|
|
|
|
| Catherine
LeVendeur is a young
novice-scholar at the Convent of the Paraclete (Heloise's convent) in
France when we first meet her. She is attractive, learned, willful
and stubborn, characteristics she retains throughout the series.
However, much else changes as the author, Sharan Newman, follows a
changing life, that, even after it seems fairly settled, is constantly
being complicated by difficult and far-away relatives. Catherine
is a merchant's daughter and used to travel and she travels a lot in the
series - to famous sites in France, to the German wine country, to
Scotland and on a pilgrimage to Santiago, Spain. These are not
light-weight journeys where the heroine jumps on a horse and, with one
stop at an inn for color, the next thing the reader knows, she's at her
destination. These journeys are major achievements, with dusty
roads, shared beds at inns (male and female separate), traveling with an
entire entourage if one wants one's own tents and taking weeks or months
of time.
This portrayal of the reality of the medieval world is the best part of these books. The mysteries are sometimes confusing, with their solutions seeming like afterthoughts, but the world the characters live in is always clearly and accurately depicted. She does a particularly excellent job of integrating medieval religious views into the lives of the characters, including views that we reject today, while keeping these people sympathetic. She is not an author who is always finding doom and gloom and bad smells in the Middle Ages; yet her world is not light and fluffy, either, with the good guys living happily ever after. Her scholarship and her knowledge of human nature are both impressively strong. |
| Death Comes As
Epiphany
The Devil's Door The Wandering Arm Strong As Death Cursed in the Blood The Difficult Saint |
