Mirabilis [Hardcover]

Susann Cokal (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 21, 2001

A medieval village under siege turns to the most unlikely saints and saviors in this darkly comic debut about religious expediency and human ecstasy.

Villeneuve, France, Anno Domini 1372. The village is under siege and people are starving when Bonne Mirabilis, wet nurse to the wealthiest and most enigmatic woman in town, realizes that she alone has the bounty with which to feed the hungry-and not by convincing her patroness to open her warehouses.

But it's a defiant act of generosity: When she was twelve years old, her sainted mother, the two priests suspected of being her father, and all the village women who believed Bonne's conception had been immaculate were locked into the church and set afire.

With a masterful sense of history and the visceral spirit of The Decameron, newcomer Susann Cokal combines the outrageous and the wondrous into the story of Bonne, a woman born "God's bastard," on her way to sainthood with the troop of ascetics, mystics, lovers, and jesters who keep her milk flowing.

Mirabilis is a remarkable and confident debut-an endlessly surprising tale about appetite and miracle, all four humors in abundance, and human ecstasy of every sort-a novel that carries the reader into that sweet rare air between the ridiculous and the sublime.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Sprawling, spiritual and crudely sensual, Cokal's debut novel is neither for the weak of heart nor the faint of stomach. In 14th-century France, in the village of Villeneuve, a town beset by plague witnesses a miracle: a young virgin takes her first communion and levitates above an awestruck crowd. But Blanche the Astonishing goes from saint to pariah when the girl bears an illegitimate child nine months later and refuses to name the father. At age 12, that child, Bonne Tardieu, witnesses her mother's imprisonment and immolation at the hands of an angry clergy. She grows up to be a wet nurse, but business is bad for an outcast with only a devout sculptor and a troubled dwarf as friends. Bonne's life changes when she catches the eye of Radegonde Putemonnie, the town's wealthiest woman, who is pregnant with her dead husband's child and stands to inherit his fortune only if she can bear an heir. Radegonde selects Bonne as her wet nurse, which means ample access to food at a time when the rest of the besieged villagers are starving. Bonne shares her good fortune, allowing the townspeople who rejected her to suckle at her always-flowing breasts. When a series of coincidences lead to the mysterious appearance of a Madonna sculpted in Bonne's likeness, the villagers hail her a saint and Radegonde a witch. Bonne is perplexed not only by her sudden change in social status but by her very unsaintly attraction to the seductive Radegonde. A visceral, absorbing account of medieval life from the perspective of its outsiders, Cokal's unsettling novel is rich with passions both religious and sexual and with an awareness of the occasional fine line between the two.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Bonne Mirabilis is on her own in the medieval village of Villeneuve. Her mother, believed by some to have conceived Bonne immaculately, has been burnt as a heretic. Her grandmother is no help, having walled herself up in the church as a hermit on learning of her daughter's pregnancy. Alone in the world and soon pregnant with a fatherless child of her own, Bonne becomes a wet nurse, a good living for a young unmarried woman in 14th-century France. The strange thing about Bonne, however, is the sheer abundance of her milk and the healing powers it seems to have. Soon she finds herself in the employ of a mysterious and wealthy pregnant widow, who begins feeding Bonne rich food to ensure her unborn child's future diet. The feasts continue even after Villeneuve is besieged by the English and the rest of the town begins to starve. Bonne becomes frustrated with her mistress's refusal to open her substantial larders to the town, and so she takes matters into her own hands and feeds the townsfolk with her milk. This beautifully crafted story about miracles and belief will not soon be forgotten. The characters are wholly believable, and the medieval world is presented in all its rich brutality and color by an author who knows every detail of the period. One expects to stay up late to finish the latest John Sandford, but a books about medieval wet nurses with dwarfs and monks and exotic, sapphic witches? Yet readers will, for it is that compelling. Recommended for all fiction collections. Wendy Bethel, Southwest P.L., Grove City, OH
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 14 and up
  
• Hardcover: 380 pages
• Publisher: Blue Hen; 1ST edition (June 21, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0399147535
• ISBN-13: 978-0399147531
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #685,375 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Susann Cokal was born in California and has lived most of her life there and in the Southwest, where she found much of the material for her novel Breath and Bones. She also studied medieval history, art history, and literature in Poitiers, France, the inspiration for Mirabilis. She has taught at California Polytechnic University in San Luis Obispo and now lives in Richmond, Virginia, where she teaches creative writing and contemporary narrative at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A perfect confection of a novel, August 11, 2004

