Fasting is one form of asceticism: the renunciation, whether short- or long-term, of material pleasures. But hoo boy is it the thin end of that wedge!

People can adopt an ascetic lifestyle for purely philosophical reasons; Stoicism in the classical era headed in this direction, though I think most of its adherents were more concerned with restraint and moderation than with absolute denial. The overwhelming majority of the time, though, asceticism is linked with religion — and specifically with transcendental religions, i.e. those which treat the divine as otherworldly and separate from the material world we all live in.

The logic there is pretty easy to follow. The divine is more important than the mortal, so it ought to be the focus of our attention. And if that’s the goal you’re pursuing, then aren’t mortal, material concerns a distraction from what really matters? You should set them aside so you can devote yourself more fully to God and the pursuit of salvation/the Buddha and the pursuit of enlightenment/etc. In some strands of thought, this world gets characterized as fundamentally evil, a trap we have to escape. Ascetism is the way to freedom.

Note that this isn’t (necessarily) the same thing as subjecting oneself to pain, or seeking that out for its own sake. A number of religious traditions involve practitioners doing horrible-looking things to themselves in pursuit of triggering a religious experience, but that doesn’t mean they think one should eschew pleasures as an ongoing habit. The latter, from what I can tell, seems to have cropped up most frequently as a feature of Christianity, Buddhism, Jainism, and Hinduism: not to say that there haven’t been ascetic movements in Islam (e.g. Sufism) and Judaism or other faiths, but they haven’t achieved the same idealization and centrality as in those first four. (And yes, I’m aware that Buddhism’s “Middle Way” advocates against extremes of asceticism. That doesn’t mean lighter versions haven’t been very important to a number of Buddhist traditions.)

The basic practices of asceticism often involve disciplining oneself to live with a reduction in material comforts. I led into this essay with the one on fasting because it’s extremely common for ascetics to limit what they eat, how much of it they have, when they eat, and so on. Although “Buddhist temple cuisine” in East Asia can rise to the level of high art, in most cases the emphasis will be on plain, monotonous food, discouraging sensual pleasure from the act of dining. The purpose of food is to sustain the body and nothing more.

Next up is sleep. If you’re pursuing ascetic ideals, your bed should not be soft, and you shouldn’t spend much time in it, either. If you’re a normal Christian monk or nun, you might be getting up in the middle of the night to pray; if you’re St. Peter of Alcántara, you sleep standing up with a beam of wood for your pillow. As for doing anything in that bed other than sleep . . . you likely won’t be surprised to hear that celibacy is hugely common among ascetics. We’ll leave that one for the next essay, though, because it deserves to be unpacked at greater length.

What about bathing? While we have the idiom “cleanliness is next to godliness,” historically, not everyone has agreed. Quite aside from the obstacles (described in earlier volumes) that used to make regular bathing difficult, some ascetics have held that, since the body is unimportant at best, actively corrupting at worst, attending to it more than absolutely required for survival is mere vanity. So: minimal bathing, or none at all — and although that sounds horrifying to us now, some people thought of the resulting stench as the “odor of sanctity,” proof of the unwashed one’s holiness.

Secular entertainments, of course, are off the table. Ascetics aren’t supposed to watch plays, or read frivolous literature, or participate in dances. Music and literature are usually limited only to holy matters. Prayer is a far more suitable pastime, perhaps carried out under uncomfortable conditions: for a Catholic that might mean kneeling for a long time on a hard floor, while a Buddhist might stand under a cold waterfall.

Clothing should not only be un-ostentatious but quite possibly uncomfortable. The proverbial garment here is the hair shirt — in Catholicism, formally known as a cilice — which is an undergarment of coarse, skin-irritating fabric. Often worn for penance, it was therefore ideal for people wanting a more constant experience of humility. Going without shoes is another option, though “discalced” (shoeless) orders in Christianity may permit sandals: enough to protect the sole of the foot from danger, not enough to keep the rest of it warm.

Enduring cold is a recurrent option in temperate climes. Historical Catholic monasteries often had tight regulations forbidding the lighting of warming fires before a certain date, regardless of what the weather was doing; I wouldn’t be surprised if the same is still true today, except it applies to central heating instead. Similar regulations governed when you broke out winter clothes — which still might be what other people would consider inadequate for the weather! Basically, if it would make you more comfortable, you should limit it to the bare minimum necessary for safety and health.

. . . or you could go further.

Self-mortification can describe any of the above practices, but we often use it to mean the more severe end of the spectrum. In Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular, the mortification on the flesh can be framed as a way to draw closer to Christ, by sharing in his suffering. This can involve everything from adding twigs to your hair shirt to scratch yourself more, to harsher and more extended fasts, to active practices like self-flagellation.

Which, from an outside perspective, sure does invite the label of “self-harm.” And the Catholic Church is not unaware of that risk; there’s a recurrent thread in its history of trying to discourage the extremes, and making sure that people only go there under the supervision of an appropriate spiritual director. In modern parlance, that person’s job is to make sure the behavior in question isn’t a manifestation of obsessive-compulsive disorder, anorexia nervosa, or some other mental illness. But Church history is also full of devout people who desperately wanted to mortify themselves more than they were allowed — especially in pursuit of mystical visions during which they felt themselves to be in God’s presence.

Because that’s one possible result of ascetic life: spiritual power. Depending on your religious framework, it may purify the body and spirit, burn away karma, concentrate and intensify your personal energy, or enable you to contact and perhaps even compel the attention of the divine — the Sanskrit epics contain many instances of people practicing austerities (tapas) until the heat generated thereby forces a god to respond. (I recall my Hinduism professor phrasing this informally as “lighting a spiritual fire under their butts.”)

