Review: THE QUEEN'S COMPANION by Lucy Pick

      

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.

Bags Full of Reading Goodness

Several weeks ago, I made a general plea to my Facebook author friends. I was interested in putting together a basket of autographed books for my son's school auction. I asked that anyone interested in helping donate a signed copy of her book in return for some publicity on the blog. I was astounded and humbled by the response. Eleven authors sent me one or more copies of their book(s); two others offered, but unfortunately, I was not able to receive their books in time. This generous response from the writing community allowed me to put together two baskets, each valued at approximately $185. I divided the books into two lots and packaged them in bookish totes from Barnes & Noble along with fancy bookmarks.

Here is a list of authors who donated their books. If you are looking for holiday gifts or excellent additions to your own library, please consider purchasing something from this list. I have read most of the books myself; many I've reviewed here on the blog and additional reviews will be forthcoming. They are all excellent reads.

Helene Wecker, THE GOLEM AND THE JINNI
Ann Weisberger, THE PROMISE and THE PERSONAL HISTORY OF RACHEL DUPREE
Maryanne O'Hara, CASCADE
Patricia Bracewell, SHADOW ON THE CROWN
Heather Webb, BECOMING JOSEPHINE
Anna Elliott, KITTY BENNET'S DIARY
Susan Spann, CLAWS OF THE CAT and BLADE OF THE SAMURAI
Julie K. Rose, OLEANNA
LJ Cohen, DERELICT, THE BETWEEN, and FUTURE TENSE
Marci Jefferson, GIRL ON THE GOLD COIN
MK Tod, UNRAVELLED
Lucy Pick, PILGRIMAGE
Laura Bradbury, MY GRAPE ESCAPE and MY GRAPE VILLAGE

I am very grateful to my author friends and thrilled that new readers will soon experience their wonderful books. These bags are sure to start a bidding war at the auction! I wish I could bid on them myself.

Thanks again to all involved!

Interview: Lucy Pick, Author of PILGRIMAGE

In Lucy Pick's fascinating new novel, PILGRIMAGE (Cuidono Press, July 2014), a blind noblewoman navigates the shoals of international politics and the difficult terrain of Northern Spain as she follows the Way of St. James to Compostela. Today Lucy answers some questions for us about the writing of her debut novel.

1. Was Gebirga of Gistel, the novel’s protagonist, a historical person? What do we know about her?

Gebirga of Gistel came about when I combined two historical clues. The first was a passage in the medieval manuscript containing the Pilgrim’s Guide to Compostela that describes the manuscript as being written by, among others, someone named Gebirga of Flanders.

The second was part of the story of Saint Godeleva of Gistel, an eleventh-century noblewoman who was killed by her husband. The husband was reputed to have a blind daughter, and to himself have gone on crusade. What would it be like, I wondered, to have a mother who was a saint and cured everyone but you?

I combined the unknown Gebirga of Flanders with the blind daughter of Godeleva, and there was my heroine.

2. In the novel, Gebirga falls blind around the age of three. What challenges did writing a blind protagonist pose? How did it affect your handling of point of view?

As you can see from my account of her origins, Gebirga’s blindness was the first thing I knew about her, and it provided challenges and opportunities. For a beginning novelist, it was a wonderful discipline to be forbidden from describing what my protagonist sees and having to rely on all her other senses to create the mood and set the scene.

Taste is an important part of the book, and we learn a lot about Gebirga’s journey from cool, damp Flanders to sunny Spain by the way the food she eats changes. So is touch, as the feel of the clothes she wears shifts from wool to cotton and silk.

I had to stop myself from using metaphors of sight in relationship to Gebirga. “Gebirga saw what he meant” was a sentence I could not write, for instance. But the hardest part was having her travel through Europe at the height of the Romanesque building boom without seeing any of the spectacular churches going up all around her. Her companion, Katerinen becomes our eyes on what that might have looked like.

photo by Yearofthedragon

3. Much of the novel’s action takes place on the pilgrimage road to the cathedral of Saint James in Compostela. How did this location become such an important destination for pilgrims? Have you made the trek yourself?

Santiago de Compostela became, with Rome and Jerusalem, one of the three most important pilgrimage sites in Medieval Europe because of its reputation as the burial place and location of the preaching of one of the apostles, James the Greater.

It really took off in the eleventh century, in the decades just before my novel starts, and a lot of historians credit the involvement of the monastery of Cluny in the development and popularization of the road to Compostela. The abbots of Cluny worked hard to create both political and spiritual ties to the different Christian kingdoms of Spain and used the pilgrimage to do it. That is one reason Gebirga starts her journey to Spain at Cluny, even though it isn’t one of the “traditional” origins of the road.

