A Canticle to Medieval Women

 I've mentioned that we listen to books together as we travel in our vehicle, downloading them from the library, often repeatedly, until we work our way through. 

We have just finished our most recent tome called Canticle, by Janet Rich Edwards which we both appreciated, although I did moreso than Ruth. A canticle is a song, often a religious song, and this novel is a song of praise to women of courage and faith. 

A review in the Washington Post drew me to the novel and this paragraph sums it up well: 

Edwards, like her late-13th-century heroine, Aleys, is walking a treacherous path. With “Canticle,” her debut novel, she has created a bizarre story of miracles and martyrdom by drawing on equally bizarre stories about medieval mystics such as St. Clare of Assisi, St. Teresa of Avila and St. Catherine of Genoa. Some readers will catch echoes of Lauren Groff’s 2021 novel, “Matrix,” about the 12th-century poet Marie de France, but Edwards’s fidelity to the Christ-saturated imagination of the period is bolder — and, probably, less appealing to those modern readers who want historical women to be sweetened with modern feminist sensibilities like a Communion wafer dipped in honey.

I wouldn't describe the story as bizarre even though it is very different from our perspective of the world today, including the spiritual. I appreciated the many allusions to that era, some of them listed above but also the Beguines. The Beguines were religious lay communities in which the women were devout yet not nuns and were free to leave if they chose. 

As I listened I was reminded of so much I've read about women of that time who found ways to express their faith outside of the often oppressive control of men. They were often mystics who experienced God and Christ in unconventional ways that were viewed as a danger to the patriarchal control of the Church. If they strayed too far from that control their lives could go up in flames -- quite literally. There are also echoes of Hildegard of Bingen and Julian of Norwich in this well written novel. 

We agree that there were portions that could have been been edited to a degree but I'm glad we prevailed to the end. 

                                                            Print of a Beguine Woman from 1489