Aude is caught between worlds but has not yet found home.
When Lady Aude encounters Eleanor of Aquitaine on the wharfs of Antioch, the queen is on crusade, but Aude is returning home. The daughter of a French crusader and an Armenian mother, Aude grew up on an estate outside of Jerusalem. To earn her place in the queen’s entourage, Aude begins to tell her own story, how she came to leave the land of her birth and how she vowed to return almost three decades later. Across those years, from the Holy Land to Flanders and beyond, she witnessed political upheaval and only slowly began to wrest control over her own life. While Aude weaves her story, events unfold around the queen and her companions, and Eleanor takes center stage in her own version of an unhappy marriage that will have its own dramatic personal and political repercussions.
Lucy Pick is a historian of the thought and culture of medieval Spain who has published on Christian, Muslim, and Jewish relations and the intersection of gender, religion, and royal power. She taught for over twenty years at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. Her previous novel, Pilgrimage (Cuidono Press, 2014), set in medieval Flanders and Spain, explores friendship, betrayal, miracles, healing, and redemption on the road to Santiago de Compostela. Intersecting with Pilgrimage in a key moment, The Queen’s Companion offers not a sequel but a parallel exploration of the lives of women in the Middle Ages.
ISBN 9781944453268
$18.00 paperback, 278 pages
July 8, 2025
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