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By Nancy Bilyeau
Pope Benedict XVI made it
official last Thursday: An 11th century Benedictine nun named Hildegard Von Bingen—mystic, writer, musician, philosopher and naturalist—is now a saint. She
is also considered a feminist and once wrote, “Woman may be made from man, but no man can be
made without a woman."
A few years ago I bought a CD
of Hildegard’s music at The Cloisters of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Listening to it often inspired me while I wrote my historical thriller, The Crown.
This was the life of a most
unusual woman:
1.) Hildegard was given to
the church at age 8. She was born at Bockelheim on the Nahe, the tenth child of
a German count who historians believe was a military man in the service of Meginhard of
Spanheim. Hildegard was sent to be instructed by Meginhard’s sister, Jutta, a nun who lived in
an enclosed set of rooms, referred to as a vault, in a Benedictine monastery. Hildegard
took vows herself at age 15.
2.) Sickly most of her life,
she made it to age 81. As a child she was often too weak to walk and sometimes
could not see. As an adult she could be in bed, paralyzed, for days. Historians
now believe she suffered from severe migraine.
3.) Hildegard said she had
visions of God her whole life. The first “shade of the living light” came at
age 3 and the visitations never stopped. She
described one as “Heaven was opened and a fiery light of exceeding brilliance
came and permeated my whole brain and inflamed my whole heart and my whole
breast, not like a burning but like a warming flame.” At age 43, she said God
told her to “write down what you see and hear” and for the first time revealed
her visions to the world.
4.) Hildegard obtained power
and sometimes used it to defy church authority. When Jutta died, Hildegard was
elected “magistra” of her community of nuns. Near the end of her life she was ordered to dig up the body of a young man buried at the
monastery because he had been excommunicated, but she refused.
5.) Hildegard wrote nine
books, seventy poems, seventy-two songs, and a play. Her books are in print and her music is widely performed
today.
Here is one of her songs,
called "Vision," on the CD The Music Of Hildegard von Bingen by
Richard Souther on Angel/EMI.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M48_LZUpo0Q
6.) The Pope authorized Hildegard to preach in public. It was extremely unusual for medieval nuns to leave their enclosed orders or to make public statements, but Pope Eugenius III was consumed with his battle against the Cathar heresies. He needed Hildegard's help. She took her preaching very seriously, calling on the Holy Roman Emperor and church leaders to reform their faith and halt abuses.
7.) She was considered the
“Dear Abbey” of the 12th century. Bishops, nobles, monks, mayors,
they all wrote letters to Hildegard seeking advice. She wrote to one monk: “Just as a mirror, which
reflects all things, is set in its own container, so too the rational soul is
placed in the fragile container of the body. In this way, the body is governed
in its earthly life by the soul, and the soul contemplates heavenly things
through faith.”
8.) Hildegard wrote approvingly
about sex. She described it as “a sensual delight” that “summons forth the
emission of the man’s seed.”
9.) Hildegard was a botanist.
She studied the natural sciences and used herbs,
tinctures and “precious stones” as healing medicines. She wrote two treatises on medicine and natural history, known in English as Book of Simple Medicine and Book of Composed Medicine, between 1151 and 1161.
10.) Pope Benedict turns to
Hildegard’s wisdom in times of crisis. Speaking of the sexual scandals of the
Catholic Church in 2010, the German-born pope said, "In the vision of Hildegard, the face of the church is stained with dust...Her garment is torn by the sins of priests. The way she saw and expressed it is the way we have experienced it this year."
I love the cover of The Crown.
Its artistry, its mood of eerie Renaissance beauty, go a long way toward conveying what my novel is about.
A writer for Barnes&Noble's blog, Unabashaedly Bookish, contacted me to find out how The Crown's cover was created. Here is the interview. As I told Melissa Walker: "In my book, 'crown' has many meanings. It is literal—a crown is a
driving force of the thriller plot. But also drama springs from my
character’s feelings of fear and distrust for the man who wears the
monarch’s crown: Henry VIII. Crowns come up in other ways too, in the
theme and in the religious symbolism that becomes very important. So I
feel that the cover of my book ties everything together in a smart and
very beautiful way."
