From the film Conclave to current events in the Vatican, the papacy now is firmly in the public consciousness. So, what better time to return to a 1000-year-old story about it. Rapture, by Australian novelist Emily Maguire, gives new flesh to the story of Pope Joan. The story of a woman in the Middle Ages who disguised herself as a man and became pope.
Maguire takes the story’s bare bones – a woman of English background from Mainz who disguised herself as a man, went to Athens to further her education, ended up in Rome, became pope and was found out when she gave birth in a papal procession – and builds characters that strike true.
The protagonist, Agnes, is born to an English priest, who although encouraging education and curiosity, tries to keep her within patriarchal society with marriage the end goal. This, understandably, creates a tension between Agnes’s curiosity and desire to learn, and the society which expects women to serve men as husbands.
Yet, that tension alone might not be enough to fuel a novel of this scope, for Maguire deeply fleshes out the narrative, moving slowly from what is now Germany to Athens and onto Rome. To add an extra dimension, providing more tension and ability to explore theology, Agnes’s mother, who died in childbirth, is described as a pagan who, on marriage, took on Christianity in name only.
That narrative choice is a masterstroke. It justifies Agnes questioning why it is right for priests to cut down sacred trees as false idols, when those trees predate even the Romans and surely are part of god’s creation. At points, with prose perfectly balanced between lyrical description and the narrative perspective of a young girl, albeit one schooled in Greek and Latin texts, it veers almost into naturalistic pantheism.
I would, here, love to go into details of how Agnes conflicts with the orthodoxy of the time and engages in refreshingly humane, anti-hierarchical and pleasure embracing theology of a sort that is so often ignored in historical fiction, which paints the Middle Ages as a depressing place. However, that would be a disservice to the novel. For although it does follow the basic narrative – Germany, Athens, Rome – and throws in the obligatory lover, Rapture is deftly written making each action and choice feel natural and driven by the protagonist rather than the needs of that traditional narrative.
But it is worth mentioning that lover. This is not a story of a woman pushed and formed by some Machiavellian lover using her for his benefit, nor one of a women driven mad by lust and so robbed of reason. It is a story that blends sensuality, love and a simple joy in the pleasures of life, with the real conflicts of life. Especially a life in which sex for women meant childbirth and so a serious risk of death.
To many modern readers the idea of sex, especially sex with a feminine focus, sits uncomfortably with Christianity. However, that has not always been the case. Maguire, in showing Agnes’s development as she questions her place in the world, and relationship to god, as a woman and so pushes against orthodox doctrine, hints at a deep learning lightly worn.
At its heart Rapture is a novel that takes a mutable story often bent into shape to back this or that side of an argument – the reformation was fertile ground for that – and recentres it. Maguire has written, an eminently readable, book about a woman coming to understand herself, and her rightful place in the world, regardless of what that world thinks she should be.
Words by Ed Bedford
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