Customer Reviews

The Book of the Maidservant

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The Book of the Maidservant is a wonderful example of making academic research accessible to any readers interested in medieval life. Don't be put off by the "Young Adult" tag; this novel would be a perfect addition to undergraduate courses in medieval literature, and makes a perfect companion to the original work of Dame Margery. Funny and warm, this is an appealing rendition of the "voiceless" whose lives were too often short, sharp and brutish. Johanna is a wonderful creation.

Read by Rebecca Barnhouse (with an additional note read by the author), The Book of the Maidservant is the unabridged audiobook adaptation of the debut novel of medieval literature expert Rebecca Barnhouse. Inspired by the fifteenth-century text "The Book of Margery Kempe" (which happens to be the first known autobiography written in English), The Book of the Maidservant follows Johanna, a serving girl in attendance to medieval holy woman Dame Margery Kempe. Though Dame Margery Kempe feels the pain of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary, she is all but blind to the suffering around her. When Dame Margery Kempe embarks on a pilgrimage to Rome, the difficulties truly begin, culminating in a bitter fight that causes Dame Margery Kempe to abandon her own servants. A stranger in the strange land of Rome, Johanna must find her own path. A saga of hardship, adaptation, survival, inspiration, and ultimately the journey to redemption, The Book of the Maidservant is enthusiastically recommended. 6 CDs, 6 hours 45 minutes.

I was impressed by the quality of writing in this and its readability. The characters are well-rounded and believable, and Barnhouse has a great eye for detail. This is a pretty versatile book: I think it could be read by middle schoolers, high schoolers, and even adults. It's not typical "YA" [teen] lit nor is it typical of some historical fiction for teens. I really enjoyed, and I'd recommend it to anyone interested in the Middle Ages.

Margery Kempe was a self-described holy woman in the 1400s, with the gift of tears, meaning that she would cry loudly for hours while contemplating the life of Christ. I forced myself to read her tedious autobiography before I read The Book of the Maidservant. Margery's book, written years after this pilgrimage (she actually went to the Holy Land), is a catalog of the people who annoyed her, insulted her, vexed her, bothered her, and didn't appreciate her constant sobbing during the trip. She spends several pages on a priest who she claims stole her sheet on the boat over to the Holy Land. Her maidservant would have been there, every day, listening to all of this. Rebecca Barnhouse pulls this girl out of the margins and writes the story of Joanna's epic journey in a century where most people would not have gone more than fifty miles from their home villages. Rebecca Barnhouse makes the travel fascinating (seasickness, fasting, bandits, haystacks, foreigners, dirt, frost, icy streams, uncooked peas) and describes everything in smashing detail without it feeling like a description. This is a great Catholic book. Joanna feels the saints have abandoned her after Dame Margery leaves her all alone in Venice, but she makes her own way to Rome in one of the best adventures of the book, and regains her faith while working in the English hospice in Rome, where as Margery Kempe tells us, she found her measuring the wine.

Is there a child in your life who loves unspecific Medieval history, Christian epics, and finds the woes of the serving class fascinating? What child doesn't long for the hardscrabble romance of the fifteenth century, with its desperate and poignant struggles, all the washing of clothes in streams, the abused and battered women, the contents of chamber pots sloshing from windows, and plaque-decayed teeth?

Are those crickets I hear?

I'm rather at a loss in reviewing the Book of the Maidservant, because commenting on the strength of the writing, and the subtle humor of the rendering of the characters feels like complimenting the paint job on the Titanic: the trim may be nice, but she just ain't gonna float.

The story, based on real historical figures, concerns Johanna, a dutiful, resourceful servant in the 1400s, who tends to Dame Margery, a zealously devout woman from a prominent religious family. Dame Margery, who has the fabulously absurd habit of lapsing into torrents of weeping every time she thinks about the suffering of Jesus, and is convinced that God speaks to her directly, decides that it's her duty to walk from her home in Briton to Rome on a pilgrimage to St. Peter's Basilica. As fun as that sounds, of course it wasn't.

As they go, Johanna and Margery join with a handful of thinly developed travelers who round out the story, but don't quite manage to give it thrust. And, well, they walk. Bickering ensues when Margery annoys everyone to pieces, sobbing as she prattles on about saints and bible stories while they climb the Alps, and even the faithful Johanna's nerves are worn thin as she's forced to become servant to the entire group and receives nothing from Margery in the way of gratitude or support.

In technique, Rebecca Barnhouse is a very skillful writer. The subject matter is ambitious, and Barnhouse is to be commended for a believable depiction of a woman living in this era, undertaking an unfathomably huge and difficult adventure. There's an austere grace with which she portrays Johanna, and as an adult reader, her character was enough to keep me interested in her journey. The problem with this book, however, is that there is no suspense or drive of plot to pull a young reader through all the not so interesting historical details.

There may be a feeling of triumph in what Johanna overcomes, but a sense of climax is curiously absent from the structure of the story, and the main dynamic of the book, the relationship between Johanna and Margery, is cast aside. Rather than growing as a character, Margery becomes flatter and more stereotypical the closer they get to Rome, and though it may be the point, the two women never come to understand each other or even acknowledge that a real relationship exists between them, which was a disappointment.

I felt unclear as to what it was Johanna really wanted, other than to go home, or just sit down for a minute. The suggestion of a romance is tossed her way, but isn't developed, and a secret family drama is revealed, but its connection to the plot or what the reader is supposed to take from its revelation is ambiguous.

But as previously stated, none of these points of criticism are relevant, because I'm not sure what child is going to sit through all the wimple pinning. Optimistically, this book will play well to a highly literate demographic of kids for whom the period detail and epic journey will be engaging. If there is such a niche, I hope the two of them have managed to find each other and form some kind of support group.


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