The author of Love Objects and An Isolated Incident turns to historical fiction to tell the story of a young ninth-century woman whose quest for knowledge will not be denied.
Rapture is a romance. Not just because it follows the love and passion of an unconventional Benedictine monk and a young girl who is determined not to bury her intelligence and learning in the expected role of submissive wife and mother, but also in the old sense of a tale based on legend, chivalric love, adventure and history.
For Agnes, motherless daughter of the ‘English priest’ in ninth-century Mainz, love is above all the love of God, and her story is an imaginative invention based on what little is recorded of the life of Pope Joan.
The first accounts of a Pope Joan were written in the thirteenth century. They claim that with the help of a lover she disguised herself as a man, worked her way up through the Church hierarchy and, in 855, due to her learning and talents, was elected as Bishop of Rome. She reigned as Pope John Anglicus (Pope John VIII) for just over two years before giving birth to a child during a Papal procession. She is said to have either died of natural causes or to have been murdered and buried on the spot.
This legend was widely accepted until 1601 when Pope Clement VIII declared it to be untrue. However, its veracity is still being debated.
Emily Maguire has taken the bones of this story and given Joan/John/Agnes a flesh and blood existence.
We first meet Agnes as a clever five-year-old whose favourite occupation is to sit on the floor beneath her father’s table and listen to the men he invites to his house.
The men are merchants and traders, messengers and envoys, clerics and clergymen. They gossip and argue and bargain into the night at her father’s table because he is a personal friend and confidant of the Archbishop, and – even a child knows this is not unrelated – a man of both influence and wealth.
Among many other things, Agnes hears conflicting views of Heaven. It is either ‘never-ending light’ and beauty, with singing angels, or there is hunger and thirst to make you change your ways.
To get there you must be pious and humble and follow God’s laws every day of your earthly life.
To Agnes, this ‘does not seem worth the effort’. Nature is already satisfying enough, and her place beneath a laden table ‘is all the heaven she needs’.
Agnes’s mother died in childbirth and her father has brought her up himself and ensured that she is educated.
She does not know it is odd for a girl to read until one of her father’s guests, a Benedictine from Fulda Abbey, spots her bent over a book by the fire and roars as though he’s spied a deer hunting a man.
No benefit and much harm derives from women reading, he tells her father, who responds that this man’s own order is known to educate girls.
‘Girls destined for the cloister, and even then I would have them learn their prayers and hymns by heart rather than risk corruption in this way.’
As she grows up, Agnes learns of history, wars, religion, saints and martyrs, and of pagans (as her German mother had been), and the way men discuss women and sex and can ‘beat half the life out of each other and then embrace as tender and loving brothers’. And she learns from watching that men ‘might say one thing with their mouths while their bodies said another thing altogether’.
By the time she is in her teens, she has decided views of her own about the things the men discuss and sometimes, to general disapproval, cannot help interjecting them into the argument. She also spends hours in the forests, befriending a litter of boar piglets, and talking to God who, amid the beauties of nature, feels
as close and real as the bark and the leaves. He moves through her with every breath of loamy air.
Her need for learning never fades but her father begins to consider her future and thinks of contracting a marriage for her. ‘You must know, Father, I do not intend to be married,’ she tells him. His response is to observe that ‘the convent’ must be for her, so she claims that she would be ‘a fine abbess’: but it is all a joke, and ‘she prays that God will send a clear sign of her destiny’.
A moment in the forest and a confrontation with a wild boar leaves her so badly wounded that she spends months in pain, ‘awake but somehow not’, ‘knowing and unknowing’. She is now disfigured, too clever, too wilful, and, born of a pagan mother, she knows no one will marry her into their family. She thanks God that she ‘will live and die unwanted by men; that is, free’.
One young man, a clever Benedictine monk who comes to her father’s table, does however value her learning. Sometimes Brother Randulf comes during the day and suggests Agnes join him for a walk, and he brings her books from the great Fulda Abbey library. She reads Tacitus, Lucretius, Virgil, Cicero – books that challenge conventional religious beliefs.
Thus she learns that great and wise men felt as she had as a child on the forest floor. She learns there are systems of morality based on reason rather than God’s will … She learns that the monks of Fulda can read most anything they like and call it Christian work.
Inevitably Brother Randulf falls in love with her, and Agnes, who knows nothing of the power of sexual urges, demands that Randulf explain, which he does. She then demands that he teach her.
Although Agnes does not enjoy her deflowering, it is accompanied by a moment of pure melodrama (this is, after all, a romance):
Water erupts from the river and they stare at each other, shockingly, insensibly wet. The earth tilts, they tumble, cling together in the reeds as the purple sky swells like the sea, and branches and birds rain down.
