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Overview
It is England, in the fourteenth century — a time of plague, political unrest and the earliest stirrings of the Reformation. The printing press had yet to be invented, and books were rare and costly, painstakingly lettered by hand and illuminated with exquisite paintings. Finn is a master illuminator who works not only for the Church but also, in secret, for John Wycliffe of Oxford, who professes the radical idea that the Bible should be translated into English for everyone to read. Finn has another secret as well, one that leads him into danger when he meets Lady Kathryn of Blackingham Manor, a widow struggling to protect her inheritance from the depredations of Church and Crown alike. Finn's alliance with Lady Kathryn will take us to the heart of what Barbara Tuchman once called "the calamitous fourteenth century."
Richly detailed and irresistibly compelling, Brenda Rickman Vantrease's The Illuminator is a glorious story of love, art, religion, and treachery at an extraordinary turning point in history.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780312331924 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 12/27/2005 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 432 |
| Sales rank: | 710,546 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.20(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
PROLOGUE
OXFORD, ENGLAND
1379
John Wycliffe put down his pen and rubbed tired eyes. The candle burned low, spitting tendrils of smoke. It would burn only minutes longer, and it was the last. Only the middle of the month, and he'd exhausted his allotment. As master of Balliol College, Oxford University, he was afforded what would be adequate for most clerics--for most, who worked by day and slept by night. But Wycliffe scarcely slept during the nighttime hours. Purpose drove him from his bed early and kept him from it late.
The orange glow from the charcoal brazier did little to dispel the twilight thickening in the corners of his Spartan chambers. The candle sputtered and guttered out. The girl would be here soon. He could send her to the chandler, paying out of his own purse. He would not call attention to his work by begging more from the bursar or borrowing from colleagues.
At least the chargirl's delay gave him a much-needed respite. The muscles in his hand ached from holding the quills. His head hurt from squinting in the dim light, and his body was stiff from hours bent over his desk. Even his spirit was fatigued. As always, when he grew tired, he began to question his mission. Could it be pride, intellectual arrogance, and not God, that called him to such a gargantuan task? Or had he simply been pushed down this treacherous path by the machinations of the duke of Lancaster, John of Gaunt? The duke was on his way to gaining a kingdom and had no wish to share its wealth with a greedy Church. But it was no sin, Wycliffe reasoned, to accept the patronage of such a man, not when together they could break the tyranny of the priests and bishops and archbishops. John of Gaunt, the duke of Lancaster, would do it to serve himself. But John Wycliffe would do it to save the soul of England.
King Edward's death had been a blessing, in spite of the political struggle now going on between the boy king's uncles. Too much lasciviousness had swirled around Edward; the taint of sin corrupted his court. He had consorted openly with his mistress. It was rumored Alice Perrers was a great beauty, but Wycliffe thought her the devil's tool. What black arts had the scheming baggage practiced to gain the soul of a king? At least with Edward's death, Alice Perrers was gone from the cesspool that had been his court. John of Gaunt was now regent. And John of Gaunt was on his side.
For now.
Wycliffe pushed his chair away from the desk. He faced the window that looked out over Oxford. From below, he heard revelers, students with too much ale already in their bellies and now in pursuit of more, though where they got the money for an endless supply was a mystery to him. He guessed they drank the cheapest, the last pouring, though it would take more of that than a fat man's belly could hold to produce such an excess of exuberance. For a moment, he almost envied them their innocence, their wanton joy, their singular lack of purpose.
The girl should be here soon. She was already an hour late. He judged this by the deep indigo reflected in the window--a glazed window to honor his station. He could have translated two whole pages from the Vulgate in that time--two more pages to add to the packet going to East Anglia on the morrow. He was pleased with the work the illuminator had done for him. Not too ornate, yet beautiful, worthy of the text. How he loathed the profane antics of beast and bird and fool inserted for amusement in the marginalia, the ostentatious colors, the lavishness that the Paris Guild produced. This illuminator worked cheaper than the Paris masters, too. And the duke said he could be trusted to be discreet.
