Jessica Knauss’s novel, Seven Noble Knights, brings to life a story from an epic poem that doesn’t exist. The tale of the seven sons of the noble Lara family, killed in vengeance during the tumultuous tenth century, is known to us today first from Alfonso X’s thirteenth-century Estoria_de_España and the Chronicle of 1344. Scholars infer from these two late sources, an original epic poem, whether an indigenous creation or one inspired by the epic poetry of the French, and they debate whether it and other early stories that found their way into the chronicle tradition are wholly imagined or have a basis in historical fact. I have myself written about a different tale from that period found only in later histories, that of Bernardo del Carpio, and I argued that story did have a basis in history, so I was eager to read Knauss’s version of this powerful story.
At first I was thrown off, because I was expecting a historicized version that takes the tale out of its later written form and situates it into the grim tenth century. What Knauss has done instead is to write the lost epic poem into the visual and material world of the thirteenth/fourteenth-century of its sources for it, much like, for instance, T.H. White did with the Arthurian tales in The Once and Future King, which placed later stories about a maybe-fifth-century king in a sort-of late medieval England of the imagination, a kind of no-time no-place. Once I realized what she was doing (and truly, only the five or six of us in the world who have spent too much time thinking about tenth-century Spain would be thrown off in this way), I settled down to enjoy the wild ride Knauss takes us on.
What I liked most about this book, is how true Knauss is to the spirit of her materials, and how uncompromising she is to the values of their time. Seven Noble Knights has the feeling of the epic poem it imagines. This is a world of blood and sex, of vengeance carried out personally by hand. These people are alien to us, what they care about, what makes them angry and how they deal with it, and Knauss allows them to retain this strangeness. Her use of language and her imagery emphasizes this sense of distance. These are not the characters of usual twenty-first century historical fiction, whom we imagine as “three-dimensional” because of their fictive interiority. Knauss’s characters are figures in the way that the characters of medieval literature are figures. We often call (or dismiss) them as stereotypes but I think Knauss’s book shows how powerful this kind of writing can be.
I felt this especially vividly with the character of Doña Lambra, who is the pivot point around whom so much of the action turns. While the centrality of the women to this story might surprise modern readers, it shouldn’t. Mercedes Vaquero, who has written brilliantly about this story and others like it, has argued that one of their roles was to create a space to discuss the fraught question of noble lineage, and women’s roles in creating and perpetuating it, and that women themselves may have been the patrons for these stories. I kept thinking of Vaquero as I was reading, and when I got to the end, lo, I discovered that Knauss had been her PhD student.
I think this novel will appeal to readers searching out a different kind of historical novel than most of what is published right now, a novel that doesn’t “bring you back in time,” but rather immerses you in a strange world and an unusual-to-us kind of story-telling.
I was delighted to be interviewed by Kristen Geaman about my book recently for the Royal Studies Journal blog. You can read the interview and a review of my book here.
I am thrilled by the interest the Royal Studes Journal has shown in Her Father’s Daughter. My argument in the book is that the female royal power I was seeing was not a consequence of personality or chance historical circumstances, but was rather part of the structure of how power was organized. When I was working on the book, I wanted to write it in such a way that it would be useful as a possible model for people thinking about gender and power in places and periods very different from medieval Spain. The Royal Studies Journal has helped me greatly to reach some of that audience.
Medieval historians need to do a better job of talking about race.
I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, at least since last January when I attended a panel on race in medieval European history at the AHA and was part of another panel on “relevance” in the study of the Middle Ages and Early Modern Europe down the street at the MLA. I’ve been thinking about it in a more systematic fashion over the last few months as the Lexicon Project — a group of faculty and students at the University of Chicago who gathered initially to talk about the lexicography of sexuality and gender — has expanded its focus and its community this quarter to discuss race, and as a goad to our discussion, we’ve been reading a range of scholarship in the area.
I have also been thinking about it because instead of working on hagiography and dialogue and nuns, as I thought I’d been doing now, my attention has been called back to the project I began my career as a medievalist with, back to the thirteenth-century archbishop of Toledo, Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada and relations between Christians, Muslims, and Jews. I’m working on two things at the moment — an article on Jiménez de Rada’s globalism, and a longer piece on Jewish and Christian intellectual exchange and competition.
