In 2014, medievalist Lucy Pick published Pilgrimage (Cuidono Press), a thoughtful and engaging narrative about two Flemish noblewomen who travel to Compostela with a group of pilgrims, searching for healing and forgiveness and finding friendship and purpose along the way (review). The main character of that novel, blind Gebirga of Gistel, had found her life upended when her crusading father Bertulf returned from the Holy Land with a new bride in tow. Pick's latest novel, The Queen's Companion (Cuidono Press, July 2025), takes this reluctant stepmother, Lady Aude of al-Lawza, as its protagonist. Extending the scope of its narrative far beyond Gebirga and Aude's short but rocky coexistence in Flanders, the narrative recounts Aude's efforts to return to the Holy Land to reclaim the birthright stolen from her upon her parents' deaths. After an unexpected rencounter at Antioch with Eleanor of Aquitaine, on crusade with her husband Louis of France, Aude realizes that the queen might prove useful to her quest. She accepts a position in Eleanor's service and soon finds herself entangled in the queen's complicated political and amorous gambits. In many respects, the narrative becomes as much Eleanor's tale as Aude's.
Pick cleverly weaves the two women's stories together by employing Aude as the group's unofficial storyteller. Throughout the course of the novel, Aude recounts fifteen tales drawn from her own life in roughly chronological order. The tales she chooses to tell serve specific purposes that have direct bearing on the present action. For example, she tells her first story to the Queen and her women in payment for having been invited to join the group. With her seventh tale, Aude hopes to show adulterous Eleanor that there are seldom happy endings or valiant rescuers for lovesick ladies. She spins her last seven tales to relieve the boredom of the women's isolation at al-Lawza. Aude acknowledges her role as a real-life Scheherazade: "Every evening, I would continue my account...spinning it out as long as I could and always stop at some exciting or dramatic moment. It was not to save my life, but it might help preserve our sanity at al-Lawza. The dangers of my past seemed to distract Eleanor from worries about her future. And it would pass the time" (178). This evocation of the Persian storyteller and her frameworked tales inevitably calls to mind the works of Western medieval and early modern authors like Boccaccio and Marguerite de Navarre, powerfully encapsulating both Aude's dual Frankish-Armenian heritage and the clash of cultures engulfing the holy land during Louis and Eleanor's Crusade.
The Queen's Companion explores numerous themes--revenge, the agency of women in a era that circumscribed it, the morality of religious conquest--but central all is a focus on the nature and power of storytelling. Aude's tales delight and entertain, instruct and guide. But her storytelling also defines--whether it be her own character, the actions of others, or the political aspirations of individuals and entire nations--by hiding and revealing, comparing and contrasting, elaborating or minimizing. Through storytelling, Aude--and by extension, society at large--attempts to make sense of a world in chaos. Picking and choosing the details she wishes to reveal and controlling when and how she presents these details to her listeners, Aude orders the essential randomness of real-life experience into a coherent, harmonized whole endowed with meaning. In a similar fashion, the Frankish Crusaders attempt to appropriate the history of the Holy Land for themselves, to "retell" it within a Christian framework of their own making. Their failure to do so in the face of concerted resistance becomes part of a broader tale still being constructed to this present day.
Pick draws upon her deep knowledge of medieval history, religion, and philosophy to create another must-read novel for readers interested in the history of Holy Land as well as those who appreciate strong and adventurous heroines. Aude's witness to and participation in Eleanor of Aquitaine's crusade, her agency in the love triangle between the queen, her husband King Louis, and her uncle Raymond of Poitiers presents an intriguing interpretation of long-speculated events and demonstrates how storytelling shapes and even decides history. The Queen's Companion offers readers an intelligent and engrossing take on the Crusades from a feminist perspective.
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Historian Lucy Pick, Ph.D, taught for over twenty years at the University of Chicago, where she is still a research associate. Her research interests include the relationships between gender, power, and religion, the translation of science and philosophy in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and its impact on relations between religious groups.
The Queen's Companion can be purchased directly from Cuidono Press or from Amazon.
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