We see this occasionally in fiction as a thing the wise old mentor does, but I feel like it’s generally less common for protagonists. Not hard to imagine why; we tend to want our characters to partake in the full range of ordinary experience, rather than swearing off three-quarters of it. And since many of us disagree with the basic principle that one ought to subordinate the self and personal desires to the concerns of a higher power, it may be hard to get the reader on board with the idea that doing so is anything other than a tragic tale. But the notion that exercising self-denial is necessary to the generation of spiritual force seems like a fruitful one to me, with plenty of tasty potential for inner conflict!

Somewhere in the course of childhood, I got the impression that “fasting” meant “not eating anything.” This isn’t wrong, but it’s incomplete: as shown by the well-known custom of Lent in the Roman Catholic Church, there are degrees of fasting, from the token to the incredibly strict.

On the lighter end, one might fast by abstaining temporarily from a particular food. For this to be meaningful, the change in diet should be more than trivial; if I abstain from mushrooms, which I don’t particularly like and almost never eat, how is that different from my ordinary life? Abstaining from meat or dairy is much more significant (and common) — though for a vegetarian or a vegan, again, that’s just business as usual. The stricter the fast, the less nourishment is permitted, until you reach the point at which no food may be eaten at all.

What about liquids? Again, it’s a spectrum. In religious contexts, temporary abstention from alcohol is (unsurprisingly) a common prohibition. People fasting before a medical procedure like a colonoscopy are allowed to have clear liquids, so they can get some calories in them for the day or so preceding. Other kinds of fasting might permit only water, to avoid dehydration; the absolute strictest forbid anything at all.

As you can imagine, that latter is not very sustainable, which is why timing also matters. During Ramadan, observant Muslims take nothing during daylight hours — which, depending on where you live, makes the fast much harder to maintain in the summer! (There are various religious opinions on how to handle this at extreme latitudes, or in space.) Once the sun sets, however, they’re free to eat and drink as needed. If your fast means continual abstention from food, or especially from drink, then you can only keep it up for a little while before you’re in medically dangerous territory. Which people have voluntarily entered, for all kinds of reasons!

Medical fasting usually tries to avoid negative side effects; it’s done for safety purposes before going under anaesthesia, or to test baseline blood sugar levels. Some people use intermittent fasting (which, like Ramadan, limits consumption to certain times of day) as a weight loss method: done right, fasting can indeed bring some health benefit.

Religious fasting sometimes goes much further. It often has overtones of purification, with the participants exerting conscious control over the base needs of their bodies and ridding them of the filth of excretion; because of this, a short fast is a common element before rites of passage or other such rituals. It may also be a form of penitence, showing your contrition for your sins by denying yourself the comfort of food. Extremely pious individuals, seeking to focus on the spiritual rather than the material, have taken it to great extremes — including all the way to the end. The Jain practice of sallekhana (fasting to death), meant to destroy karma that would influence your next rebirth, is officially not considered suicide; the Cathar endura was somewhat similar, with people on their deathbeds refusing everything other than water after they received the funerary rite of consolamentum. In historical Japan, some Buddhist monks underwent a process of lethal fasting designed to ensure their bodies would become natural mummies after their deaths, known as sokushinbutsu.

Or perhaps your fast goes beyond orthodox religion and into the realm of magic. Despite its dramatic-sounding name, a “black fast” is merely a strict form of Catholic fasting, akin to Ramadan, with nothing during the day and only a vegan meal and water at night. According to folklore, undertaking a black fast on certain holy days could bring special benefits, like protection from harm or sudden death. But some people took it further, using it as a form of spiritual vengeance: they would “fast upon” someone who had wronged them, with the intent of harming or even killing them outright.

Take away that magical angle, and you have the notion of fasting as a protest against injustice. In this form we often call it a hunger strike, and in Ireland, this appears to have roots stretching back to before Christianization. The practice there was usually to fast on the doorstep of the person from whom you wanted justice, and scholars theorize that this interfaced with the deep-seated customs around hospitality. (Letting somebody starve on your literal doorstep: the opposite of being a good host.) It’s not just an Irish practice, though, being found in India as well — and in modern times, Gandhi might well be one of the most famous examples of a hunger striker. His fame played a key role in the success of his fasts, as the Brits knew very well how bad it would look if somebody that well-known died in one of their prisons. Meanwhile, a no-name agitator might be allowed to starve to death without comment.

Because for a protest fast to work, it generally needs publicity. In pre-modern times it’s enough for a fast to be known within the community — which is another reason doing it on someone’s doorstep is useful; even if you get forcibly evicted, people will notice that happening. As society gets bigger, hunger strikers depend on news media to report their actions . . . and, if necessary, their deaths. In 1981 Ireland, Irish Republican prisoners made a point of fasting one at a time for more sustained attention, ultimately resulting in ten deaths.

Not all such fasts end fatally, of course. Some hunger strikers flinch; others succeed in achieving their aims and return to normal eating. But sometimes, their fasts end involuntarily, as authorities either decide they have a moral duty to prevent death or refuse to let the guilt of the striker’s death land on their heads. In these cases prisoners get force-fed, usually by means of a tube placed down their throats, though some slavers at the height of the trans-Atlantic trade used a speculum to pry open the mouths of slaves who refused to eat. Suffragettes in particular received this treatment, as the chauvinism of the era meant deaths of women would have cast their captors in a particularly bad light.