Working on the article has made me realize what an awful lot of evidence historians of medieval Spain have left on the ground, evidence that could be used for a rich and fruitful discussion of race in the Middle Ages. Working on the other project has returned me to something I observed in my first book, Conflict and Coexistence: Archbishop Rodrigo and the Muslims and Jews of Medieval Spain, about the difference between the contemporary historiography of medieval Christian-Jewish relations and the historiography of medieval Christian-Muslim relations. As I wrote in 2004:
“The perceived breakdown in harmony between Jews and Christians is perceived as a puzzle, as a problem, and different factors are adduced by scholars to explain this perplexing state of affairs. By contrast, conflict in relations between Christians and Muslims is taken for granted and seems to need no explanation.”
At the time, the model of difference I was using was that of alterity, inspired somewhat by David Tracy’s Dialogue with the Other and Julia Kristeva’s Strangers to Ourselves. I think now that race might have been a more effective and sharper tool for understanding the difference between those two historiographies. Put simply, most of us who study Christian-Jewish relations in medieval Iberia are Jews of one kind or another. We’re of an age that we grew up, one way or another, in the long shadow of the Nazi racialist project. The one thing, perhaps, that unites us is that we know we do not want to be a race. We know what happens when Jews become a race. We’re just like you! we say. We’re white! We’re European/American/Canadian! It’s weird that you guys did all those awful things to us but we’re willing to let bygones be bygones if you let us into your universities! And we’ve been very leery of allowing race to be one of our categories of analysis for interpreting the Middle Ages, and we pretzel ourselves into knots trying to avoid it, as the news mounts up from the Tree of Life, from desecrated cemeteries, from Twitter and 8chan, that a race is not something you choose for yourself; it is something others ascribe to you.
And into this historical moment comes Geraldine Heng’s The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. I remember the man who became my doctoral advisor, Jocelyn Hillgarth, lamenting in the very first session of the very first class I took with him that no one wrote big books any more, no one took risks or made big arguments. This is a big book. And what it offers us is a way to cut through the anxiety medieval historians have felt about speaking of race in the Middle Ages — fears of anachronism, fears of a teleology that begins with us, obsession with biology, with vocabulary, with colour, with DNA, all these things that have made us wishy-washy and hesitant.
Race has no substantive content, Heng says. Race has no substantive content. Rather, it is “one of the primary names we have — a name we retain for the strategic, epistemological, and political commitments it recognizes –that is attached to a repeating tendency, of the greatest import to demarcate human beings through differences among humans that are selectively essentialized as absolute and fundamental in order to distribute positions and powers differentially to human groups.”(p. 3, 27) I’ll emphasize some of words I think are key in this formulation: Race is a name. The phenomena it describes are repeating and grave. It demarcates differences that are essentialized as foundational. These differences are used as the basis for differential distributions of power.
Race is not a single “thing.” It is a structural relationship for the articulation and management of human differences.” (p.3, 27) And it is one of the factors that creates the European subject.
This is not a review of Heng’s book. For one thing, I haven’t finished reading it. I’m sure there are places where I will disagree with this interpretation or that — I can already see a few spots where my own argument would be different. That’s not the point. I don’t take this as the last word. I take it rather as an invitation do further work, and as a gift of a powerful tool that we can use for understanding when differences that are religious or ethnic or physical or gendered become racialized (and when they don’t or haven’t and how this changes or doesn’t over time). Talking about race in the Middle Ages is not going to be about finding a particular word used, or a physiognomy described, though those may be the clues we use as evidence. Each case has to be argued on its own merits. We will disagree.
It was lucky and maybe surprising that I liked Estella so much, given that this was my view of it for most of the time I was there:
But Estella is lovely. Imagine the shell of a soft boiled egg once you’ve knocked the top off, leaving the sides jagged and craggy, and after you’ve eaten the egg out of it. Now imagine a town nestled in the bottom of the shell, with a river twisting through it.
