hooves, the dark alleys, the villainy, and the candlelight you can see throughout this trailer from Sky:
We’ll celebrate the premiere of Season 2 with a live-tweet on Saturday, 9 January 2021, at 7pm EST. Use the hashtag #ccalchemy to join us and invite your friends!
In the meantime, follow us on Twitter or join our Facebook group, the Chamomile & Clove Clovers, to connect with us and other fans dreaming about the magic and wonder of Season 2. See you tomorrow!
Wherever you are, we hope you are well and safe — we hope you get to spend the day remembering, honoring, and celebrating the caring, nurturing people in your life. If today is hard for you, we wish you peace and hope that you find something today that brings you joy. Who knows, maybe it will be this episode.
Phoebe’s frisky, and so are we! Today, we’re exploring consent, parenting, and the relationship between sexuality and feeding in vampire novels while discussing Chapters 18, 22, and 23 of Time’s Convert. It’s sensual, silly, and also very serious — so, about what you’d expect.
You can always reach us at chamomileandclovecast@gmail.com, or you can follow us on Twitter, or you can join our Facebook group, the Chamomile & Clove Clovers. We’re eager to hear your thoughts and feelings about this episode or any others — we’re so grateful for your continued love and support.
Starting this afternoon, we’ll begin recording our final two wrap episodes for the All Souls Trilogy — all three books, all at once. It’s going to be a blast.
In preparing for this episode, we’ve gone back into the vault and listened to our wrap episodes from A Discovery of Witches, Shadow of Night, and the Book of Life in order to tease out trilogy-wide themes, plots, character arcs, and motifs. While listening to the back catalogue, I realized it might be helpful for y’all to have all of our wrap episodes listed in one place. Accordingly, here’s a quick guide to our wrap episodes:
We are so excited to start talking about the trilogy as a whole and we hope you’ll join us. In the meantime, keep an eye out for more prizes and fun from the All Souls Discussion Group during the A Discovery of Witches TV 2020 Winter Watch! As always, you can find us on Facebook in the Chamomile & Clove Clovers group and on Twitter as @chamomilenclove. If you’re so inclined, you can check out our merchandise on Redbubble or become a member of our Patreon.
As always, please feel free to show us a bit of love on the podcasting app or review site of your choice. It helps other people find us and makes our day. We’re so lucky to have you!
It’s springtime in Prague, y’all — time for golems and hunts, puppies and weird gifts from your royal admirers. What, that’s only Diana? My bad.
“Tell us again about the unicorn’s horn. It is supposed to have miraculous curative powers.”
Writing for The Pharmaceutical Journal, William Jackson reports that the myth of the unicorn may have arisen from Alexander the Great, who adorned his war horse with golden horns for battle.
Other stories suggest that the myth of the unicorn arose from early reports of the rhinoceros, although, as Jackson reports, belief in the unicorn lasted well into the Renaissance. The belief in the medicinal properties of the unicorn horn likely began in the fifth century and persisted into Emperor Rudolf’s day — the unicorn horn allegedly neutralized poison, a tantalizing property for royals fearful of assassination attempts.
Because “unicorn horn” was so precious, there were lots of counterfeit items–the blog Early Modern Medicine reports that, in order to test the authenticity of a suspect horn, one should pass a spider over it. If the spider survived, you’d been had. If the spider exploded, you had the real thing. Good to know.
It’s an automaton, Jack,” Matthew said, picking the thing up. When he did, the stag’s head sprang open, revealing the hollow chamber within. “This one is meant to run down the emperor’s dinner table. When it stops, the person closest must drink from the stag’s neck.
In the Real-Time Reading Companion, Deb notes that the automaton Rudolf sends Diana is based on this one, which you can see on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
Rudolf’s collection survived the Thirty Years’ War by virtue of the fact that part of it was moved to Vienna, where it’s still on display.
“There goes Sigismund,” Gallowglass said, bending close to my ear. The noise from the bells was deafening, and I could barely hear him. When I looked at him in confusion, he pointed up, to a golden grille on the adjacent steeple. “Sigismund. The big bell. That’s how you know you’re in Prague.”
The Sigismund Bell hangs at the top of St. Vitus’ Cathedral in Prague. The church took over 600 years to complete—the last section was only finished in the 20th century. The construction of the Gothic cathedral ceased as a consequence of the Hussite Wars and the project was not completed until the millennial anniversary of Wenceslas I, Duke of Bohemia, in the 1930s. The popular history tells us that when the bell Sigismund was finished, no one knew how to lift the massive bell into the tower. Naturally, the princess devised a solution—by making a pulley of her own hair to lift the bell into place. Ouch. You can hear Sigismund’s peals in the video below. You can learn more about the architecture of St. Vitus (and the work of one Matthew of Arras, French architect (hmmm)) here.