It is convenient, too, that this earthquake kills Agnes’s father and destroys her home. Knowing that as an orphan she would be taken in by the nuns but given the most menial tasks to do, and knowing that Randulf is about to return to Fulda Abbey, she sees an alternative:
‘Take me with you to Fulda.’
Her will has made itself known after all, surprising her as much as Randulf, who laughs, says ‘Agnes!’ Laughs, says ‘Agnes! What – Agnes!’
‘You said yourself I have the mind of a man. Let me use it.’
So they concoct a story. He brings her a tunic and cape, she binds her breasts, he cuts her hair, and they decide that Randulf has met ‘him’ and learned that he is newly orphaned but is educated, has been a scribe, has spiritual knowledge, and is proficient in Latin, all of which might make him ‘worthy of a place’ in the Fulda community.
Thus begins Agnes’s life as a man and a monk.
Emily Maguire has done her research well. Fulda Abbey was a German abbey, founded in 744, and famous for its scriptorium and library. Her account of Agnes’s life while living there as Brother John describes the exhausting regime of prayer and contemplation. After a year, Agnes signs her obedience to the Rule and is fully accepted and tonsured. She is assigned to the scriptorium, learns to prepare goat skins until they become fine parchment, to mix inks, and to write ‘the distinctive Fulda script’. She also reads obsessively, then, finding herself compulsively adding her own thoughts to the texts she copies, she ‘promises God she will take more care with His work’ and begs scraps of parchment on which to write her own texts.
Although she has vowed not to lie with Randulf again, she yearns for his company, but sees him rarely among the other monks. When war and plague have ravaged the land and the abbot is sick, one monk comes to her and hints that he knows her secret:
‘It seems we may again have to elect a new father,’ he says. ‘Perhaps this time it will be you, Brother Eugenius.’
The glint in his eye tells her there is no error; he knew her name every time he called her Johannes and he knows it now. Eugenius, he calls her. The woman famously elected abbot of a house she had lived in falsely for many years.
She knows she must leave and calls on Randulf for help.
Together they escape from the abbey, travel across a devastated land, face banditry and famine and, thrown together by the horrors they see, become lovers. Agnes, realising that she has become addicted to the pleasures of the flesh but is still yearning ‘towards God’, acknowledges her ‘error’, sneaks away from Randulf, and takes a terrifying sea-voyage to Athens, where she is accepted by a group of monks who live independently, so she can continue her work relatively safe from discovery.
Some years later, when she is being sought out by many others for her learning and spiritual wisdom, her gender is again questioned; this time, without judgement, by the leader of the monks. She knows she must flee again, and she heads for Rome.
In Rome, she begins teaching at the Schola Greca, becomes Professor of Theology, and gives public lectures where ‘sometimes men are moved to tears by her words’. Pope Leo IV takes notice and invites her to the Vatican. Her piety and outspokenness challenge the wealthy and autocratic Pope, and she eventually becomes one of his closest advisers. She learns about the riches, the jealousies and the political in-fighting inside the Vatican, and she is regarded as an outsider until the Pope tells her:
‘Tomorrow you cease to be Brother John. You will become Cardinal Johannes Anglicus, inarguably worthy of a place in the inner sanctum of the Bishop of Rome.’
Ah, my daughter, she imagines God saying – laughing! You may be the greatest trickster in Rome but you have nothing on me.
On the Pope’s death, the Constitutio Romana of 824 (which gave all Romans, laity and clergy, the right to elect the pope), ensures that Agnes, who is popular with the people of Rome, is elected as Bishop of Rome. How she manages this; how she deals with the loneliness of this position; how she becomes pregnant; and how she dies, make up the final few chapters of Rapture.
Emily Maguire tells her story well. She makes Agnes a convincing character, weaves the turbulent history of the times into her life, and finds plausible (almost) ways of getting her to Rome and of keeping her secret. Altogether, this is an enjoyable and thought-provoking tale that left me to ponder on the truth of the legend of Pope Joan, and how, exactly, a woman might convincingly lead a monastic life and achieve the ultimate position in the Church of Rome while being in constant danger of her gender being exposed.
Emily Maguire Rapture Allen & Unwin 2024 PB 310 pp $32.99
Dr Ann Skea is a freelance reviewer, writer and an independent scholar of the work of Ted Hughes. She is author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE 1994, and currently available for free download here). Her work is internationally published and her Ted Hughes webpages (ann.skea.com) are archived by the British Library.
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Tags: Athens, Australian fiction, Emily | Maguire, Fulda Abbey, historical fiction, Mainz, monastic life, Pope Joan, Rome
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