My favorite way to learn history is to come across it via fiction. Of course, since my favorite kind of history is not the chronicle of kings and queens, but everyday history–what people ate, how they lived, what they did to get away from it all–it is these details and quirks of history that stay with me. For example, in Laura Kinsale’s FOR MY LADY’S HEART–for my money, one of the best medieval romances ever written–the hero is a knight, the heroine is far above him in worldly stature: she is a princess. On the run from danger, it is the two of them against the world. One scene in the book has her giving him an orange and a stick of violet-scented sugar that made up part of her meal. And this is a paragraph from that scene: He sucked the fruit, allowing the rich bitter juice to run on his tongue. He’d had oranges in Aquitaine a few times, at feasts and Christmas–but to eat one every day as she did was something utterly beyond his experience. And the penidia: he’d never tasted white sugar but once, a score and more Christmas gone, a child at the high…