In the Middle Ages, there were castles on many of these hills, protecting the town, which was founded in 1090 by King Sancho Ram irez of Navarre by annexing the fortified Basque settlement of Lizarra. The king’s plan was to move the main road, which is also the pilgrimage road to Compostela, out of the difficult hills above, so it could run more easily down through the flat. He encouraged settlers from France and also Jews to come live there, and they did, settling in what became three adjacent walled communities, and creating an important trading hub.
I got a strong sense of that medieval city, especially on the side of the river where my albergue was, right on the pilgrimage road, underneath the old Jewish quarter, pressed up against the hill. In the photo above, the Camino is the street that runs behind those two cars. The ground floors of many of the buildings that run along it are very old, even medieval, as you can see from the two behind those cars. To the right is the palace of the Navarrese kings, whose first floor dates to the late twelfth century, a rare example of civic Romanesque architecture. More on that soon. In the background to the right, the tall tower you can see belongs to the church of San Pedro de la Rua. Above it, on the hill, was one of the castles I mentioned, and when it was destroyed by the Castilians in 1572 in their war against Navarre, it fell on the twelfth-century cloister of the church, destroying half of it. I wasn’t able to get into the church or cloister (hello, Spain, and churches that are not open when they say they will be) but I did use some of my strength to climb the many steps up to the facade. It was worth it.
You can see it is as much fortress as church. Estella has been on one frontier or another during most of its existence, most recently in the nineteenth century, during the Carlist Wars.
I think when most of us look at a building like this, we think things like “Gothic” “French” “European”. Maybe that polylobed arch gives some of us pause. Pilgrims will have seen one very like it walking through Cirauqui earlier that day, but others might think more of buildings that look like this:
This is the Tin Mal mosque, in Morocco, built to commemorate the Almohad leader Ibn Tumart in 1156, four years before Notre Dame was started in Paris and a few decades before San Pedro de la Rua was constructed. The Almohad Empire extended from Africa through the southern half of Spain at this time.
Look closer at some of the figures on the portal, like these two facing griffins. See the detail still preserved on their wings, and what looks like maybe traces of paint.
Compare it to this silk roundel originally wrapped around the relics of Saint Siviard and now in the treasury of Sens.
Imagine what it would have looked like if the portal had all been painted. Not the somewhat austere, stern, pure stone we see today but a riot of colour, more like a series of silk textile borders. I also like the little stone guys on thrones. I’ve never seen that before.
It’s not a church, but the Romanesque palace has some interesting sculpture too.
This capital shows Roland fighting against the giant Ferragut, part of the tale of Charlemagne in Spain found in the Pseudo-Turpin chronicle. Their battle supposedly took place outside Nájera, a few days further on the pilgrimage road.
I love the detail you can see here on their shields and their chainmail.
Here is Ferragut himself. Evidently he and Roland paused their fight many times, to discuss the finer points of their theological differences.
But I had other reasons to be interested in Estella. This town, like many others on the pilgrimage road to Compostela, had an important Jewish community throughout the Middle Ages, and when I wrote Pilgrimage, my historical novel about the twelfth-century Camino, I set an important scene among the Jews of Estella. If you have read the novel, it is the moment when Gebirga is travelling with Yusuf, a Mozarabic Christian, and two Jewish traders. They stay with a Jewish family in Estella over Shabbat, much to Gebirga’s discomfort. That evening, their prayers are interrupted by news that their slaughterhouse, down by the river, was on fire. They confront a Christian mob, whose leader tells them a story of seeing a Jew throw a crucifix into the river. At that very moment, he says, the Jewish slaughterhouse caught on fire. When asked who it was he saw, the ringleader points to Yusuf who takes to his heels. Half the mob follows him, and a brawl erupts between the other half and the Jews. It ends in a draw, but Yusuf remains missing.
