Award for The Crown

Stuart MacAllister, the author and U.K. book blogger Sir Read-A-Lot, just announced a new award, the Golden Hammer & Anvil Shield, for novels whose stories "are impeccably crafted, where authors have taken care to ensure their manuscript is properly edited ... where the story evokes thought and emotion long after the final sentence has been read." "The Crown is one of four winners. Read announcement here.

Thank you, Sir Read-A-Lot. :)

Sister Joanna’s Home

By Nancy Bilyeau

In the town of Dartford, a 40-minute train ride south of London Charing Cross, is a building called the Manor Gatehouse. Inside you will find a registration office to record the births, marriages, and deaths that occur in Kent. This handsome red-brick building, fronted by a garden, is also a popular place to book a wedding reception. “It looks amazing in the official pictures,” gushed one satisfied bride in a website testimonial.

But when I first walked up that path to the Gatehouse, I was filled with awe, and definitely not because I was planning a wedding. I was thinking of who stood on this same piece of ground six centuries ago. Because it was then a Catholic priory—a community of women who constituted the sole Dominican order in England before the dissolution of the monasteries—and it is where I chose to tell the story of The Crown.

The Gatehouse of Henry VIII's Manor

This is where Sister Joanna Stafford, my half-English, half-Spanish protagonist, prayed, and sang, and wept, and struggled.

I didn't create a Catholic novice as a protagonist for my book because of a religious or political agenda. A lifelong Tudor fanatic, I felt I had no choice but to set a story in the 16th century. I wanted to write about someone different, and so I plunged into researching the life of a young nun at the most tumultuous time in the Dissolution of the Monasteries. What would it be like to have your way of life taken from you--would you try to stop the destruction, or accept the inevitable? 

At one time, like many others, I accepted a series of "truths" about life in the time of Henry VIII: people did not often live to old age; women were rarely educated outside of the royal family or high aristocracy; women outside of the court of the king, and the carnal grasp of the king, were not as interesting to our modern sensibilities; the monastic life was in decline, most likely corrupt, and deserved to be ended; and nuns were either forced to take vows or ended up in convents because they were not as "good" as the women who married--ie, they were rejects. 

My years of research revealed to me how wrong all of those stereotypes were.

The true story of one woman's life, Prioress Elizabeth Cressner, illuminates some of the complex truths.   A "good and virtuous woman," she was the leader of the priory in Dartford for 50 years; she died in December 1536 at somewhere between 75 and 80 years of age, just as Henry VIII was putting intense pressure on the monasteries to submit to his will.

Edward III

Dartford Priory had been founded with great care by Edward III, although the idea of establishing a house for Dominican sisters is attributed to Edward II. Did he feel some obligation to carry out the wish of his deposed father? Impossible to know. Once the pope approved the founding of the order, four Dominican sisters were recruited from France, for whose expenses 20 pounds was paid from the Exchequer.

The English priory soon established a reputation for "strict discipline and plain living." Dartford was known for the value put on education and contained a library of books. It also drew aristocratic nuns, even royalty, most famously Princess Bridget of York, the daughter of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville.

Prioress Elizabeth Cressner took on her tasks with great energy and a bold temperament. She executed wills for people in the community and appointed priests to celebrate Mass in the parish church and masters to oversee the local almshouse for the poor. She administered much of the property owned by the priory, even though it was technically the job of the friars assigned there.

In the 1530s, Thomas Cromwell was turning a speculative eye on the monasteries. Undaunted, Prioress Elizabeth sent Henry VIII's minister a series of firm letters over a recent appointment of a certain Friar Robert Stroddel as president at the Dartford community. The prioress found him unkind and even dishonest.

The prioress wrote Cromwell:

"And now of late I understand {Stroddel} hath purchased letters of your good lordship under our most gracious founder's seal to be president here the term of his life, by feigned and untrue suggestion, for as much as he hath governed the office so well, as he himself reporteth."

Despite such fiery letters, the prioress was unable to dislodge Friar Stroddel. When Elizabeth Cresssner died, the convent at Dartford was still intact. There was no corruption found at the priory by the king's investigators. But her successor, Joan Vane, was forced to surrender it just the same to the king, and all of the nuns were expelled with small pensions and no place to go.

 The king did not award the priory to a favored courtier, as he usually did. He took the priory for himself, ordered it demolished and a luxurious manor house raised on the property. Henry VIII never slept there, though his ex-wife, Anne of Cleves, lived there for a time.

The manor house was given to Sir Robert Cecil by King James I, and passed through various hands before being demolished by the 19th century. All that remains is the red-brick gatehouse, although that was built by Henry VIII. Nothing is left of the priory itself, except for the stone wall that ran along its perimeter.

The priory wall, seen at right

One a cloudy afternoon, I walked the perimeter of the centuries-old wall, as the cars whizzed by. There are no Dartford Priory gift shops, as exist at the carefully preserved Tower of London. No mugs for sale bearing the face of Prioress Elizabeth Cressner. But her life was significant all the same.

I paid her homage on my solitary walk.

A Bit of Fun!

My friend Sere Prince Halverson, author of the wonderful novel The Underside of Joy, took my book with her to the dentist...to get a crown done. Ha!

View From an English Bookstore

I love hearing that people see my novel in other countries. The Crown is now on sale in England, Australia, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands. They all have different covers, and two have different titles: The Last Veil in Italy and The Last Nun in Germany.

My editor at Orion Books in the UK snapped this wonderful photo:

Ten Fascinating Facts About Hildegard Von Bingen

By Nancy Bilyeau

One of the notable choices made by the former Pope, Benedict, was to approve the sainthood of an 11^th century Benedictine nun named Hildegard Von Bingen—mystic, writer, musician, philosopher and naturalist. 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 12^th 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 turned 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."


------------------------------------------------------------------------

Nancy Bilyeau is the author of The Crown and The Chalice, historical mysteries set in Tudor England. The protagonist is a novice of the Dominican Order.

Telling a Book By Its Cover

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 10^th.  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.”

So simple and yet so evocative, and delicately shaded with poignance. There is much I can learn here. (Want more? Go to http://www.amazon.com/Rules-Inheritance-Claire-Bidwell-Smith/dp/1594630887/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1334793392&sr=8-1)

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.

-----------------------------------


Some of the members of Book Pregnant blog about our experiences as debut authors. See the posts at http://bookpregnant.blogspot.com/