Before wrapping this up, I should make mention of the concept of inedia, i.e. the ability to live without eating. Some claimants of this ability insist they need only air, and are called breatharians; others say that sunlight is all they need. Mythologically, the concept seems to have its roots in South and East Asia — and of course, in speculative fiction it might be literally possible! Lots of cultivation novels assume their characters can build up the spiritual power necessary to survive without food, though they might still enjoy it as a sensory pleasure afterward.

In real life, however, there are no confirmed cases, because this simply doesn’t work. By all means, abstain from food or drink for short periods of time if it benefits you medically, spiritually, or politically. But be careful not to take it too far!

Uniforms, heraldry, flags. In a military context, these all serve the crucial purpose of communication. And if they seem like fairly primitive methods of achieving that, well, for most of history, primitive methods are all we’ve had.

When it comes to communication — whether that’s signaling to troops on the battlefield or sending a message to a different part of your force elsewhere — your options are fundamentally three: it can be visual, auditory, or written (a special case of visual). Touch and taste are far too short-range to be of any use, and while scent can theoretically travel farther, our olfactory senses are too poor to make much use of it. Even an alien species gifted with a better nose would face the problems of slow movement and dissipation over distance, reducing the signal’s utility.

Written communication is great in some ways, terrible in others. So long as everybody involved is literate, the message won’t get garbled in transmission: excellent! Unfortunately, it’s also vulnerable to being intercepted, altered, even forged outright. Prior to modern times, it’s also slow, being limited to the speed of whatever’s carrying it, whether that’s a guy on foot, a rider, or a pigeon (which, as Year Four discussed, only works in very specialized circumstances). Writing is handy for sending a message to another military detachment, but you’re not going to be able to use it to communicate with the guys currently locked in combat.

What about visual signals more broadly? Movies give us tons of examples of a flag being raised or waved to communicate with the troops . . . but those examples are often deeply flawed, with the same movement of the same flag having the magical ability to communicate whatever is needed in the moment. Worse still is the version where the commander just lifts his arm, and suddenly thousands of men know it’s time to march forward.

Visual signals only work if you can see them. Which sounds like an obvious statement, but now imagine that the flag — much less the raised arm! — is two, three, ten football fields away from you. (Doesn’t matter which type of football. The point holds regardless.) How well can you see it? Remember that battle lines can get extremely long when the armies involved are big; are your eyes good enough to pick out a bit of cloth half a mile or more away? Are you looking in the right direction when the signal goes out? What about when you march forward, and now the flag is behind you?

Flags and similar kinds of standards, like the Roman legionary eagles, mostly get used at much shorter range, to drive individual smaller units. Your standard-bearer is at the front of your group’s block, not the back; when the flag advances, so do you. When it stops, you stop. When it retreats, you retreat. (When it falls, you say oh shit. And then probably try to pick it up, or hope one of your buddies does.) It’s useful for moving a limited mass of soldiers around, but you can’t use it to transmit orders from the commander to that mass.

There are other visual ways to signal, e.g. by sending flares up into the sky, but you get the idea. Any such method is subject to these limitations on the battlefield, while over longer distances, you’re looking at the kinds of communication systems described in Year Eight. They are, generally speaking, blunt instruments at best, not capable of delivering complex information or instructions.

So what about sound? You won’t be surprised to hear me say this also has problems. Speech only goes so far; studies suggest that if you have a close-packed and quiet crowd and a good set of lungs, your voice might carry to a few thousand people, but “close-packed and quiet” does not describe battlefield conditions, nor communication at a distance. It’s a little unclear how long ago speaking trumpets (megaphones) were invented, but even those only boost your range a little.

Musical instruments do better, and they don’t require you to be facing them to receive the signal. As with flags, though, your “vocabulary” is limited, because relying on a complex melody to communicate “third unit of cavalry, circle around the army’s flank to intercept their reserves” is not so much courting failure as doing a swan dive into failure’s arms. It also turns out that, like flags, instruments have mostly been used to control the movements of smaller units: you’re only being cued to move if it’s your group’s horn or drum sounding the advance or retreat. (I presume, though I don’t know, that you know it’s yours because it’s loud enough to be obviously nearby, as opposed to farther down the field.) Once again, the commander can’t really use this to send orders from his post, because which group is he trying to signal?

Pretty much the only thing he can use is a messenger. Send someone on foot or on horseback with orders (written or verbal), and hope the messenger doesn’t get captured, killed, or ignored by the officer on the receiving end, who’s annoyed that some lackey claims he’s supposed to change his plans or move into action. There’s a reason we have that idiom about “don’t shoot the messenger” . . .

With all of this in place, you can see why modern technology had such a revolutionary effect on warfare. Telegraphs and radios, not to mention their later successors, mean that suddenly you can transmit your written or auditory signals vastly quicker — and that goes both ways! I’ve been talking as if everything is supposed to go from the commander to the troops, but he needs updates, too, and being able to send word more or less instantaneously that the center is collapsing or the right wing is about to be flanked opens up a whole new world of tactical responses.

Because if you were wondering how anybody managed when signaling was so crude and inefficient, the answer genuinely is “they kinda didn’t.” If your communication is limited, your control is limited. You deploy your troops for battle and then press play, with maybe one or two tricks held in reserve; everything else is up to the guys in different spots on the field, because there’s no way to manage more complex coordination and maneuvering.