By 

K. Huff (Radnor, PA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Mirabilis (Paperback)

A beautifully-written story of a provincial French town in the late 14th-century. Our main character is Bonne, the bastard daughter of a woman who was said to have performed miracles. Twenty-two years later, Bonne finds herself as a nursemaid to a wealthy woman. When the town of Villanueve is besieged by the English, and the townspeople are starving, Bonne finds herself feeding most of them with her milk.

This is a strongly sensual book- but, oddly enough, it is not sexual. The act of breastfeeding is treated with matter-of-factness. Bonne is a fascinating character, and I enjoyed getting "inside her head" in this powerful book about love and longing during a time of famine and plague, at a time when it was a sin to be a dwarf or a Jew. We also see the viewpoints of some of the other major characters in the book.

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A work of heavenly perfection and earthly passion, June 21, 2001

By 

S. Barron - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Mirabilis (Hardcover)

Wonderful! An engrossing tale of a medieval wet nurse that follows her from an inauspicious birth into worthlessness to a lauded position in her village, where she has been and continues to be viewed by some with suspicion. Through dark and tangled forests, carefully maintained bright castle gardens, streets covered with thorns and excrement, and places spiritual and secular that are simultaneously consecrated and unholy, Susann Cokal has written a novel that uses archetypal figures and locations in a way that transcends symbolic confinement and creates a unique and often erotic world that is deeply rooted and alive. Her characters, especially the titular Bonne, are fascinating, psychologically complex, and so well developed that they remain conscious in your mind both between readings and after the novel ends, causing you to wonder about them and their current lives as one would think of a friend. This is a world that I will continue to hold in my mind and a book I will revisit often.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An eerie tale of poverty, religion and superstition, March 1, 2005

By 

Luan Gaines "luansos" (Dana Point, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Mirabilis (Paperback)

Fall back in time, before the Enlightenment, the Restoration, to the mentality that surrounded the Inquisition, when the Catholic Church was immolating heretics and unbelievers, when myth and witchcraft are as familiar as fervently whispered prayers. In 1357 France, a small village is overwhelmed on every front, long under siege by the English, threatened by the Black Death that is decimating cities and subject to the fickle judgment of an angry God. This is a world of poverty, where people live by their wits, exchanging services for goods, coin a precious commodity.

Shrouded in superstition cloaked in religion, Bonne Tardieu, daughter of Blanche Mirabilis (Blanche the Astonishing), ekes out a meager existence as a wet nurse, knowing that a patroness would change her world drastically. The illegitimate Bonne is used to life as an outcast, her once-sainted mother immolated in a church fire. Fate looks kindly upon Bonne, in the person of Radegonde Putemonnie, the town's wealthiest woman, who commissions Bonne as the wet nurse for her unborn child. Radegonde must carry this child to term in order to inherit her deceased husband's fortune, opening her opulent home to the wet nurse, providing for the breasts that will feed the coming baby.

In a starving village, the young woman is an object of intense scrutiny as she is plied with food to enrich her milk. The bountiful Bonne, in an effort to assuage the villager's envy, allows them to nourish their starving bellies on her milk. Bonne develops an attachment to the woman who offers her this island of security, but gossip prevails. Eventually Bonne is hailed as a saint when a Madonna appears, bearing Bonne's likeness. Unfortunately, the town turns against Radegonde, proclaiming her for a witch.

This is a fascinating tapestry of class differences and the rampant superstition of fourteenth century France. Both sensual and spiritual, the images are lush, filled with the contrasts of poverty and wealth as scandal spreads like wildfire, the village fueled by fear, tales of witchcraft passing from tongue to tongue. Cokal captures the iconic spirit of a Medieval French village, its population decimated by lack turned brutal, urged by primal needs more urgent than religion, an unstoppable force of mob mentality. All is chance if one is not born to nobility; Bonne Tardieu is the essence of fertility in this tapestry of primal needs, where salvation requires more than a willing back bent to hard work. This world requires good fortune for survival. Luan Gaines/ 2005.