When I came to Estella, I wanted to see how well what I had invented matched what was there. I based many features of this episode on stories about the Jews of Estella, including a story that the Jewish women of Estella had their own synagogue, and the anti-Semitic legend of the Jew throwing a crucifix in the river. My source for a lot of my knowledge about Jewish communities along the Camino is David Gitlitz and Linda Davidson’s wonderful The Pilgrimage Road to Santiago: The Complete Cultural Handbook
The Jews of Estella were moved around during the four hundred years they lived in Estella, but when Gebirga would have stayed with them, around 1120, their community was on the hillside above the pilgrimage road and the river, up behind the albergue where I was staying. You can see a few house here in the photo, but much of the area is open, and occupied by a bypass highway, just out of sight beyond these houses. Its emptiness makes it easier to remember and imagine the lost community, easier for me than in Toledo or Barcelona.
The church of Santa Maria, here, was built on the site of the synagogue where the men would have prayed in Gebirga’s day. It was taken from by the king and given to the bishop of Pamplona to build this church in 1144.
To the left, and facing where the Jewish community would have been, was this big pile, now an old folks home, but originally a Dominican monastery, built in 1258. Those who study relations between Christians and Jews in Spain know that in the thirteenth century, Dominicans, the “Order of Preachers,” gained the right to be able to force Jews to listen to them preach. In this community, evidently they also taught Arabic. I have read about this and known about it for years; in Estella for the first time I could feel what it would have been like to have this Dominican presence imposed on your community.
This church has been locked since the late nineteenth century so all you can see is its facade. It sits right on the pilgrimage road into town, opposite the river. It is the church of the Holy Sepulchre, and it was originally built on the site where the Jew was supposed to have thrown the crucifix into the river. This facade dates from the fourteenth century, but as you’ll be able to see, its creators had their minds very firmly on the Jewish community that surrounded it even then.
The tympanum at the centre shows scenes from Holy Week — the Last Supper on the bottom; the Crucifixion at the top, the cross flanked by Mary and John; and in the middle, the harrowing of Hell, the women at the tomb, and Christ appearing before Mary Magdalene. But look at the figures holding up the tympanum.
They’re Jews. It’s a disquieting image and there are many ways to interpret the two figures. They hold up the Crucifixion and Resurrection the way what Christians call the Old Testament holds up the New. Perhaps Jewish taxes paid for the church — given the location of the church this would not be surprising. It may not even be an entirely negative depiction. At a time when Jews were increasingly being marginalized in Spain, their physical presence here makes a case for them to have a place, however fraught and marginalized, in Christendom.
Estella has had a troubling and difficult history, only a small part of which I have talked about here. It is also beautiful, only a small part of which I have shown you here.
Today I fly to Pamplona via Madrid and on Monday I begin my first stage on the Camino Francés. I’ll be walking for thirty days, trying to reach Santiago de Compostela, where I will give the Apostle a big hug and then come home.
Why am I doing it? Maybe the real question is, what took me so long? I’m a historian of medieval Spain, but my interest in the Camino has always been more personal than professional. I first learned about it when my mother gave me (I think it was a loan, but I never gave it back, ha ha) Laurie Dennett’s A Hug for the Apostle when I was in graduate school. My doctoral adviser was more bemused by my Camino interests than approving, but when he retired, he have me his copy of Gerogiana Goddard King’s three-volume The Way of Saint James. When I began teaching at Chicago, one of my first classes was on pilgrimage across religious traditions, and I also taught classes on medieval pilgrimage, using Nancy Frey’s wonderful Pilgrim Stories: On and Off the Road to Santiago. I even published a historical novel about the twelfth-century pilgrimage that used the creation of the well-known Pilgrim’s Guide to Compostela as part of its frame.
I think that was part of the problem. I know too much about the history of this pilgrimage to be moved by druids and grails and magical swords. I know all about rites of passage and liminoid phenomena and communitas and what happens when you abandon your old structures and social bonds. Was I going to be the grumpy pilgrim in the corner rolling my eyes when people get a bit new age for my tastes and resisting camino families, angels etc? (Probably) Who wants that? Another reason was that there was so much in Spain that I wanted to visit, and see, and think about. I couldn’t bear the thought of being on the Camino 2km away from somewhere I wanted visit and being too tired to walk there and back. And, well, I’m okay now but I used to get really homesick.