But with every improvement in your signals, you acquire new options. Maybe your infantry units can not just advance, halt, and retreat, but wheel to face a new direction. Maybe you can tell in something like real time that your far-distant left is hard pressed, so you can dispatch reinforcements in time to do some good.

Which means that if you’re writing speculative warfare, the communications aspect is vitally important. Do they have telepathy? Flying animals with more capabilities than homing pigeons? Long-distance scrying or satellite surveillance? Teleportation? Anything that can transmit detailed information faster than a guy on a horse is a major advancement in tactical and strategic capability over most of human history. Meanwhile, the weaknesses of that method open up fascinating possibilities for trouble: can it be intercepted, altered, forged entirely? How can you use that to screw over your characters, er, I mean, make their lives more interesting?

The comedian Eddie Izzard has a bit in her show Dress to Kill where she characterizes colonialism as sticking a flag in the ground to claim a place, then ignoring the assertion of the locals that their home is their own because, well, they don’t have a flag, do they?

While obviously exaggerated for the purpose of comedy, the idea in play there isn’t without basis in fact. Nowadays, flags are the premier emblem of a country — and often smaller units thereof as well, like provinces and states and even cities. We march our flags in the parade of nations that starts off the Olympic Games; we brand our exports with them. We fly them high over our governmental buildings and lower them to half-mast in the wake of tragedy, as a signal that the whole community is (or should be) in mourning.

Flags probably have their origins in a military context, and we’ll get into how they were used there more in the next essay. Fabric banners, as opposed to standards more broadly, may have been invented twice: one in south or eastern Asia, the other in ancient Rome, though I can’t swear that there wasn’t influence from former on the latter. They can be attached to the side of a pole, to a horizontal cross-bar at the top, or both; the advantage of a horizontal attachment is that you’re not dependent on wind to lift the flag and display its design.

Nowadays almost all flags are not only rectangular but adhere to one of a small number of ratios in their proportions (2:3, 1:2, or 3:5). There are still exceptions, though, and they used to be more common. If you look at the state flag of Ohio, you’ll see an example of a swallowtail pennon: a flag wider at the hoist (attachment) than at the fly (loose edge), with a forked edge rather than tapering to a triangle point. Heraldic rules used to dictate who carried what style of flag at what size, along with what could be placed on the flag; for example, differentiating a banner from a pennon helped differentiate a knight banneret from a knight bachelor.

Speaking of heraldry . . . As you might expect, a lot of early European flags consisted of sticking one’s heraldic arms on a pole. Because of that, the rules governing design ensured a fairly high degree of clarity, like you would want on a battlefield. But the intersection of various emblem traditions has in modern times produced some fairly terrible flags, especially at the level of cities: the city has a seal, and it needs a flag, so it just sticks the seal on a flag and calls it a day. The result is a fiddly, complex image nobody would ever have bothered with if they needed to embroider or appliqué the entire thing, instead of mechanically printing it.

The term for flag design is vexillography, and boy howdy do people in that field have Opinions about the right way to go about it. These days, there’s general agreement that a flag should be relatively simple — often characterized as “a child could draw it.” Many countries have adopted a triband, i.e. a flag divided into three bands either horizontally or vertically, which may or may not be equal in width. Some of these have a “charge,” an emblem of some kind superimposed, usually at the center (but not always). When each band is a different color, it’s termed a tricolor, and since the late sixteenth century, that style has been associated with republicanism and revolution. As democratic governance has spread around the world, tricolors have followed — though of course nothing stops a government from adopting that design as a fig leaf over very un-democratic rule!

Of course, these get very repetitive, and (outside their charges) they can fill up the available color design space very fast. Modern flags often depart from the heraldic rules for tinctures, both in the colors they use and how they’re positioned. The green/yellow/red of Pan-Africanism or the black/white/green/red of Pan-Arab nationalism don’t always avoid putting a color against a color; the flag of Argentina specifies a pale blue instead of the more midline hue seen in many other flags. Non-triband flags also sometimes reach for ways to distinguish themselves from the herd; the redesign of Minnesota’s state flag (which used to be a poster child for bad design) cleverly inverted the sideways triangular charge called a “pile” so as to echo the shape of the state itself. When everybody has a flag, it helps to get creative!

But the reason we need so many flags boils down to modern nationalism. It’s not that kingdoms didn’t have banners in the past — they absolutely did, on the battlefield and in their castles — but often those banners were simply the arms or emblem of the ruling dynasty. Or a country might use multiple flags in different contexts, like sixteenth-century Spain flying both the arms of the Habsburg king and the saw-toothed Cross of Burgundy (that one deployed particularly on ships). As national identities coalesced in the late eighteenth century, though, it became increasingly important to have a national symbol separate from the person in charge, and those symbols appeared more and more often in contexts other than military ones.

Not that flags have ever been limited to military use. Taken in the general sense of “a piece of fabric meant to fly in the wind” rather than the distinctive emblem of a person, group, or locale, flags can serve all manner of purposes! Signal flags came up in Year Eight as a means of communication; Tibetan prayer flags are flown to spread their blessings on the wind. We use flags to mark everything from the finish line of a race to where your tour guide is in the crowd (though when you get down to it, that latter is probably a direct descendant of their role on the battlefield . . .). When a player commits an offense in certain sports, we signal it with a flag. When a city wants to advertise a festival or a special museum exhibit, they may dangle banners from the streetlights.

And when they want to assert their right not to be governed by a colonial power, they might just design a flag.

Heraldry is a peculiar mix of localized and universal.

