Out of print, but buy it from abebooks.co.uk
As with the Outcast I found myself giving this story a queer reading.
The dynamic of the story comes from the encounter of Lovel and Rahere. Lovel is driven out of his village because of both his physical disability and the gifts of healing, whether intuitive or supernatural, that he inherits from his Grandmother. Rahere one-time Jongleur (or Court Jester) who became the founder of St Barts.
They are both outsiders, marked out in various way for not conforming with the expectations of masculinity – although in the context of monastic community their alternative ways of being were given a certain social validity – but those within religious communities are almost by definition “other” than society’s norms.
Although published in 1970 Sutcliff in still writing as she was a generation earlier, I would not want to get carried away, this is not radical call to liberation, but neither is it a text of heteronormative terror.
I also found the words Sutcliff puts into Rahere’s mouth to explain his move from Jester to Monk, following the sinking of the White Ship, intriguing…
“It seemed to me then, that if life was indeed a small matter, there could be no God to trouble Himself with such a trifle; and I found, somewhat to my surprise, that I could not believe there was no God. It followed then, that there was something more to life than making the King laugh after supper...”
This seems an unusual sequence of thought – many move from a sense of life being meaning to a sense of God behind that meaning – but here, instead, it is a moving from a sense of God to the awareness that life must be meaningful.
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