So why now? I finally have the time. It was telling that the first moment I had time to do this, this was the first thing I thought of doing. I have two goals in mind. First is that I want to see if I can do it, if I can walk that far. It will be about 700 km. Second and more important is that I want to see what it feels like to move through this landscape at foot pace. What do I see? What do I learn?
I don’t know if I will keep posting when I am on my journey or if this will be it, but you can follow me on Instagram where I will probably/possibly post some photos at least. or not. How about a couple of photos now? Here’s pretty much everything I plan to bring. (Except the cat. I am not bringing the cat.)
“Yadda Yadda, you’re pack is too big, yadda yadda, you’ve got too much stuff.” La la la I can’t hear you. Here’s the full pack.
Fromista I thought a word about the sources in English that I used for my historical novel, PILGRIMAGE might be interesting both for readers, and also for modern pilgrims who have tackled (or dream of tackling) the Camino to Santiago de Compostela. One of the wonders of the Camino Frances is not only that it is such an old track, but that there has been so much written about it over the centuries. I think knowing something of the history that created the road only enhances the journey. And it is not a history primarily of dates and politics, but one of art and architecture and real people with hopes and dreams and fears tracking off into the unknown (to them) world. My own heroine takes a roundabout route before joining the road through France via Arles and Toulouse. She takes the Camino Aragones before joining — after a few plot-required detours — the Camino Frances.
The first source pilgrims who are interested in the history and origins of the route usually encounter is the engaging and wonderful twelfth-century Pilgrim’s Guide to Compostela. I link to the Italica Press translation by William Melczer, which is also available in a Kindle edition, for those pilgrims who would like to carry it en route. I would not suggest you replace your modern guidebook with it, however. Let’s just say that Aimery Picaud was a little optimistic when he described the length of each stage…
The Miracles of St. James accompanies the Pilgrim’s Guide in manuscripts, and is now available in its own translation. The gem of this book is its translation of the medieval sermon “Veneranda dies.” If you want an idea of how they thought of the Camino in the twelfth-century, and the origin of traditions (and complaints) that are still relevant today, this is the place to look. Exerienced pilgrims will discover many differences, of course, but I think you will be surprised to see how the more things change, the more they stay the same.
If your primary interest in the Camino is its art and architecture, and if you want to know more about what you might see along all the main roads in France and Spain, you might like Pilgrim’s Guide to Santiago de Compostela: A Gazeteer by Paula Gerson and Annie Shaver-Crandell. I found it an invaluable resource for imagining my heroine’s journey.
A resources designed more for the modern pilgrim, because it describes what you will see stage by stage, is David Gitlitz and Mary-Jane Davidson’s The Pilgrimage Road to Santiago: The Complete Cultural Handbook. It doesn’t provide trail directions or the addresses of albergues but it is an excellent source for explaining what it is you will actually see on the road and what it all means. I returned to it over and over again while writing.
I saw this documentary, “Walking the Camino” last night at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. I think what moved me more than anything, beyond the beautiful scenery which I am already familiar with for the most part, was the way the faces of the pilgrims were transformed as their journey progressed. They all radiated a kind of peace and clarity you hadn’t known they were missing when they left. It is the advantage of watching a documentary with real pilgrims, rather than a movie like “The Way.” You can’t perform that kind of internal change; it must come from within. The film is on for one more night in Chicago, so catch it before it leaves. It is also showing elsewhere in a number of Canadian and American cities.
I have been interested in the Camino since by chance I read Laurie Dennett’s A Hug for the Apostle back in the 80s. She did her walk before Paulo Coelho’s Pilgrimage and other popularizing accounts transformed it from an almost forgotten walk known to enthusiasts and Spaniards into the huge phenomenon it is today. I loved the book, read everything I could about the road, medieval and modern, and dreamed about doing the walk some day.
