Matrix

Seventeen-year-old Marie is expelled from Eleanor of Aquitaine’s court and sent across the Channel to become prioress of an impoverished English abbey. The community is hungry, sick and politically exposed, but Marie gradually turns the convent into a disciplined and prosperous female institution. As her authority grows, she directs building projects, protects the nuns’ estates, cultivates intense loyalties and interprets a series of visions that enlarge her ambitions beyond the role assigned to her.

Groff identifies her heroine with Marie de France, the twelfth-century poet whose biography remains uncertain, and imagines a life shaped by the Angevin court of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine. The novel uses monastic labour, landholding, worship and enclosure to examine how women might exercise economic, spiritual and political power inside a male-dominated medieval order. Its treatment of female community, desire and visionary experience makes it biographical historical fiction with strong social, political and queer dimensions.