Voices drifted up from below, laughter, a snatch of song, then receded. Surely the girl would not be much longer. He must finish more of the translation tonight. He was halfway through the Book of John. Shadows flickered around the room. His eyelids drooped.
Jesus had faced down the temple priests. Wycliffe could face down a pope. Or two.
The coals shifted in the brazier, whispered to him. 'Souls perish while you dawdle.'
He dozed before the glowing embers.
John knew that she was late as she rushed up the stairs to Master Wycliffe's chamber. She hoped that he was so busily engaged with his writing that he would not notice, but she had seen no candle glow from his window. Sometimes, he hardly noticed she was there as she collected his soiled linen, swept his floor, emptied his chamber pot. Wouldn't it just be her luck that today he would be in one of his rare moods, asking about her family, how they spent heir Sundays, if any of them could read?
It wasn't that she resented his curiosity--in spite of his abrupt manner, he had kind eyes, and when he called her "child" he reminded her of her father who had died last year--but today, she didn't want to talk to him. She was sure to cry and besides, he would not approve, she thought, as she fingered the relic hanging from a ribbon attached to a hemp string. It girdled her waist like a rosary.
She smoothed her unbound hair beneath its shabby linen cap, took a deep breath, and knocked lightly on the oaken door. When she heard no response, she rapped again, louder, cleared her throat. "Master Wycliffe, it's me, Joan. I've come to clean your lodgings."
She tried the handle on the door, and finding it unbarred, opened it just a crack.
"Master Wycliffe?"
From the interior gloom, gruffly: "Come in, child. You are late. We waste time."
"I'm so sorry, Master Wycliffe. But it's my mother, you see. She's very ill. And there's only me to see to the little ones."
She scurried about the room while he watched, lighting the rush lights, their flames flickering as she opened the window and slung out the contents of his chamber pot. She collected his soiled linen into a bundle, conscious of his eyes on her. She never disturbed the papers on his desk. She had learned that the hard way.
"Shall I replace the candle, sir?"
"Umph. I've naught to replace it with. I've been waiting for you. So you could fetch more."
"I'm sorry. I'll go right away."
She hoped he would not report her tardiness. Who knew when her mother would be well enough to return to her own work as a charwoman. He turned his chair away from the window to face her, held up his hand in a halting gesture. "Your mother is ill, you say?"
"Her fever is very high." She blinked back tears, then blurted out her confession. "I've been to Saint Anne's to beg the priest to pray for her.
His mouth pressed into a tight line above the gray hairs of his beard. The priest's prayers are no better than yours. Perhaps not as good. Yours may well come from a purer heart."
He stood up, towering over her, austere in his plain robe and tight woolen cap that scarcely covered the gray hair flowing over his shoulders and mingling with his beard.
"What's that you have hanging on your belt?" he asked.
"My belt, sir?"
"Beneath your arm. Something that you call attention to in trying to conceal."
Copyright (c) 2005 by Brenda Rickman Vantrease
Reading Group Guide
A Biographical Note From the Author
I grew up in a series of small southern towns. My favorites were always the ones with the biggest libraries. Learning to read was the singular most liberating moment of my life. I still remember the day I brought home my third-grade reader, a book of real stories—not those skinny little See Spot Run books. This one had some heft and a yellow cover, and I read it all the way through in three days. I particularly liked a fairytale about a knight trying to win a fair maiden by the impossible feat of riding his horse up a glass mountain. I can still see the illustration of that plumed and helmeted knight spurring his white steed up that shimmering blue glass mountain.
My father was a Baptist minister, and some of his congregations were farther away from the library than my bicycle or roller skates could take me. When I ran out of books, I would dig out my father's old college text, a massive tome entitled Masterworks of World Literature. Boredom drove me to the epic poetry of John Milton and The Nibelungenlied and El Cid, the English poets, a little Sophocles, even Oscar Wilde, when I would have preferred to be reading Nancy Drew or a teenage romance novel—a beneficial deprivation.
