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.

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.

Review: THE STUDY OF MURDER by Susan McDuffie

The pursuit of knowledge takes a vicious turn in Susan McDuffie's THE STUDY OF MURDER (Five Star, 2013), the third novel of her fourteenth century Muirteach MacPhee series. Scottish sleuth Muirteach and his wife Mariota accompany Donald, their lord's teenaged son, to Oxford University for his studies. Soon a tavern maid disappears and someone bludgeons an Oxford master to death. As Mariota sneaks into lecture halls and Donald carouses with fellow students, Muirteach investigates the crimes. Tensions between the academic community and the townsfolk rise to a fevered pitch when another senseless killing occurs and the undersheriff arrests suspects on the basis of Muirteach's findings. Yet Muirteach himself remains unconvinced of their guilt; certain the strange drawings Donald discovers on some used parchments will lead him to the killer, he continues his inquiries. Then Mariota disappears, and Muirteach must solve the riddle of the murderer's identity with all haste if he hopes to find his wife alive.

The strength of McDuffie's mystery lies in its evocation of medieval Oxford. With the help of the included map, the reader follows on Muirteach's heels as he traipses through town, visiting its stately college halls, shabby student tenements, raucous taverns and busy booksellers and stationers. She smells the offal in the gutter, the acrid odors of the tannery, the sweet flowers of the surrounding countryside. She hears the drone of Latin lectures, the off-key plucking of Donald's lute, the shouts of rioting mobs, the scrape of tools on parchment. She tastes the cheap wine, the hearty meat pies, the landlady's comforting stew. Not only does the author evoke the sensory details of fourteenth century life, she describes the structure of the medieval university, the conventions of instruction, the importance of disputation in earning a degree. McDuffie brings to vivid life a university experience quite different from today's.

The novel's characters are convincing and likable. Devoted to his wife and his charge, Muirteach is a reluctant sleuth, but a thorough one, determined to get to the bottom of things and bring the true criminal to justice. Headstrong Mariota might be a tad modern for the times, given her determination to further her medical education, but her family history and her father's reputation as a physician make her yearnings believable. The students who populate the university cross the spectrum from cerebral philosophers to partying louts; the masters themselves are distinctive and wedded with enthusiasm to their specialties. Palpable tension exists between the merchants, landlords, servants and watch and the often supercilious and dissolute students who take them for granted. Muirteach, in his role as Donald's chaperone, understands and mediates between the two factions.

The mystery itself is carefully developed so as to cast suspicion on multiple persons, each of whom has a valid motivation for involvement in the crimes. Early on I had a hunch as to the identity of the perpetrator, yet I found my confidence in this identification challenged again and again by the plausible motives of other suspects. Even though my guess proved ultimately correct, it was entertaining to watch Muirteach piece together the evidence and come to conclusions that defy the obvious.

Enriched by colorful characters, caustic conflict, and a finely researched setting, THE STUDY OF MURDER will please readers looking for a unique, historically based whodunit.

You can learn more about author Susan McDuffie at her website. Susan wrote an interesting article about the historical Voynich manuscript, the creative kernel of her mystery, here.