Kelley nodded. “He came when Dee was still in Prague, asking questions about the book and nosing about in my business. Rudolf let him enjoy one of the witches from the Old Town—a seventeen-year-old girl and very pretty, with rosy hair and blue eyes just like your wife. No one has seen her since. But there was a very fine fire that Walpurgis Night. Gerbert was given the honor of lighting it.” Kelley shifted his eyes to me. “I wonder if we will have a fire again this year?”
Walpurgis Night is a Northern European festival celebrating St. Walpurga that takes place on 30 April-1 May. While the festival has its roots in pagan rituals welcoming the spring and summer, St. Walpurga is remembered for denouncing sorcery and witchcraft. Traditionally, people believed that Walpurgis Night was the last night of the year that a witch could cast powerful spells before the autumn. In sixteenth century Ireland, people slaughtered hares on 30 April believing that they were cow-stealing witches in disguise. In Germany, people believed that witches roamed abroad on Walpurgis Night to participate in a great gathering on top of the Blocksberg mountains. Though I tried, I couldn’t find anything on whether people actually engaged in witch-hunting — but they definitely lit bonfires to ward off sorcery and spells.
After days of careful negotiation, Matthew was able to arrange a visit to Rabbi Judah Loew. To make room for it, Gallowglass had to cancel my upcoming appointments at court, citing illness.
The name Maharal is a Hebrew acronym for Moreinu ha-Rav Loew, or “Our Teacher Rabbi Loew.” Legend has it that the Maharal used his knowledge of the Kabbala to animate the golem of Prague, a creature raised to protect the Jewish community from harm. According to this article from the New York Times, the symbolism of the golem re-emerges every so often—especially in times of trouble and uncertainty. To this day, people honor the legacy of Rabbi Loew by leaving stones on his grave in the Jewish cemetery of Old Town Prague.
We’ll pick up again with Matthew and Diana as they hunt with Emperor Rudolf on 8 April. In the meantime, be sure to catch A Discovery of Witches TV on BBC America and AMC TV when it premieres at 9pm on Sunday, 7 April! You can also vote in the last couple rounds of A Discovery of Witches TV March Madness between now and Sunday — check out our Twitter profile (@chamomilenclove) or our Facebook page to participate.
If you like what we do, consider leaving us a review on iTunes! We can’t wait to begin our book discussions of Book of Life with you on 14 April 2019!
Matthew and Diana’s return to England causes a bit of a ruckus in the calendar — we’re actually going to return to London and celebrate Christmas Eve in 1590 (Chapter 15) before we spend Christmas with Ysabeau, Sarah, and Em in the present day (Chapter 14).
I had never imagined that Old St. Paul’s would be so big. I gave myself another pinch. I had been administering them since spotting the Tower (it, too, looked enormous without skyscrapers all around) and London Bridge (which functioned as a suspended shopping mall). Many sights and sounds had impressed me since our arrival in the past, but nothing had taken my breath away like my first glimpses of London.
As Deb notes in both the Real-Time Reading Companion and The World of All Souls, modern London an Elizabethan London are two very different creatures.
Diana and Matthew arrive in London a mere two and a half decades after an outbreak of the plague in 1664 and the Great Fire of 1666. The Great Fire burned for three days and destroyed some five-sixths of the City. The fire began in the King’s bakery near the London Bridge and swept through a city that was unusually dry after a very hot summer. The city began to re-build almost immediately — Sir Christopher Wren submitted “ambitious” plans to Charles II that would have widened London’s streets and made London look more like Paris. Many of his plans were never realized, in part because Londoners insisted on keeping the original sites of their homes and businesses and partially because his ideas were rather expensive. Wren was eventually responsible for the construction of approximately 50 new churches, including the grand new design of St. Paul’s Cathedral.
“At last,” Henry Percy appeared, beaming. “We’ve been waiting for hours. My good lady mother sent you a goose. She heard reports that no fowl are to be had in the city and became alarmed that you would go hungry.”
“Is this your doing, Henry?” I looked from the entrance hall into our main living quarters. Someone had tucked holly, ivy, and fir around the fireplace and the window frames and mounded them in the center of an oak table.
Jen and I hope you have a wonderful Christmas Eve with your loved ones. We’ll see you again tomorrow for a (brief) Christmas entry to celebrate the preview of A Discovery of Witches TV on Sundance and Shudder. We can’t wait to hear what you have to say about Episodes 1 and 2 on our Twitter feed or via our Facebook group.
Chamomile & Clove 