[Monkfish; 2024]
In medieval Europe, Roman Catholic women chose life in the cloister not only to express their faith, but also to earn respect. As the historian Steven Ozment has noted, medieval Catholic morality considered the virgins and widows of religious orders more respectable than wives. Among religious women, one was especially elevated: the anchoress, a woman “anchored” to a church or shrine in a tiny cell, where she practiced devotion and self-mortification until her death. Perhaps the most famous anchoress is England’s Julian of Norwich (c.1343–c.1416). Julian wrote works of mysticism and theology during her anchorage, in a church still standing today at Kilderkin Way and Saint Julian’s Alley in Norwich. The philosopher, composer, illustrator, scientist, and abbess Hildegarde von Bingen (c.1098–1179) was enclosed in an anchorage in her early teens, as a servant to the anchoress Jutta von Sponheim.
The secluded life of a fourteenth-century English anchoress and her young servant is only half the story of Kristen Holt-Browning’s debut novel, Ordinary Devotion. The other half is the life of a twenty-first century woman, a wife and medievalist slogging away as an adjunct professor at a college in upstate New York. These two lives, connected across time and an ocean, intrigued and delighted me as I read the book. Fundamental to this connection is women’s search for respect—a search that continues to this day.
The novel opens in England. The year is 1370, and the narrator is a twelve-year-old girl named Elinor, about to be enclosed with the anchoress that she will serve. Monks push a weighty, oaken door. Stone and dirt surround the girl in a tiny cell. Enclosure feels more like interment:
The door is closed. Black everywhere. The dark is all. More dark than I thought there would be. How can such a small space hold so much darkness? But also, there is less: less air, less light. Less me. As if, already, I am shrinking to fit this enclosed place.
Scraping and shuffling on the other side of the door, its outline hardly visible within the stony wall. It is being bricked up . . .
This first chapter of Ordinary Devotion is one of the best descriptions of claustrophobia I have ever read. The prose-craft evokes a physical sensation of panic. With short, dense sentences and a preponderance of one-syllable words, Holt-Browning’s text has the pace of rapid, shallow breathing. To compound Elinor’s anxiety—and ours—the author ends the chapter with the strange, rustling presence of someone else alive in the cell.
In the second chapter, set in a New York college town, circa 2017, a medievalist named Liz browses the college bookstore. She dutifully surveys the shelves for books aligned with her scholarship on medieval notions of purgatory. Liz didn’t pick purgatory as her focus. She was talked into it by a male faculty advisor, who convinced Liz to set aside her interest in medieval gender studies. But, at the bookstore, Liz has an experience that reminded me of St. Augustine’s great dictum “Pondus meum, amor meus [My weight is my love].” She is pulled irresistibly toward a book on medieval anchoresses, all the while conscious of her ten-week pregnancy.
The rest of the book alternates between these fourteenth- and twenty-first-century settings. As the plot unfolds and characters develop, so does the similarity of women’s experiences across the centuries. Elinor and Liz have similar relationships with the women who mentor and care for them. The anchoress that Elinor serves—Lady Adela— teaches Elinor to read. The scholars Sloane Lanham and Jasmine Lewis support Liz and her work. Similarities also occur among the men who suppress Elinor and Liz, as well as those who champion them: Brother Joseph, a compassionate monk, befriends Elinor through her cell’s aperture for food and chamber pots; and Nick, Liz’s husband and a tenure-track faculty member. Throughout their similar experiences, Elinor and Liz search for society’s respect—the overarching theme of Ordinary Devotion.
One way their search manifests is in the desire for self-determination. Elinor is given no choice but to be walled-up in an anchorage. Her father made this decision with the encouragement of male clergy, and Elinor chafes at this. Liz, tracked into the study of purgatory by a male advisor, is restless and hungry to return to her own interests. In addition, Liz takes an adjunct job at the college where her husband Nick has been hired full-time. Her struggle to cope as a poorly paid, overworked, and sometimes denigrated adjunct professor is among the most important parts of Ordinary Devotion.