To read the entire interview, and to "meet" the Touchstone Books designers who created this beauty, go to:
http://bookclubs.barnesandnoble.com/t5/Unabashedly-Bookish-The-BN/Cover-Stories-The-Crown-by-Nancy-Bilyeau/ba-p/1329861
Being Book Pregnant
Amid the Moet-popping highs and Kleenex-box-emptying lows of publishing my first novel there’s one thing I’ve come to depend on because it never wavers: the support of other writers.
I don’t care for the word community. For me it’s weighted with a certain psycho-babblish softness, unlike those crisp, hard Saxon words I adore. Or perhaps hearing community takes me back to my first job as a journalist, covering planning & zoning meetings that stretched to midnight. As council members bickered over watershed boundaries, I chewed the inside of my mouth to stay alert.
Yet when I crack open Websters’ Third (unabridged of course) and read the definition of community I realize how precisely it fits: “A body of individuals organized into a unit usually with awareness some unifying trait.” Ah, Websters’…
Writing is one hell of a unifying trait. I discovered that in workshops taught by novelist Rosemarie Santini and, later, Russell Rowland, and particularly in the invite-only screenwriter group called 5150 created and run by Max Adams (the number is police code for “involuntary psychiatric hold” and yes, it’s apropos).
Then, late last year, my friend and co-blogger Sam Thomas (The Midwife’s Tale: A Mystery; 2013) pulled me into a private Facebook group named Book Pregnant, populated by writers whose debut books were due to arrive in 2012 or 2013.
I was one of the first to “drop” when my historical thriller pubbed on January 10th. My fellow “preggers,” as we sometimes call one another, posted links to my book reviews and blog posts. They bought The Crown and reviewed it on amazon, goodreads, and elsewhere. On our members’ only Facebook board, I found cheers and hugs, wisecracks and tough love as well as generous doling of publishing-savvy advice. We have jobs, spouses and children, mortgages due and houses for sale, ailing parents and doctor appointments. We’re from every part of the country: Virginia, New York, Ohio, Montana, Illinois, South Carolina, Texas, California, you name it. And we never stop checking in.
It was Book Pregnant that came to my rescue last month, after The Chicago Tribune published an author profile on a Saturday morning… or did it? The reporter told me her story would run that day, but, sitting in my New York City apartment, frantically searching the newspaper website, I just came up with zip. After I posted an “SOS” on Book Pregnant, member Amy Sue Nathan (The Glass Wives, 2013), who lives in a Chicago suburb, went out and bought the newspaper. Not only did she confirm the existence of “Tudor England Beckons Debut Author,” but she got herself photographed holding up the newspaper.
This week Amy struck again, with a lovely post on Women’s Fiction Writers entitled “How Reading a Historical Thriller About a Nun Helped Me Write Women’s Fiction About a Jewish Family.” Going out of her usual zone of reading turned out to be useful: "So, while a young nun was chasing secrets all over England, and I was learning things about the Catholic Church, kings and nuns and monks, I was also internalizing a deft hand for setting, conflict, mystery, and even a little bit of romantic tension." Awww, thanks Amy. (To read her whole blog post, go to http://bit.ly/IirJ5u)
Amy is right. I’ve already inhaled the exquisite historical novels “At the Mercy of the Queen,” by Anne Barnhill, and “The Sister Queens,” by Sophie Perinot. But these two were in my wheelhouse, frankly. I just bought The Rules of Inheritance, a dazzling memoir of harrowing loss written by Book Pregnant member Claire Bidwell Smith. I don’t read that many memoirs--and here I am, hooked at once. The book begins with Claire as a freshman in college; a parent has just visited. I share a passage on page 3:
“My mother worked hard to close the new distance, acting chipper, and I tried to fill the gap too, telling her about my classes and my roommate, Christine. That night we ate dinner in an Italian restaurant in town. She ordered two glasses of wine, let me have one. Around the room two or three other students sat at tables with their parents, and for no real reason I felt embarrassed for all of us.”
