Crusading against the "Romanists"
Jun. 26th, 2013 12:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ricardienneAt a library book sale, I came across Sarah Emily Holt's Lady Sybil's Choice, and the frontispiece plus first paragraph caught my attention:
After less than a chapter, the generally religious nature became apparant, and after a few chapters, and hence a few (tedious) interludes in which the heroine Elaine's deeply religious servant Margot tries to explain what it means to give oneself up to Christ, I grasped that it was a pretty hard-core 19th century evangelical story. A bit of poking around on the internet turned up the fact that Holt (who wrote 50 or so Evangelical novels, mostly historical and mostly for girls) was a rabidly anti-Catholic neo-Calvinist. Which is a bit of a problem when writing about the 12th century, you might imagine.
But apart from some Waldensians around the edges (not to mention the fact that somehow, the illiterate nurse has just happened to hear translated from Latin all the major anti-'Romanist' clobber verses), the main plotline of the book is about the heroine going from being a "typical" medieval Catholic noblewoman, who trusts in relics, masses, and the innate superiority of her birth to stand her in good stead with a distant God -- to, basically, a born-again Christian avant-la-lettre who has turned over her life to her personal savior, sola fide and all. (Pretty much every morally good character we meet has done this.). There's even a bonus debate between a Materialist Atheist and a hippy-dippy abstract Platonist, with the moral pointed out that They're Both Going to Regret It When They Die, Those Fools. And a little digression on the evils of extreme Calvinist "the elect are already perfected in this life" doctrine.
But meanwhile, there's stuff about the crusades, and politics in the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and it is all meticulously researched and portrayed in a delightful 19th century archaising style. With exhaustive genealogical appendices that note where a character is made up and where historical and footnotes on some of extremely archaic words (e.g. "saye" for silk, "diapering" for, I think, a kind of geometric brocade). And a lengthy appendix on -- be still, my heart! -- forms of address. While the story itself is sprinkled with cute little ingenuous slips by Elaine that practically have signs attached saying, "MY QUAINT MEDIEVAL VIEW OF ANTIQUITY AND BIBLICAL HISTORY: LET ME SHOW YOU IT" and "O HAI THERE IDEOLOGIES OF SOCIAL STRATIFICATION IN THE NORMAN KINGDOMS!" There was also one hilarious footnote where Holt says, basically, "I don't want you to think that I approve of nuns. But in this period, convents and religious life were one of the only ways for women to be independent and unmarried, and also, weren't nearly as corrupt as they were by the time they had to be Dissolved." (Cf. also the fact that all the nuns in this novel are basically evangelical Protestants.)
But this was a thing that I rather liked: most of the principal characters are women, and there's a strong "men are stupid chauvinist pigs" undertone, where even the best male characters are shown to be shortsighted and dismissive of women, and, while the most idealized female character isa doormat tolerant and submissive to her possibly gay stupid husband, it's also made clear that the men are, objectively, wrong to devalue womens' opinions and intelligence and worth, and that Elaine is far better off hanging out with the learned Sister Judith and such than getting married to some stupid nobleman. So…yay for proto-feminism, even if it comes wrapped in a tedious and self-righteous evangelical package?
Alix says I am a simpleton. I don't think it is very pleasant. Sometimes she says I am a perfect simpleton: and I cannot say that I like that any better. Nor do I think that it is very civil in one's sister to put her opinion on record in this certainly perspicuous, but not at all complimentary manner.Excellent! I thought. It sounds like a 19th century version of Catherine Called Birdy! The narrator, Elaine, is the youngest daughter (age 14 at the beginning) of the Count of Poitou during the Second Crusade; the novel takes her from her home in France to the Holy Land as she goes to accompany her elder brother, the knight Guy, to the court of the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
After less than a chapter, the generally religious nature became apparant, and after a few chapters, and hence a few (tedious) interludes in which the heroine Elaine's deeply religious servant Margot tries to explain what it means to give oneself up to Christ, I grasped that it was a pretty hard-core 19th century evangelical story. A bit of poking around on the internet turned up the fact that Holt (who wrote 50 or so Evangelical novels, mostly historical and mostly for girls) was a rabidly anti-Catholic neo-Calvinist. Which is a bit of a problem when writing about the 12th century, you might imagine.
But apart from some Waldensians around the edges (not to mention the fact that somehow, the illiterate nurse has just happened to hear translated from Latin all the major anti-'Romanist' clobber verses), the main plotline of the book is about the heroine going from being a "typical" medieval Catholic noblewoman, who trusts in relics, masses, and the innate superiority of her birth to stand her in good stead with a distant God -- to, basically, a born-again Christian avant-la-lettre who has turned over her life to her personal savior, sola fide and all. (Pretty much every morally good character we meet has done this.). There's even a bonus debate between a Materialist Atheist and a hippy-dippy abstract Platonist, with the moral pointed out that They're Both Going to Regret It When They Die, Those Fools. And a little digression on the evils of extreme Calvinist "the elect are already perfected in this life" doctrine.
But meanwhile, there's stuff about the crusades, and politics in the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and it is all meticulously researched and portrayed in a delightful 19th century archaising style. With exhaustive genealogical appendices that note where a character is made up and where historical and footnotes on some of extremely archaic words (e.g. "saye" for silk, "diapering" for, I think, a kind of geometric brocade). And a lengthy appendix on -- be still, my heart! -- forms of address. While the story itself is sprinkled with cute little ingenuous slips by Elaine that practically have signs attached saying, "MY QUAINT MEDIEVAL VIEW OF ANTIQUITY AND BIBLICAL HISTORY: LET ME SHOW YOU IT" and "O HAI THERE IDEOLOGIES OF SOCIAL STRATIFICATION IN THE NORMAN KINGDOMS!" There was also one hilarious footnote where Holt says, basically, "I don't want you to think that I approve of nuns. But in this period, convents and religious life were one of the only ways for women to be independent and unmarried, and also, weren't nearly as corrupt as they were by the time they had to be Dissolved." (Cf. also the fact that all the nuns in this novel are basically evangelical Protestants.)
But this was a thing that I rather liked: most of the principal characters are women, and there's a strong "men are stupid chauvinist pigs" undertone, where even the best male characters are shown to be shortsighted and dismissive of women, and, while the most idealized female character is
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