But I haven’t done it yet (this is the first question people ask me when they discover I have written a historical novel about the medieval Camino so I might as well get it off the table) and I don’t know if I will. It is not the physical challenge that scares me; that I welcome (though I may be deluding myself). There is the problem of fitting it into an academic schedule of course. Once, it was the fear of the frustration of missing some medieval gem a few kilometres off the road because I am tired and have to get to Pamplona or Ponferrada by nightfall. But I return often enough now, that should not be an issue. I have criss-crossed the road numerous times in different places on research trips to Spain, reading medieval manuscripts in towns where medieval pilgrims once walked and modern ones trace their footsteps. I was going to add “and as a tourist” but if I want to be honest, I am never just a tourist in Spain. Everywhere I go, I am thinking about the country’s past, learning its history from its geography. And that, I think, is the real problem. I fear I know the land too well, that I won’t be able to bring to the Camino the open heart I need, ready to learn all it has to teach. I’ll be the annoying one in the albergue, debunking the myths. I worry that to be a true pilgrim, I need to go to Japan or Mexico or somewhere less freighted for me.
But it still calls to me. I still want to do it. And one day, maybe I will.
At last! My historical novel about the pilgrimage road to Compostela in Spain in the 12th century was released on Monday. I’ve been telling people all over the internet about it, and even added a page here, but this is my first chance to do a full blog post. So I have a whole bunch of links for you.
First is the book’s Goodreads page. If you have an account, do drop by and take a look. Reviews are always very welcome.
Next, I made a Pinterest page showing images from the different places my heroine visits on her journey, all keyed to a map. If you zoom in on the map, you get a better idea of the different locations.
I joined Twitter. My handle is @lucykpick. If you follow me, I will follow you, la-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la-la.
And last but not least, here is a link to the publisher’s website where you can buy a copy all your very own with free shipping within the United States. Yes, it will be available in bookstores, in Canada, and as an ebook very soon. Believe me, I will let you know!
She’d earn her place on this earth for her contributions to the history and culture of medieval Spain alone, but Cynthia Robinson is also an author of compelling and engaging contemporary literary fiction. I read the first few chapters of this in draft, and I am really glad to see it has been published. So check out Tatiana’s Wedding if you are looking for a good read. Lovely cover too:
As I wrote last October, my first novel, Pilgrimage, is going to be published by Cuidono Press, a new small press based in Brooklyn (I think those of you who enjoy the Middle Ages might be interested in its first released book, A Place of Light, on the origins of the Abbey of Fontevraud.) I am delighted to let you all know that my novel will be released this June.
And I think it is finally time for me to let you know what it is about. People who write talk about “conference pitches,” “elevator pitches,” etc. This is my current “dust-jacket pitch”:
For the rest of twelfth-century Europe, Spain was a far-off and exotic place, rich in silks, ivory, and gold, full of Muslims and Jews, and raging with battles between rival kings and kingdoms. It was also home to the mystical Christian holy site of Compostela at the western edge of the known world, shrine of Saint James. The saint’s tomb drew a perpetual wave of pilgrims, coming for adventure, seeking a miracle from the saint, or performing penance to expiate an old sin.
PILGRIMAGE is the story of one of those pilgrims. Gebirga of Flanders, the blind, dispossessed daughter of martyred Saint Godleva. She flees her callous family with a pack of pilgrims that includes a count’s daughter, bound for marriage, and a mysterious messenger with an unknown agenda, all bound for Compostela. The journey takes Gebirga from her home on the edge of the North Sea across the kingdoms of France and into the Iberian Peninsula, where she is caught up the swirling winds of political change, from restless, power-hungry kings and queens, to the Roman Pope. Beneath all the birthing of nations, churches, and ideas, PILGRIMAGE is a story of a young woman struggling with her station in life and trying to find her place in the world.
And speaking of dust-jackets, we are still working on the cover, but in the meantime, I want to point you in two directions. The first is to look up at the image in the header of this blog, shot by me in Spain at a place where one of the major scenes in the novel takes place. I discussed this place in my very first blog post, The Image in my Header. Next, look down. This is a painting I bought at the Hyde Park Art Fair several years ago because it reminded me of Gebirga’s journey from Flanders to Spain. I like to think those are the Pyrenees in the distance.