It has revived as a pilgrimage destination in recent decades for people whose motives are as mixed as they were in the Middle Ages. Your readers may know Paulo Coelho’s novel The Pilgrimage, which brought a kind of New Age element to the pilgrimage, and Martin Sheen’s movie, The Way.

I have not done the pilgrimage myself, though I have travelled to many of the places along the road that I describe, and I drew on stories of both medieval and modern pilgrims in constructing my narrative. For example, my sister walked the last part of the route with a group of breast cancer survivors and their families, and that is how Gebirga finishes her journey too.

 4. What is your favorite scene from the novel? Which scene was the most difficult to write? 

My favourite scene from the novel was one of the first scenes I ever wrote, and at the time I wrote it, I did not yet know exactly how it worked into the story. It is a scene in which Gebirga is attacked and left alone on a mountainside. No one knows where she is, and she has been injured. This moment of crisis gave me a chance to get to know who she really was, and also to explore some of the spiritual aspects of her medieval world, both Christian and pagan.

The hardest scene to write was a moment of tragedy, and I won’t say more lest I give the plot away. Like my favourite scene, I knew it was going to be in the book right from the beginning.

5. PILGRIMAGE is one of the first novels published by Cuidono Press. What advantages have you found working with a small press offers? 

There are distinct advantages to working with a small press and with a new small press at that. The main one is that I don’t feel the pressure to come right out of the gate with huge sale figures to justify my existence. My novel is one of those that will help define what Cuidono Press stands for as it grows, and I expect it will stay in print a good long time and have a chance to find its audience. That is invaluable for a first time novelist.

Another was the chance to be involved with the creation of the book cover, which uses a detail from a fifteenth-century panel painting that shows scenes from the Life of St. Godeleva.

6. What piece of writing advice helped you most during the crafting of PILGRIMAGE and your search for publication? Do you have other advice to pass on to writers of historical fiction? 

Write what you love; write what you want to read. Keep trying to improve. Don’t give up.

Shell marker

7. Do you have another novel in the works? Will we see Gebirga and Yusuf again? 

There is an old piece of writing wisdom that says there are only two plots in the world, someone leaves town, or someone comes to town. PILGRIMAGE is the story of someone who leaves town. But Gebirga leaves her home when her father returns after decades away with a young, spoiled bride. This character, Aude, is pretty unsympathetic in the novel. I began wondering what it would be like to be Aude, and wrote a novel about her, which begins as a “someone comes to town” story, and involves Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Second Crusade. But whether Gebirga and Yusuf ever reappear in a story of their own is up to the readers of PILGRIMAGE!

Thanks so much, Julianne, for inviting me to be part of your blog, and for all the work you do supporting historical fiction and introducing us to so many wonderful books.

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Learn more about Lucy Pick and her books at her website. PILGRIMAGE is available at Amazon.com or directly from the publisher, Cuidono Press.

My review of PILGRIMAGE may be found here.

Review: PILGRIMAGE by Lucy Pick

For centuries, Christian pilgrims have plied the roads of Europe towards the magnificent cathedral of Saint James the Greater in Compostela, Spain. Streams of nameless pilgrims walked the Way of St. James to plead their intentions, exonerate their guilt, and render homage to the saint at his Spanish resting place. Lucy Pick, a professor of medieval religious thought and practice, has imagined the plight of one such pilgrim, Gebirga of Flanders, in her historical novel PILGRIMAGE (Cuidono Press, July 2014). A fresh and thoughtful read, PILGRIMAGE explores betrayal, friendship, healing, and redemption in a setting hitherto ignored yet vastly important to the fabric of medieval life.

Blindness descends on young Gebirga, the only child of Bertulf and Godeleva of Gistel, after she witnesses an altercation between her parents which results in her mother’s death. Her father establishes a convent in memory of his saintly wife and departs on crusade, leaving Gebirga in the care of his brother at the castle. Raised by her nurse to be independent despite her infirmity, Gebirga learns to navigate her environs with help of her dog and becomes a competent châtelaine. When her father unexpectedly returns to Gistel with a new bride, Gebirga expects to be relegated to the convent. However, a trip to Bruges occasions an unforeseen encounter with Katerinen, sister of the Count of Flanders, and the beginning of a new life for Gebirga as the headstrong girl’s attendant. The political schemes of the great require Katerinen and Gebirga to travel to Spain in the guise of simple pilgrims. The final two thirds of the book trace the details of the women’s journey to Compostela as members of a motley group searching for healing and forgiveness and finding friendship, love, and purpose along the way.