I also made up stories in my head. My first published effort was a poem submitted by my ninth-grade English teacher to a student anthology. (I haven't written any poetry since—maybe because when I was called up to the stage in assembly to receive my award I stumbled on the steps. Overcoming shyness is not something one can learn in the pages of a book.) While still in high school, I received my first form rejection slip from Ladies' Home Journal. I'm still embarrassed just thinking how awful that story was —and I still remember how much that first rejection hurt. At sixteen, my writer's heart was very naïve and very tender.
Libraries have always been important to me. I graduated with a B.A. in English from Belmont University, working my way through school in the college library, I met my husband Don on the steps of that same library, and late in my career in education went back to school for a library degree, finishing up my teaching career in the metropolitan Nashville school system as a librarian. During my twenty-five-year tenure, I earned a master's degree and a doctorate from Middle Tennessee State University, traveled, worked summer jobs, read books on writing—and even wrote a little fiction. But it was only after I retired from teaching in 1991 that I really had time and energy to pursue my dream. Don and I used our vacations to travel to writers' conferences and workshops from Maine to California. During that time I piled up a lot of rejection slips, but a few of my essays and short stories found homes in periodicals and anthologies, among them VeriTales (Fall Creek Press), Thema, and Coast to Coast.
Seeing my first novel in print has been the culmination of a lifetime of dreams. And the best part—The Illuminator is in my local library, and a lot of other libraries besides. Right there, on the shelf. With the call number Fic/Van.
Before Gutenberg - Book Production in the Middle Ages
The image of a solitary monk toiling away at a slant-top desk comes readily to mind when we think of books produced before Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in the mid-1400s. And indeed many books were created just this way. But not all.
A book was a highly desirable commodity, a status symbol proclaiming that its owner—whether an illiterate knight who might not be able to read or a philosophy student in the burgeoning university system—was wealthy, educated, and religious, in an age when all of these things mattered greatly. An entire industry grew up to feed this need. From the largest guild of bookmakers in Paris to the monkscribe toiling in his abbey scriptorium, book production provided employment in an economy that was shifting from the feudal model of farmers tied to their masters' land to artisans working in thriving towns and boroughs.
First, the parchment maker prepared the calfskin—a medium-sized prayer book required the skin of twenty animals—by curing, stretching, and scraping the hides. (Paper was also produced, but considered to be inferior because it was not lasting.) A stationer sold parchment, along with the nibs and quills, pens and brushes, paints and leather inkpots—these he might make in his shop or purchase wholesale from a cottage industry—and sometimes even the finished books. An apprentice prepared the parchment by drawing guidelines on it and mixed the fine pigments, taking great care not to waste such costly ingredients as saffron and lapis lazuli and cinnabar; then a scribe painstakingly copied the words using inks made from carbon black and oak galls.
It was the illuminator's task to illustrate the margins with miniature pictures, adding gold and silver to make them even more desirable. Indeed, in this context the word "illuminated" is not a synonym for illustrated, but a reference to the use of precious pigments and gold and silver. The illuminator's art would also be expressed in the carpet page, a full-page illustration at the very beginning of a gospel. This was brilliantly colored and meticulous in execution, with perfect symmetry that might require exacting compass work. (Think of some of the Turkish carpets you've seen, which is probably where carpet pages got their name.) The best ones are an intricate blend of Celtic knotwork and designs interwoven around a central motif—usually a cross, which would be blended over and over again in inventive ways, even into the border. Such a page would be a challenge to the imagination and the skill of a master illuminator, since it was the single biggest illustration in a manuscript, and the first thing his patron saw of his work. Finally the book binder would sew the pages, or "quires," together, attach the sewn manuscript to planed boards, and enclose the book in leather. If the book was destined for a wealthy churchman or nobleman, a goldsmith or silversmith enclosed the whole in a finely wrought cover studded with jewels. If it was intended for some humbler use, he would merely add a base metal clasp to keep the codex closed and protect its parchment pages from dust and curling. The whole process could take months, or even years, per book.
The text was often religious, a book of hours or psalms or hagiography, pilgrim guides, but sometimes secular, too, including husbandry tips, medical treatises, and secular verse. Books often contained errors from weary copyists. But whatever the wisdom or folly of the words inscribed, all were produced in the same laborious fashion. All were precious.