This, then, is my community. I won’t always be “Book Pregnant,” but I hope to keep checking in with these amazing writers for a good long time to come.
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Some of the members of Book Pregnant blog about our experiences as debut authors. See the posts at http://bookpregnant.blogspot.com/
A new review from luxuryreading just hit my inbox and I'm in tears. In a good way. Reviews like this make all the working vacations and 5 a.m. writing sessions worth it:
" Bilyeau’s prose is beautifully constructed without feeling contrived; it is easy to fall into the story and stay there for hours. As the story relies heavily on centuries of history, her descriptions are woven into each chapter with a precision that can enlighten even those least familiar with the background while never faltering in her quest to entertain."
For the review in its entirety: http://luxuryreading.com/thecrown/
I'm extremely grateful for the bloggers' response to my first novel. Each time I read a review I'm struck by the beautiful designs of these sites, the depth of the bloggers' knowledge of historical fiction, and most of all their passion for reading.
Each review and interview has helped me along the way. It was one of the first reviews, by Devourer of Books, that made me realize that I'd found my place online.
Here's what she wrote on Jan. 9, the day before my novel went on sale.
The Crown by Nancy Bilyeau
Published by Touchstone, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Joanna Stafford’s family has been repeatedly touched by scandal. First her uncle is executed for treason, and now her beloved cousin Margaret is condemned to be burned at the stake for her part in an uprising against Henry VIII and his persecution of the old (Catholic) ways. Even absent her family connections, Joanna is a suspicious figure as a novice Dominican nun in a time when the King has broken with the Pope and is shutting down religious houses throughout the country. Between the family treason and the religious leanings, Joanna finds herself in great trouble when she becomes involved in a commotion during Margaret’s execution. Imprisoned in the tower, along with her beloved father, Joanna is offered a single way to save both herself and her father by Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester: she must return to her convent and find the crown worn by the Saxon King Athelstan. As soon as Joanna returns, however, people begin turning up dead, complicating her mission and making her wonder just what this relic really is. The Crown would best be classified as a historical thriller, but to my relief, Bilyeau’s writing style is much more closely aligned to the historical fiction genre than to the thriller genre, avoiding the short chapters with cliffhanger endings that are a hallmark of many thrillers. Bilyeau develops her characters well; Joanna is certainly a fully-fledged person and, although the reader does not have access into the minds of the other characters, all of the secondary characters are complex enough to be realistic as well. Even Gardiner manages to avoid being a two-dimensional villain. Each chapter has rich historical detail interwoven with the story, bringing a sense of authenticity, without ever devolving into info-dump territory. The storyline Bilyeau created for The Crown is fascinating as well. Even while Joanna is in the tower the action continues to move forward and the reader begins to get a sense of the political intrigue occurring throughout the court and the religious orders. The legend of Athelstan and his crown is teased out perfectly, enough information is given to keep the reader from becoming frustrated, but enough is also withheld to keep the level of suspense high. The Crown may be a debut novel, but it is a fantastic example of the historical thriller drama. If that’s what you’re in the mood for, I highly recommend picking up The Crown.
Here's the review on the website, plus the comments below: http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/2Nh4yH/www.devourerofbooks.com/2012/01/the-crown-by-nancy-bilyeau-book-review
All I can do is say, Thank you.
Literary New England, a wonderful show on blogtalkradio, interviews me on Monday, March 5th, at 8 pm. Other authors on the show: Taylor Polites on The Rebel Wife and Howard Frank Mosher on The Great Northern Express. And there will be fun chat about Dr. Seuss as well.
I'm on the show because I once lived in New England--Connecticut, to be exact--but anyone can listen by clicking on this link below. And there will be giveaways!
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/literarynewengland/2012/03/06/taylor-polites-howard-frank-mosher-nancy-bilyeau
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