Burton Book Review - Leafing through history: Mary Sharrat

Oct 10, 2012

Illuminations by Mary Sharratt

BurtonReview Wednesday, October 10, 2012

An inspiring story of a very strong woman

Illuminations by Mary Sharratt
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, October 9, 2012
Hardcover 288 pages
Review copy provided via Saima Agency, thank you!
Burton Book Review Rating: Four stars

Illuminations chronicles the life of Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179), who was tithed to the church at the age of eight and expected to live out her days in silent submission as the handmaiden of a renowned but disturbed young nun, Jutta von Sponheim. Instead, Hildegard rejected Jutta’s masochistic piety and found comfort and grace in studying books, growing herbs, and rejoicing in her own secret visions of the divine. When Jutta died some three decades later, Hildegard broke out of her prison with the heavenly calling to speak and write about her visions and to liberate her sisters and herself from the soul-destroying anchorage.

Like Anita Diamant’s portrayal of Dinah in The Red Tent, Mary Sharratt interweaves historical research with psychological insight and vivid imagination to write an engaging and triumphant portrait of a courageous and remarkably resilient woman and the life she might have lived. Deeply affecting, Illuminations is a testament to the power of faith, love, and self-creation.

Anchorite: a person who lives in seclusion, esp a religious recluse; hermit.

Author Mary Sharratt brings us a story of Saint Hildegard beginning when she was given to the church at an early age as a tithe, accompanying a wealthy young woman. I cannot imagine the sacrifice of being an anchorite, and being walled in with little sustenance for a young girl around nine years old. Somehow housed within this prison of sorts, Hildegard finds her own peace with the lot of her life and embraces any sort of past time that comes her way, from books to herbs to embroidery. Her beautiful companion, Jutta, is portrayed as perhaps a bit mad as she is eager to be cloistered away from the evil hands of her brother. Hildegard is portrayed as being made of stronger stuff than Jutta, and ably survives being shut within walls for what seems to be eternity, as Jutta is happy to be viewed as pious and full of grace as she starves herself.

Meanwhile, ever since Hildegard can remember, Hildegard is the one who is seemingly touched by God as she sees prophetic visions that are difficult for anyone to understand. She is immediately rebuked as being mad and learns to hides her visions as many view these visions to come from the devil. It is not until later that she is able to use them to help guide others, although she always had many detractors. Once she is out of the stifling grip of Jutta, whom everyone loved more than she, Hildegard was able to exert herself over those in the monastery who oversaw her care. She began to speak out against the severe treatment of girls brought to the anchorage and to discourage very young girls from being forced into the anchorage at such an early age.

Although the book seems to be a short one, there was a lot packed into it. The novel brings to light all of the struggles that Hildegard faced beginning from her enclosure all the way into her last days as an abbess, and it speaks to the enormous sacrifice that nuns and those of religious vocation make. It also hints at the debauchery that hides behind the walls once Bernard of Clairvaux dies and how the times changed as money instead of God becomes the driving force behind the monasteries and abbeys.

I really enjoyed this story and the telling of Hildegard's difficult life; it is not sugar coated with her piety but shows Hildegard as a true woman with real desires and needs. Her intellect seems to have known no bounds, as she is remembered for her music, poetry and scientific writings. The people of her life were also intriguing characters, especially the beautiful Jutta and Richardis, and Volmar, the one monk who was never failing in his support of Hildegard. What an honor to have read this dramatic story of a woman who is well deserving of her recent recognition as a Doctor of the Church which comes much too late.

Feb 1, 2010

Mailbox Monday!

BurtonReview Monday, February 01, 2010

Mailbox Monday is hosted byMarcia at The Printed Page. We share what books that we found in our mailboxes last week. And I am adding what I purchased, swapped, etc.

I broke down and bought some more books. It's that old book disease again (insert zany insane smiley face here).

Oh well.
At least they were cheap.

Symphony by Jude Morgan: this is a gorgeous hardcover that I got dirt cheap from Amazon.. see that "best price" of .01? Awesome deal. Sarah of Reading the Past has touted this author, so I picked one.

"In 1827 Harriet Smithson, a beautiful and talented young Irish actress, makes an unusual decision. Determined to avoid the traditional route to stardom via the manager’s bed, she joins an English company in the bold experiment of taking Shakespeare to Paris.
With the ferment of revolution in the air, the new generation is longing for a novel kind of passionate, spontaneous art. And to Harriet’s astonishment, it is embodied in her---La Belle Irlandaise. In the midst of this frenzy she finds herself pursued by a strange, intense young composer named Hector Berlioz. So begins a painful and profound love affair. She is his muse, his idée fixe, his obsession; and Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, directly inspired by Harriet, will change music forever.
Symphony is an audacious, brilliant, and haunting novel, set against a background of nineteenth-century theatre, Romantic art, music, and revolutionary Europe. But at its heart lies the story of two lives transfigured and destroyed by genius, inspiration, and madness."
(*Sounds PERFECT for Enchanted by Josephine's Oh LALA Challenge!)

Here's a couple I've coveted for awhile. After no luck on wishlists I just had to breakdown and buy them. I just had to!!
Green Darkness by Anya Seton
"This unforgettable story of undying love combines mysticism, suspense, mystery, and romance into a web of good and evil that stretches from 16th-century England to the present day. Richard Marsdon marries a young American woman named Celia, brings her to live at his English estate, and all seems to be going well. But now Richard has become withdrawn, and Celia is constantly haunted by a vague dread. When she suffers a breakdown and wavers between life and death, a wise doctor realizes that only by forcing Celia to relive her past can he enable her to escape her illness. Celia travels back 400 years in time to her past life as a beautiful but doomed servant. Through her eyes, we see the England of the Tudors, torn by religious strife, and experience all the pageantry, lustiness, and cruelty of the age. As in other historical romance titles by this author, the past comes alive in this flamboyant classic novel."