By “localized,” I mean that it’s very specifically a medieval-and-later European phenomenon. The idea of individuals or groups having emblems is vastly older and more widespread, but that isn’t heraldry per se; it lacks the hereditary element that turns idiosyncratic choices into an organized system. In Europe, that system started forming during the High Middle Ages, around the twelfth century. By the middle of the fourteenth century you start having heraldic authorities responsible for recording and enforcing unique designs and color schemes, so that you can truly identify a member of a particular family by seeing their coat of arms — whether on the battlefield or off.

To the best of my knowledge, no other place in the world has quite this same practice. Japan comes close; mon or kamon (“family mon”) developed in the Heian period as a way of identifying members of the nobility so their order of precedence would not be in doubt. (It’s extremely useful to be able to answer that question at a glance! Heralds in Europe had similar responsibility for memorizing coats of arms and knowing who outranked whom.) In later centuries, certain mon like the imperial chrysanthemum were restricted, while others saw multiple uses by different groups. But although mon are hereditary — and, like heraldic arms, can be assigned to organizations as well as families — color is irrelevant as a distinguishing factor. And although mon can be modified to indicate a cadet branch of a family, there’s nothing equivalent to European heraldry’s system of quartering, where multiple emblems can be combined into one.

Tamgas on the Eurasian steppe are the other noteworthy candidate, as these are again a hereditary emblem of a family, clan, or tribe. Unlike Japanese mon and most of the charges (images) of European heraldry, tamgas are highly abstract, and their original purpose — still in force today — was for branding livestock. They’ve seen use outside that context, though, e.g. on funerary monuments, thereby expanding and strengthening the sense that these images represent the lineage more broadly.

The full system of European heraldry is ridiculously complex, its difficulty compounded by the fact that half its terminology is taken from medieval French. I’m not going to try and cover it all here (that’s a job for a specialized book), but I do want to note that the complexities of it very much developed over time. In fact, a lot of it dates to the early modern era and later, when coats of arms were no longer nearly as important for identifying men on the battlefield or in a tournament; instead they had become a decorative art, a little game played by the upper classes of society (gentlemen and nobility) and powerful organizations like universities and guilds.

In this game, the range of permissible emblems and how you deploy them expands enormously. Early heraldic arms went for a small number of impressive signifiers, like dragons, lions, and crosses; in later use you find mice, fish, and the tools of different trades. New colors came into use. Quarterings started to get out of hand; the arms of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, consisted of no less than twenty distinct components, representing all the places he ruled — some of them more than once, because of how he inherited them! (The most ridiculous example I know of cranks that up to three hundred twenty-three quarterings.) Furthermore, the emblems acquired add-ons like supporters, helmets, mottos, and crests, all of which were equally subject to the specific rules for heraldry.

But let’s loop back to that color thing for a moment, because this is where heraldry unexpectedly taps into something universal.

Do me a favor and take out your phone. Look at the icons for the apps. Or while you’re going through your day, look at the logos for corporations, the signs along the road. Count how many of them consist of either white or yellow on a colored background, or some color on a white or yellow background. This is a fundamental rule of heraldry in action, and it persists all these centuries later for good reason.

Heraldic tradition dictates how tinctures are organized and juxtaposed. For our purposes, we can lay aside the furs (specific background patterns); we’re concerned only with the metals — gold, silver — and the colours — blue, red, purple, black, green. (Heraldic history also includes a mulberry color between red and purple and an orange-to-brown color, but they were not commonly used, and later folklore decided those were “stains” that represented a dishonorable act.) According to the rule, you can juxtapose a metal with a color or a color with a metal, but not a metal on a metal or a color on a color. In other words, you can have white or yellow (representing silver or gold) against some other shade, but not white and yellow together, or red and blue, or green and black, and so forth.

More than just arbitrary aesthetic taste underlies this rule. By following it, you create a high-contrast design that is easily “read” even at a distance or in poor light. With modern pigments and dyes, we do have the capacity to make a green bright enough to stand out against black, or a red vivid enough to contrast with a pale, desaturated blue, but those rely on a command of coloration not easily attained when working with historical materials — especially when you consider the propensity of dyes to fade! If you want to be sure someone can make out your emblem at a glance, whether it’s on a battlefield or driving seventy miles an hour down a highway, following the medieval rule for tinctures is the safe way to go.

So I roll my eyes a little whenever I read a novel where the author, clearly in pursuit of badass vibes, describes the villain’s heraldry as being red on black. Sure, it sounds cool . . . but odds are high that somebody trying to make out the specifics at anything past close range just sees a blob of something red. Which I guess is fine if nobody else is running around with a red-on-black banner, such that the colors alone are sufficient, but still: nobody’s going to appreciate the artistic effort that went into your skull-and-snake design, because they can’t really see it.

Putting full-blown heraldry into a book is automatically going to make the setting read as European, which means it won’t suit every story. But as the examples of Japan and the Eurasian steppe show, there’s room for different systems of hereditary emblems, even if they aren’t as complexly elaborated as heraldry became in later centuries. On the other hand, the latter offers all kinds of potential for narrative fodder, whether that’s making a reality out of the “stain” notion or somebody starting a massive diplomatic incident because they confused one coat of arms with another that’s very similar!

Uniforms aren’t purely a military thing. Sports teams wear them; so do students at certain kinds of schools. Some jobs mandate uniforms for their employees, including servants in the past wearing the “livery” of their masters. But we associate this idea so much with soldiers (and with the not entirely unrelated police) that being “in uniform” can be shorthand for military service, “uniforms” shorthand for the personnel of such groups.

