The Maiden of All Our Desires, a new historical novel by Peter Manseau, begins with a thrashing storm that “would become the stuff of bards’ tales and poetry”. The blizzard “would only be spoken in frightened whispers”, for it ravaged the land – even “stone churches were said to have vanished in the wind”. Manseau follows the hyperbolic description of the storm with a detailed, yet equally surreal rendering of Mother John, the abbess at Gaerdegen, a wilderness convent: “her body hidden under the shearling blanket that was the privilege of her office, she appeared just then only a head, the skull of a martyr on a lambskin pillow. Still breathing, and already she was the perfect relic: a withered globe of skull-white flesh. Eight brown teeth like rats in a hole.”
A novel set in a 14th-century European convent might sound like a surprising offering from a major American publisher such as Simon & Schuster; one might wonder if such a novel treats faith in a blithe manner, or unfolds with the pulpy feel of an anti-papist tract. The Maiden of All Our Desires does neither, probably arising from the notable pedigree of its author. Manseau is the founding director of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History’s Center for the Understanding of Religion in American History. His previously well-received books include The Jefferson Bible, a scholarly consideration of the third president’s reconfiguring of the New Testament, and Vows, a memoir about his parents: a former nun and priest.
Manseau, then, is not a novelist making a jaunt through matters of faith; he is a writer and thinker whose life has been shaped by the contours of doubt and devotion. In Vows, Manseau notes that “vocations aren’t shaped by heavenly proclamations but earthly influence; not just by portentous Last Suppers or the intricacies of the Latin liturgy, but by breakfast tables and unscripted conversations”.
Such a literary and liturgical sense enables Manseau to wed the ascendant and the base; to recognise that Catholicism, in story and sense, is both physical and abstract – and in that paradox, it holds a unique power.
Although isolated in the wilderness, the Abbey of Gaerdegen exists within a world ravaged by the Black Death. There is no escape from such pain, and Manseau captures the universality of death through his treatment of weather. Wind is ever-present in the book. Wind snuffs out much needed fires, seems to stir discord among the nuns, and carries an increasing cold into the convent. “Snow drifted across the slate roofs of the dormitory, the refectory and the church. It hissed on the twin chimneys of the bakehouse, still hot to the touch with the previous evening’s fire, and it fell on the dark, squat shack between the bakehouse and the cloister.”
In the same way that the convent’s walls are breached by wind, they are also not immune to scandal. The bishop’s court sends an ominous message to the wilderness nuns: “it has come to our attention that the sisters in your care are not sufficiently protected from heresy and error. We need not remind you, I am sure, that ardour and affection for one’s forebears may arrive unexpectedly at idolatry.” The source: the Book of Ursula, a collection of writings by one of the convent’s founding nuns. In her vision, the convent was to be a space open to all who would make the pilgrimage; its status in the wilderness was not to be a fortress, but the edifying conclusion of a grand journey.
Not all agree with her, least of all Fr Francis, a priest who builds a wall around the convent to keep out those who carry the Black Death. He rejects Ursula’s provocative writings, but she is aware of his darkest secrets. The tension rises throughout the novel, palpable in Manseau’s dramatic syntax.
The Maiden of All Our Desires – a stylistic work of historical fiction set in a convent – calls to mind Ron Hansen’s masterful novel, Mariette in Ecstasy. Published in 1991 by HarperPerennial, another significant American publisher, the novel was critically lauded – its stylistic touches and postmodern structure transcending a secular audience’s unease with its deeply Catholic milieu.
In Hansen’s book, young Mariette Baptiste is a beautiful and rich postulant of the Sisters of the Crucifixion convent. The other nuns look at her with suspicion and a fair amount of envy – and both emotions only increase when it appears Mariette is blessed and burdened with stigmata.
As Manseau writes in Vows of his own mother and father, vocation is ultimately a human condition and choice; for those who choose the religious life, sacrifices abound. Desire does not disappear when one devotes their life to Christ. In The Maiden of All Our Desires, Manseau unfolds a folkloric tale with themes eternally relevant to the Church.
A worthy read on its own, Manseau’s novel is also valuable for what it portends: that major secular publishers might continue to showcase work with complex Catholic themes and subjects, written at the highest level of skill.
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