I believe Holt-Browning might have done even more than she did with characters and plot lines antagonistic to Elinor and Liz’s self-determination. I wanted the two men who played a suppressive role— Elinor’s father and Liz’s advisor—to be drawn in more detail. I wanted a more complex dynamic between Liz and her husband, delving into the ways professional inequality might threaten their marital relationship. For example, Holt-Browning might have augmented her descriptions of the social and emotional concerns that arise when professional positions are “wildly unequal” between intimate partners. But these are minor concerns about an otherwise fine treatment of the obstacles to independence that Elinor and Liz confront.
As the novel proceeds, Elinor and Liz do achieve greater self-determination, abetted by mentors and friends. They listen to the insistent call of their own inner voices. In a memorable scene, Liz enjoys a meal with Sloane Lanham and Jasmine Lewis, basking in the assurances extended by these scholars. Liz has an epiphany about the “purgatory” she was coaxed to study and the academic work in medieval gender studies she yearns to try.
What happened? Where did purgatory go? A new path of research to follow who knows where. Never mind that this topic was far beyond the confines of my professional position. I wasn’t supposed to expand outward in my studies; if I wanted to advance, I needed to burrow inward, deeper down into the ancient texts, closer and closer to the source. Backward and inward, not outward and forward . . .
I didn’t want to drag myself up purgatory’s dry mountain. I wanted to cross an ocean. I sipped my wine and felt it slide down my throat, I imagined it joining with my bloodstream, the rivers inside me, my living, liquid body, which I wanted to carry across the world, water across water.
In this lyrical passage, Holt-Browning lets Liz’s voice play with the double meaning of purgatory in her life. “Purgatory” describes both a field of study she did not freely choose and the resulting pain of her inauthentic choice. Liz suffers from the lack of self-determination, but she also begins to anticipate the joy of it. Holt-Browning deploys powerful verbs to reveal Liz’s strong emotions as she grows conscious of her own academic passions. Liz has been obliged to “burrow” but now she wants to “expand” in her academic work. She needed to “drag” herself on an uphill climb, but now she wants to “carry” her independent and flowing self toward a wider world.
Another manifestation of Elinor and Liz’s search for respect is their burgeoning awareness of the need for reproductive choice. Ordinary Devotion covers the gamut of issues in pregnancy and sexual health. Holt-Browning shows how such issues infuse the lives of Elinor and Liz, and indeed, all people regardless of gender or place in history. In the fourteenth century, Elinor’s mother died in childbirth, kicking off a cascade of events that entomb the girl alive in an anchorage. Elinor hears Lady Adela at the cell’s aperture, counseling pregnant women and revealing her own intimate understanding of reproductive and sexual choices. In the twenty-first century, Liz grapples with difficult decisions about her fertility. Holt-Browning faces women’s reproductive and sexual health forthrightly, as challenges to be confronted by communities, not just by women alone.
The treatment of women’s reproductive choice in Ordinary Devotion touched me personally and profoundly. I am a mother of twins, becoming pregnant by surprise at age forty-six. I faced dangers to my own health and the real threat that one or both of my infants could have severe genetic or congenital defects. I am grateful that I lived in an area of the US where my reproductive health choices were not limited. I am grateful that my physicians and nurses presented me with the full range of healthcare options. Under their care, I delivered two healthy children. In the process, I learned a set of facts that Ordinary Devotion expresses very well. Pregnancy is perilous. It may be ill-timed—medically, economically, or psychologically. The risks of reproduction touch every human life, yet are too often treated as the disgraceful fault of the lone pregnant woman. Elinor, Liz, and all the characters in the novel’s orbit embody these facts, and send us off to ponder them long after the last chapter.
Holt-Browning spins a tale to read for pleasure as well as for principles. Social, religious, and gender issues intersect in the novel, but always emerge through deft, never didactic, prose. The book is historical fiction, but unlike most work in this genre it eschews the genre’s tropes of mysteries, mansions, and romping romances. The result is historical fiction that is also realism—two “ordinary” women who discover their “devotion” to their own lives as well as to the divine. Ordinary Devotion is an original work on the ancient and current theme of women’s desire for respect in a society that often devalues them. It conveys this theme with eminently entertaining plot lines and characters. There is nothing ordinary about that.
Dana Delibovi is a poet, essayist, and translator. Delibovi is a 2020 Pushcart Prize nominee, a 2020 Best American Essays notable essayist, and consulting poetry editor at the literary e-zine Cable Street. She is the translator and commentator of the book Sweet Hunter: The Complete Poems of St. Teresa of Ávila.
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