Why, though? What purpose does the uniform serve?

The knee-jerk answer is “to tell friend from foe on the battlefield,” and that’s not entirely wrong. But if you’re envisioning that thing you’ve seen in movies where two armies smash into each other and instantly dissolve into a confused melee with enemies on all sides, erase that from your mind. If your battlefield looks like that, something has gone terribly, terribly wrong. Uniforms are more likely to serve their purpose in letting you know that the unit you see approaching from the south is your reinforcements — or, alternatively, the other side about to flank you. (Disguising yourself as the enemy has both its merits and its perils . . .)

Identification goes beyond knowing who to stab in the heat of battle, though. Uniforms can also tell you which part of your own army you’re looking at: is that guy an infantryman? Gunner? Cavalry soldier? Which lord’s retinue or modern squadron does he belong to? If you find some dead bodies in the woods, which unit got ambushed, and what does that mean for your subsequent situation?

Or you can read “identification” in a slightly different sense. Wearing a uniform signals not only to others but to you that you belong to a particular group, whether that’s your specific unit or your army as a whole. And this isn’t merely a nice side note; that sense of identity is key to battlefield performance, since the bond with your buddies and your unwillingness to let them down play a vital role in getting you to fight instead of running away. There’s a reason soldiers often take pride in their uniforms; those represent membership in something bigger than just themselves.

The psychological angle also turns outward, having its own effect on the enemy. By now you won’t be surprised to hear me say that not all armed forces achieve uniformity of appearance; that requires money, effort, and the organizational capacity to make it happen. Modern states take these things for granted, but historically, not everyone pulled it off. Those that did signaled to their opponents that they were well-funded, committed to the cause, and organized enough to handle the necessary logistics and discipline. Who would you rather fight: that guy, or the one with a ragtag assemblage of fellows in whatever clothes they happen to be wearing? Uniforms are a tool of intimidation as well as cohesion.

Of course, it’s not an all-or-nothing proposition. Modern uniforms are incredibly codified, even down to mandating the exact chemical composition of the dyes used on the fabric. Everything from a soldier’s boots to their haircut is governed by regulations (which may also prohibit the addition of personal touches on top of required bits). Before industrialization, though, that degree of standardization was much harder to achieve — and very few armies tried.

Instead, you can go for more limited elements. Maybe everybody is supposed to wear a coat and trousers of more or less the same color and cut, but everything past that is up for grabs. Maybe you issue tabards, which don’t have to be fitted and are easily thrown over whatever else your soldiers are wearing. Maybe it’s headgear or, in an absolute minimal form, armbands to identify which force each guy belongs to. In Japan it was sashimono, small banners on poles attached to the soldiers’ backs; you’ve probably seen this in films.

You also don’t have to outfit your entire army with uniforms. Elite units tend to get these first, both because they have the money to do it, and because it makes them look special — which I don’t mean in a derogatory sense! They’re elite for a reason, and dressing them in the same gear both gives them confidence and advertises their badassery to the enemy. Sometimes their “uniform” is just better and more complete armor, but that counts; if your infantry are in boiled leather and your elite cavalry are in mail, or the infantry have mail and the cavalry have plate, it doesn’t matter as much whether the plate is all identical in style. Just seeing all that polished metal shining in the distance signals that a real threat is about the enter the field.

Officers are a special subset of this. Up until quite recently, we took it for granted that officers should be immediately identifiable by their appearance, without having to check for small markers like the stripes on a patch. This wasn’t just to make them look important; it was because you needed to be able to find them as fast as possible so you could follow their orders. One of the best ways to do this was to give them taller hats, with crests or feathers or big ol’ spikes or anything that made them stand out in a crowd. They might also look archaic; there’s a distinct tendency for officer garb to lag a bit behind current fashion, probably because we associate tradition with authority. But the flamboyant visibility of officers declined very sharply around the time we got better at long-distance sniping: being immediately identifiable becomes a fatal liability when that helps a hidden enemy pick out the most valuable target to drill through the skull.

Flamboyance can become a problem for regular soldiers, too. For a while in the nineteenth century, French soldiers wore trousers in a particular shade of red called garance, which came to be seen as a proud symbol of French identity. Then we developed smokeless rifles, and battlefield visibility improved enormously. After they lost 27,000 men in a single day in early World War I, France decided their national identity would be better off without red trousers.

Finally, uniformity can be situational. Modern soldiers may have a service uniform and a full dress uniform, both of which are distinct from their combat uniform, i.e. the kit they’re wearing in the field. That’s multiplying the investment and effort by three! In less organized forces, soldiers might be permitted to wear whatever they like most of the time, and only don their uniforms for battle or for ceremonial occasions. Or alternatively, they’re supposed to be in uniform at all times, and their officers simply fail to enforce that discipline: coats get hocked to pay gambling debts, torn up for rags, or left behind because the soldier just doesn’t care.

Because remember, one option for uniforms is “nothing at all.” Though I sometimes see writers forget this, it’s entirely possible that an army deploys no uniformity whatsoever, because they just don’t have the money or the organizational oomph to make it happen. Soldiers show up in whatever assortment of clothes and gear they can scrape together, or whatever the recruiting authority managed to scrape together and then hand out. They won’t look very good, and they might not feel very good, either, but they’ll just have to cope. It’s the best their particular force can do.

Given that my job mostly involves sitting at a desk, I have to devote particular effort to getting exercise if I want to be in good health.

