Matrix by Lauren Groff (2021)

[jserraglio]

One of the strangest books I’ve read in a while. A medieval tale loosely based on the life of the real Marie de France (ca. 1160-1215).

In the novel, the virago Marie becomes an abbess poet of Breton lays; she sports bastardized royal blood as the half sister of King Henry II of England and banishes all males over the age of 12 from her lands lest they impregnate her novices. Marie is also a mystic seer of 19 visions from the Virgin Mary which she uses to justify a grandiose edifice complex.

The novel (if it is a novel rather than a romance in the Brittany vein) features lesbian nuns, a woman who says Mass and hears Confession, and a jealous, money-obsessed Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine as the unobtainable object of Marie’s unquenchable courtly love.