London's Other Tower - Wycliffe and the Lollards
Many visitors to the infamous Tower of London are unaware that London holds another tower with an equally gruesome history. It's called the Lollards' Tower. And from the heavy iron rings imbedded in its stone to the aura of misery that still clings to its walls, it offers up a full measure of historical shivers.
It would seem an unlikely place for persecution and torture. Picturesque Lambeth Palace, situated on the south bank of the Thames, has been for centuries the official residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, where England's most venerable clergy meet to discuss theology and make ecclesiastical policy. In medieval times, that mandated the confinement and torture of hundreds of heretical dissenters. Early in the fifteenth century a special tower was constructed to house these heretics, who were sometimes tethered to iron rings for days on end. Those who did not recant met their fate at the stake, while others—the luckier ones—had their hands bound behind them as a hot iron branded their skin with the letter H. H for heretic or L for Lollard.
The name Lollard refers to an anticlerical, antipapal movement that began in England during the last part of the fourteenth century, and was spread throughout the countryside by "poor priests" and lay preachers. Most scholars think the name came from a Flemish word lollaert, meaning to mumble or murmur softly. Some believe that this anti-Catholic movement, which in later decades expanded to Bohemia, Germany, Wales, and Scotland, would eventually influence North American belief systems through the Puritan fathers.
The movement began with the writings of the Oxford theologian John Wycliffe, who was deemed "the most significant Englishman of his time" in Barbara Tuchman's hstory, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. Wycliffe gained powerful patronage at court because his early writings advocated the supremacy of crown over Church in all matters of civil authority. Later, however, he went on to challenge Roman Church authority in spiritual matters as well, condemning the rich and powerful friars as thieves and liars and calling the Pope an Antichrist. Wycliffe and his "mumblers" advocated a personal faith and railed against relics, pilgrimages, and the sale of indulgences. But most importantly, John Wycliffe proclaimed Scripture to be the only infallible authority in all spiritual matters and began the translation of the Scriptures into English. Because of his powerful friends at court, Wycliffe never felt the full brunt of persecution. Although he was chased out of Oxford, he was allowed to retire to his parish in Lutterworth, where he died of natural causes. His followers would take up his fight and his effort to translate and disseminate the Scripture. Many of them would become all too familiar with the amenities offered in the Lollards' Tower.
1. Do you regard The Illuminator as primarily Kathryn's story or Finn's?
2. What do you think about Kathryn? Is she a good mother? In what ways do she and her sons, Colin and Alfred, help and hurt each other?
3. The author has said that she created Finn as a kind of ideal hero who doesn't exist in real life. How close does he come to your own ideal?
4. Agnes and her husband are caught in the shift between feudalism, when farmers were inextricably bound to the land where they were born, and the life of an itinerant worker. How do you regard Agnes's decision to stay with Kathryn, both before and after her husband's death?
5. The strict feudal class system exerts great pressure on the lives of other characters as well. For example, how does it affect Alfred's opportunities, and what choices does Half-Tom have open to him about his future? To what extent does class consciousness continue to influence our lives today?
6. Some have called the Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich feminist in her concept of Jesus as "Mother God." How do you view this interpretation? In light of the troubled times in which she lived, what do you think Julian means when she says "all will be well"?
7. Faith is obviously central to Julian's existence. What role does it play in other characters' lives? For example, how does Kathryn's faith change in the course of the novel? How important are Colin's religious beliefs to him?
8. What do you think about Magda? In what ways does her mysticism seem similar to, and different from, Julian's? What role does mysticism play in spirituality, and is that role greater during tumultuous periods in history?
9. What is the symbolism of the two necklaces described in the novel?
10. The Illuminator is set at a time of great corruption in the Catholic Church. What do you think accounts for corruption not only in religion, but also in other established institutions such as government, capitalist corporations, large philanthropic organizations, etc? Is that corruption inevitable?
11. Discuss how the social and political climate of the period brought Finn and Kathryn together while simultaneously pulling them apart. How could the actions of their children have led to a different outcome for their relationship?
12. The novel ends where it begins: Half-Tom meets Finn on the road outside Norwich and hands off another vulnerable child to him. How satisfying is the ending?