A professor of history and religion, Pick understands both the complicated politics of the time and the texture of medieval piety and immerses the reader in this rich and unfamiliar world with confidence and aplomb. She guides the reader through the tangled the web of European alliances and Spanish monarchies with patience and grace, careful not to overwhelm the reader with detail but always providing just enough framework to support the dramatic action. More importantly, Pick treats medieval religious practices and popular sentiment with respect, presenting them to the modern reader without apology or condescension, opening the door to a forgotten way of seeing the world and inviting the reader in. This attention to the religious character of everyday medieval life gives her novel a credibility that many popular works of medieval fiction lack.

As in any good novel, it is the characters and their relationships that capture the reader’s heart, and here, too, Pick does not disappoint. PILGRIMAGE’s cast of characters ranges the entire scale of medieval society, from popes and queens to shepherds and tavern louts. Of particular interest are Yusef, the mysterious messenger who straddles two cultures and faiths; Aiméry, the Augustian canon traveling the pilgrimage routes in order to write a book about them; and Katerinen, the unstable yet endearing teen bride who becomes Gebirga’s charge and friend. Gebirga herself offers an interesting take on the typical historical fiction heroine: she must overcome not only the social limitations of medieval womanhood, but the physical blindness that could have easily rendered her a useless burden on her family and society. The guilt Gebirga bears over her inability to clearly recall the circumstances of her mother’s death and the challenge of living as the daughter of an official saint add to her difficulties. It is only fitting that Gebirga’s journey rocky journey toward happiness and self-acceptance culminates at Compostela, a place of spiritual and emotional, as well as physical, healing.

The novelty of PILGRIMAGE’s setting and the uniqueness of its plot earn it the honor of being a must-read for lovers of historical fiction. The author’s fine understanding of human relationships, her thoughtful investigation of miracles and their meaning, and her respectful yet exacting exploration of faith in all its expressions ensure that PILGRIMAGE will find a place on lists of favorite historical novels for years to come.

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Lucy Pick, Ph.D, is the Director of Undergraduate Studies and Senior Lecturer in the History of Christianity at the University of Chicago Divinity School and an associate professor in the Department of History. She specializes in the connections between historical writing and theology and the ways in which religion shapes lives through ritual. She has written a monograph on Jewish, Christian and Muslim relations in thirteenth-century Toledo and is currently examining the careers of royal women in early medieval Spain. PILGRIMAGE is her first novel. You can learn more about Lucy Pick and her fiction at her blog, Lucy Pick Books.

Lucy will be back tomorrow to answer questions about her novel.

Literary Stocking Stuffers

There has been much internet talk about buying books as Christmas gifts in order to bolster the publishing industry. Lucy Pick has started a meme describing ten books she's enjoyed this year in order to give people ideas of books they might like to read themselves or buy for another. Here's my contribution to the effort:

Lawrence Hill, Someone Knows My Name: A beautifully written fictional account of the life of an African woman during the colonial era: her abduction by slave traders as a child, her harrowing journey to South Carolina and its indigo plantations, her escape to New York and relocation to Canada, and her eventual return to Africa and work with British abolitionists. I learned many new things about British involvement in both the slave trade and the abolition movement. The colonial timeframe is a nice change from the standard Civil War setting.

Vanora Bennett, Portrait of an Unknown Woman: Although I haven't finished this one yet, I'm finding it an engaging account of the interaction between the painter Hans Holbein and the family of Sir Thomas More, with an intriguing twist on the story of the Princes in the Tower. The depiction of sixteenth century life and thought is quite detailed and accurate.

Irene Nemirovsky, Suite Française: The interrelated stories of a vast cast of characters caught up in the German Occupation of France. Beautifully executed characters detailed from a wryly ironic perspective; the author explores human weakness and the heroic self-sacrifice in ways that makes both extremes sympathetic. 

Alice McDermott, After This: A lyrical account of the inner lives of the members of an Irish Catholic American family during the Vietnam War era. McDermott captures the dynamics of the large Irish Catholic family so perfectly as she charts the course of the various Keane siblings during a turbulent era.

R. J. Knecht, Renaissance Patron and Warrior: The Reign of Francis I:  A thorough account of the life and times of François I, who ruled for thirty-three years as the Renaissance blossomed in France. The author shies from a strictly chronological approach and organizes the material thematically within loose boundary dates. Well chosen photographs and artwork support the text, which introduces many major figures the sixteenth-century Europe. If you've always wondered when or why something happened in Renaissance France, this is the book to start with.

The other books I've loved this year I've already blogged about: Catherine Delors's Mistress of the Revolution, C.W. Gortner's The Last Queen, Michelle Moran's Nefertiti.  If I can remember others (why do I always go blank when someone asks me for book suggestions?) I'll add them to the list. 

Happy book browsing. I hope you find lots to like this season at your neighborhood bookstore!