Katherine by Anya Seton
"This classic romance novel tells the true story of the love affair that changed history-that of Katherine Swynford and John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, the ancestors of most of the British royal family. Set in the vibrant 14th century of Chaucer and the Black Death, the story features knights fighting in battle, serfs struggling in poverty, and the magnificent Plantagenets-Edward III, the Black Prince, and Richard II-who ruled despotically over a court rotten with intrigue. Within this era of danger and romance, John of Gaunt, the king's son, falls passionately in love with the already married Katherine. Their well-documented affair and love persist through decades of war, adultery, murder, loneliness, and redemption. This epic novel of conflict, cruelty, and untameable love has become a classic since its first publication in 1954."

The King's Grace by Anne Easter Smith: another cheap best price.. this came out in 2009 with mixed reviews. So we shall see how I feel about it, but this is right along the current events of the reads that I have been enjoying lately.
"All that history knows of Grace Plantagenet is that she was an illegitimate daughter of Edward IV and one of two attendants aboard the funeral barge of his widowed queen. Thus, she was half sister of the famous young princes, who -- when this story begins in 1485 -- had been housed in the Tower by their uncle, Richard III, and are presumed dead.
But in the 1490s, a young man appears at the courts of Europe claiming to be Richard, duke of York, the younger of the boys, and seeking to claim his rightful throne from England's first Tudor king, Henry VII. But is this man who he says he is? Or is he Perkin Warbeck, a puppet of Margaret of York, duchess of Burgundy, who is determined to regain the crown for her York family? Grace Plantagenet finds herself in the midst of one of English history's greatest mysteries. If she can discover the fate of the princes and the true identity of Perkin Warbeck, perhaps she will find her own place in her family."

The Players: A Novel of the Young Shakespeare (Hardcover)~ Stephanie Cowell
"A graceful and sensual historical novel tracing William Shakespeare's momentous path of self-discovery, both as a writer and as a young man. Before he was William Shakespeare, playwright and poet, he was simply Will, a young man who dreamed of the writer he would someday be. Based on extensive research and historical fact, this richly detailed fictionalization of Shakespeare's formative years begins with the glover's son roaming the fields of Stratford, hungry for knowledge and restless to escape the boundaries of his small town and loveless marriage. Will leaves his family for London and becomes a struggling actor whose charmed, reckless circle of literary and theatrical friends includes John Heminges, Ben Jonson, and Christopher Marlowe. All the while, however, Shakespeare continues to challenge himself as a writer; soon he is selling his plays and earning acclaim in the world of the London theater and aristocracy. Yet perhaps his finest and most heartfelt writing of the period can be found in the sonnets written for the Earl of Southampton, the beautiful young lord whose affection and aloofness stir the poet's soul. The earl becomes Shakespeare's patron, friend, romantic rival, and eventually, his lover. With the earl and the bewitching Italian musician Emilia Bassano, Shakespeare plunges into a tempestuous love triangle that will threaten both his desire to write and his sense of himself."

And another Amazon purchase:
The Vanishing Point by Mary Sharratt
"In the tradition of Philippa Gregory’s smart, transporting fiction comes this tale of dark suspense, love, and betrayal, featuring two star-crossed sisters, one lost and the other searching.

Bright and inquisitive, Hannah Powers was raised by a father who treated her as if she were his son. While her beautiful and reckless sister, May, pushes the limits of propriety in their small English town, Hannah harbors her own secret: their father has given her an education forbidden to women. But Hannah’s secret serves her well when she journeys to colonial Maryland to reunite with May, who has been married off to a distant cousin after her sexual misadventures ruined her marriage prospects in England.

As Hannah searches for May, who has disappeared, she finds herself falling in love with her brother-in-law. Alone in a wild, uncultivated land where the old rules no longer apply, Hannah is freed from the constraints of the society that judged both her and May as dangerous—too smart, too fearless, and too hungry for life. But Hannah is also plagued by doubt, as her quest for answers to May’s fate grows ever more disturbing and tangled."

And from Paperbackswap I received:

Wicked Company by Ciji Ware
"At a time when female writers are considered a scandal, Sophie McGann, an independent Scottish lass living in 1761 London, pens plays for David Garrick, the legendary actor-manager of Drury Lane." OK, so it's a lame description. But I really enjoyed Island of The Swans by this author, so much so that I will soon own all of her fiction. (insert that insane smiley here!)

Too Great A Lady: The Notorious, Glorious Life of Emma, Lady Hamilton:A Novel by Amanda Elyot
"Emma Hamilton is renowned as the real-life heroine of the greatest love story in British history. Now, Amanda Elyot breathes new life into this remarkable woman, in what might have been Emma's very own words.
The impoverished daughter of an illiterate country farrier, young Emily Lyon sold coal by the roadside to help put food on the family's table. By the time she was fifteen, she had made her way from London nursemaid to vivacious courtesan, and continued a meteoric rise through society, rung by slippery rung, to become the most talked-about woman in all of Europe, mistress of many tongues, a key envoy in Britain's and Italy's war against the French, and confidante to a queen.
This novel, inspired by her remarkable life, recounts Emma's many extraordinary adventures, the earth-shattering passion she eventually found with Lord Nelson, and how they braved the censure of king and country, risking all in the name of true love."

I have a feeling I forgot something. But this is certainly a fun list to ponder.. and I love Amazon. Just posted today is my review of Island of The Swans by Ciji Ware, giveaway is Tuesday!