This is not a modern phenomenon, but it is something of an elite one. If your day involves heavy physical labor in the fields or a factory, if you’re a laundress or a dyer hauling around sopping masses of fabric on the regular, if you’re a warehouse worker or grocery store stocker constantly lifting boxes, why on earth would you want to spend some of your precious non-working time doing yet more physical activity? Even if something like strengthening auxiliary muscles or stretching would benefit you, odds are low that you’re spending much time on that. When your workday ends, you want to rest.

But the more leisured classes throughout history have often understood that getting exercise improves health, and they’ve had the time, money, and energy to devote toward that goal. Depending on where you look, they’ve also linked it to spiritual development (Indian yoga) or character-building (Muscular Christianity). So what did such people do to stay fit?

Unsurprisingly, a whole swath of historical exercise looks a lot like war training. Warriors and soldiers prior to the gunpowder era often practiced with heavier versions of their usual weapons, whether those are swords, maces, spears, staves, or otherwise. Archery has likewise occupied a frequent niche, as have wrestling and boxing, even if men rarely expected to be fighting bare-handed in the field.

This extends not only to fighting, but to other things you might need to do during a battle. Climbing, for example: up a pole, up a rope, up the underside of a ladder, even running up a wall to grab the top like a modern parkour athlete. Throwing things: not just javelins but any heavy object, like a stone, a discus, or a pole (most famously in the form of Scottish caber tossing, but they’re not the only ones to do it). Riding — and not just riding, but also vaulting onto a horse (real or wooden), as if you are mounting on the run.

And, of course, the perennial classic: lifting heavy things! Often this was just stones, but purpose-built weights like the Greek halteres or Indian clubs go back a fair way. (Kettlebells are much more recent, coming from Russian weights used for crops, and then repurposed by performing strongmen.) Exactly what form the lifting has generally taken, though, is unclear to me. Deadlift? Bench press? Squat? I’m leery of assuming people have always done the same modes we do now; odds are pretty good it was more generally “pick this thing up and then maybe walk with it before putting it down,” rather than the strictly regulated movements of a modern gym.

Many historical exercises required little to no equipment. Running, skipping, jumping, swimming, dancing . . . if it moves your body and gets your heart rate up, it’s probably been used as exercise. (Unless you’re doing it in bed. Though that’s been considered exercise, too.) Calisthenics such as push-ups, which use the body’s own weight to provide resistance, are easy to incorporate into an exercise regimen, though I’ve seen indications that chin-ups might be a more modern phenomenon. Possibly this is true when they’re viewed as their own, separate movement, as opposed to the final stage of something like that wall-running exercise mentioned above. Then off in India, yoga of course has a centuries-long history — though we should bear in mind that modern yoga-as-exercise is significantly different from the historical tradition, which goes well beyond bodily fitness.

Some kinds of acrobatics seem to be fairly ancient, though it’s difficult to be sure exactly what forms people practiced. Tumbling in the basic sense — somersaults of various kinds — is another of those things that can double as a war skill, so it seems to have been common. Other movements, like bridges or handstands, are done more for their own sake, to build flexibility, strength, and balance. I haven’t been able to find out whether more advanced skills like handsprings or flips featured in exercise routines; certainly they would be practiced by actual acrobats, but I personally doubt the average person was doing them just for fitness.

Naturally, we don’t always stick to just one thing at a time. If running is good, and jumping is good, why not combine them? Now you have invented hurdles! The leisured classes most likely to engage in these activities were also not above doing elective grunt labor for the sake of fitness; ancient Greek boxers apparently thought digging was great exercise, and others have chopped wood.

Exercise also bleeds over into the broader category of sport. Any kind of physical game provides a workout; the distinction is merely whether you happen to be getting that workout because you wanted to play a game, or whether you’re play the game in order to improve your fitness. There’s no particular point in trying to separate those two — it only matters for how you present someone deciding to engage in that activity.

Though exercise has frequently been a male-dominated pastime, it’s not wholly so. Women’s health also benefits from fitness . . . but it’s true that people have often worried that too much of it might harm us, or more specifically, our fertility. A fear that is not entirely unfounded; elite female athletes do tend to experience amenorrhea, the absence of a period. But you have to train pretty hard to get that far, and the notion that your uterus might fall straight out of your body if you run a marathon has more to do with sexist assumptions and bad biology than any practical truth. (How else would all those peasant women doing heavy labor manage to have kids?)

Because of these fears, women’s exercise has tended to be lighter: walking, running (at shorter distances than men), and riding are very common. During the Victorian era, activities like archery, cycling, and rowing got added to the approved list. Calisthenics for women were much more of an innovation in that era, promoted by reformers, with much backlash and fear of what the consequences might be.

While exercise can be done in many places, then as now, we like to make it as social activity. The term “gymnasium” comes to us from the Greek institutions where men and boys would work out — naked, as the root of that word indicates — which also doubled as schools more generally. The Romans liked to pair a gym with a bath complex, so they could warm up their muscles and clean themselves off afterward. Over in India, the spiritual aspect of yoga could mean its physical practices were carried out in suitable locations like temples . . . or conversely in the wilderness, as part of a broader ascetic life. European gentlemen of the last few centuries might have rooms for boxing or fencing, or even private swimming pools, as part of their elite clubs. And, of course, where exercise is used to keep soldiers fit in peacetime, you’ll find facilities incorporated into military barracks.

