We rarely review novels here, but we couldn’t pass the opportunity to highlight this one. It was a big bestseller and won awards in France, where it was published in 2017, and appears now in English for the first time in a beautiful translation by Susan Emanuel. The novelist, Aline Kiner, died in 2019.
The title may confuse some, as it’s the same title given to the late thirteenth-century Beguine known as Marguerite Porete. Porete was burned at the stake for heresy in Paris in 1310. That year is also the setting for this fiction.
Who were the Beguines? You will find resources on our site, including reviews of two excellent books: Laura Swan’s The Wisdom of the Beguines and Bernard McGinn’s Meister Eckhart and the Beguine Mystics.
Beguines were women who were often regarded as too independent and free-thinking by the men who ran the institutional church. The word “Beguine” means simply a female layperson of religious intensity. These groups of passionate women did not seek ordination but found visionary and unitary experiences with the Divine on their own and in combination with other like-spirited women with whom they shared a dwelling. They deliberately steered away from established convents, which were associated with the rich and highborn. Beguines were also often dedicated to service of the poor and the sick and to talking and writing (controversially, for women, in that time) about knowing God intimately. Great mystics such as Mechthild of Magdeburg, Beatrijs of Nazareth, Hadewijch, and Marguerite Porete were Beguines.
The setting for this novel is a Beguinage — a shared house, where Beguines live with one another — in Paris. Many Beguines were widows, choosing a different life this time around. Here’s how one character, Ade, views her new situation: “The Beguinage is a compromise. A temporary home. She knows that she lives on the margins of this world that hums with laughter, prayer and daily routine. Her home is set apart from the rest, against the outer wall, and there she spends her long silent days, sharing the housekeeping tasks with a young and discreet servant girl. The rest of the time she spends in reading and silent contemplation. But it is difficult to be truly alone here, where hundreds of women live without the harmony imposed by the rules of a convent. They are all so different from each other.”
An abused teenage girl arrives at their door in desperate need. The women take her in and soon discover that a Franciscan friar is pursuing her, desiring to return her to where she’s fled from.
Kiner writes with sensitivity of the religious details of the time and of institutional Catholicism in late medieval Europe. Her research was clearly extensive. Most of all, Kiner’s sensitivity to her characters is what makes her story compelling. For an example of how these qualities are combined in the writing, see the excerpt accompanying this review.
Readers will encounter heretical trials as well as sexual assault, so anyone who should avoid such descriptions is forewarned to turn to another novel. But if you enjoy rebellious religious women and a great story, you should appreciate this book as it relates to the spiritual practices of questing and peace.