Public gyms for general use, though, seem to be a phenomenon of the nineteenth century onward. And that makes sense: as industrialization and mechanized transport vastly increased the amount of time we spend sitting, as more children went to school and spent their days at desks, we started having to carve out dedicated spaces and times for working our bodies. We put more emphasis on physical education in childhood, and adults started thinking more about the need to move.

Which is my cue to stop typing and go downstairs to work out in my den. I have a goal of being strong enough for a pull-up by the end of the summer, and I want to hit that mark!

This is honestly closer to a theory-type essay, as I’ve already talked about more concrete angles like prostheses and assistive devices (in Year Four), and this time around I’m looking more at the dynamics of presenting physical disability in fiction.

Activists for better representation of disability often object to worldbuilding that imagines magic or advanced technology has erased that issue from existence, and advocate for greater visibility for disabled characters in our stories. I want to take a moment to say: in any setting that doesn’t have such handwavy solutions, quite frankly, disability ought to be vastly more common than it is.

Let’s take the specific example of trachoma and its accompanying condition, trichiasis. It roughens the inside of the eyelid and causes it to turn inward — eyelashes and all — resulting in repeated abrasion of the cornea. Though it was eliminated in the developed world during the 20th century and a 21st-century push has thus far wiped it out in thirty countries where it was still endemic, historically, this has been one of the leading causes of infectious blindness. It ran rampant through army camps and other crowded environments; it spread in cities; it infected people repeatedly throughout the course of their lives, until they lost their vision entirely.

How often have you seen it in a story?

Or consider osteoarthritis. We may occasionally note an elderly character being “stooped” or groaning at their stiff joints, but the reality is that any person whose job involves a lot of heavy manual labor is at high risk of developing such problems . . . and “heavy manual labor” is a great description of agrarian life at any point prior to industrialization. (During industrialization, it depends a bit more on what type of factory you’re working in.) Archaeologists can look at a skeleton and judge what social class that person belonged to just by comparing their age to the wear and tear on their joints: two sets of remains recently found in Pompeii were fairly clearly identifiable as some middle-aged lady of the house and some younger male servant or slave, based on the damage to his bones — and the lack of such damage to hers.

Injury in particular plays a key role here. Just in my lifetime, the tendency to send someone to physical therapy after an accident or surgery has skyrocketed, because we now have a much better idea of how to return the body to full function. But in the past? People often had to return to work as soon as they were anything like physically capable of it, instead of taking time to fully heal — or, if they were wealthy, they got coddled with bed rest that actually made their recovery harder. How often do we see the results of that in fiction, though? Sure, we all know the trope of the character with old injury who can tell when it’s about to rain . . . but we say much less about reduced range of motion, persistent loss of strength, or the ways that compensating for one problem (like an uneven gait) can screw up some other part of your body (like your back).

Of course, this is in part because we complain most about discomfort and limitations when we feel like we shouldn’t be subject to them. If literally everybody around you starts experiencing arthritis by the time they’re thirty because you’re all constantly doing backbreaking labor, then when your own aches and pains begin to set in, that’s more apt to feel like par for the course. It’s a mark of how far medicine has come in the last century that we in the developed world expect we ought to continue to feel good for decades on end.

But also, I suspect that if we were to depict physical disabilities being as widespread as they were in historical reality — and still are, in many parts of the world — it would come across as unrelenting misery porn. If we tried to represent the honest rate of painful and disfiguring scars, missing teeth, deteriorating vision, weak grips, backaches, neck pain, reduced mobility, disturbed digestion, and more that probably afflicted the average rural village, market town, or overcrowded city of the past . . . frankly, I’m horrifying myself just trying to imagine it.

And even if you’re writing science fiction of the sort that imagines a more technological future, this won’t all go away — or at least, it won’t for all of the characters. Anyone on the bottom end of the social scale is liable to experience more disability relative to the elite, who can afford time to heal or expensive treatments and therapies to address their problems. The nature of the problems in question may change, and might include fictional ideas like neurological issues caused by the use of brain implants, but they’re still likely to be there.

I am not, for the record, advocating that half of all characters under the age of forty should have some kind of disability, and every single character above that line. I suspect the result would end up distracting rather than effective — one of those situations where truth winds up seeming less realistic than fiction. But I do think that all of us, not just the disability activists, would benefit from acknowledging more often how much this can be threaded into characters’ lives, without them being explicitly marked out as Characters With Disabilities.

Especially because, when these issues are so widespread, they’re no longer going to define someone’s identity in the same way we might expect today. Having a bum knee or terrible vision or a stomach that regularly sends you to the privy at a run is just going to be how people are. That character can’t walk without a cane? The same is true for six other people in the village. Some disabilities will still stand out — seizures, for example, are going to be rarer, and quite possibly attributed to supernatural causes rather than ordinary life — but many of them will seem like business as usual.

Which means that, in fiction, noting their presence can be done through simple traces of description. Two characters are having a conversation; one of them, upon being given a heavy object to look at, grimaces and transfers it to her stronger hand. The other one, standing up to leave, leans on the arm of his chair and then gently eases his weight onto his right hip. The servant, summoned to escort him out, stops rubbing at the infection reddening their eyes. The narrative doesn’t have to stop and explain that these people have physical problems; it’s just part of the descriptive texture, used to break up the dialogue and exposition.

Am I thinking of these things more right now because I’m moving through my forties? Is that “right hip” example possibly drawn from personal experience, which I only recently mitigated with physical therapy? Nahhhh.

But man, does age give me more sympathy for characters whose bodies don’t work perfectly on command, every time.