[Comments] Matrix by Lauren Groff

[lostcheerio]

April Welcome to the RPGX Book Club where we read books, eat Cheetos, and stay up late! This month's selection is Matrix by Lauren Groff. It was recommended by the inimitable Lemming23, who promises to guide us into the world of English monasticism and religion in medieval times, as this is his academic focus! This book is a speculative biography of Marie de France, a poet of noble birth in France who ended up in England, and according to Groff's imagination, became a prioress at a remote abbey. I'll leave it to Lemming23 to say more about the book and its context in his intro post, but I'll just say I've read Lauren Groff's last two books and she is an exquisite writer. I'm on page 50 of this one and so far it's like if The Name of the Rose and A Year in Provence met in 11th century England in the rain, and birthed The Sound of Music but in sackcloth and starving, with Breton lais. If you have more to say on Appendix N: The Eldritch Roots of Dungeons and Dragons as you finish it up, you can keep the other thread alive as long as you want to! But let's move our random chatter to this one, and begin discussing this nun's tale! I'll race you to see who's the first to write and run a one-shot inspired by monastic life.

[DeletedUser79558]

Thank you lostcheerio! Like you, I've read several of Groff's other books before, so when I saw that she had a new one out, I grabbed it without seeing what it was about, and was thus surprised when I started reading it to find that it was on a subject that I know quite well (being a contract / adjunct professor of medieval history specialising in English monastic history of the 12th-13th C, which is where and when this novel takes place). I suggested it in the other thread as I thought it might prove interesting - giving a good example of medieval monastic life without being too academic and which could serve as a useful guide to roleplaying in a monastic environment. I stopped reading at that point (I was about 20-odd pages in) so that I wouldn't get too far ahead, so I'll re-start now we're all on the same page, roughly.

Since I don't want to post a wall of text here, I wrote up a quick document for context here (so that's where you'll find the dry, dreary, wall of text! April Fool! You still have to wade through my boring lecture! Wait, that's the not aloud bit, right? Bugger. Anyway, read it if you like, but don't worry if you take one look and think nah mate, let's not). I've tried to keep it fairly short, but I can go on a bit, and a lot of it is based on my supposition of what's likely to be in the book. If you have any other questions, or something seems weird or strange as we go through the book, please do ask, and I'll try to answer any questions you have without entering boring Prof. Lemming territory too much. If you *do* want to get bored rigid, then PM me, and I can go on and on and on and on for AGES with the most excruciatingly tedious detail. Seriously. I've taught entire semester-long classes on this subject, and they only scratch the surface.

Anyway, I'm coming into this novel with as much detail as others are who are coming into it new, but from what I've gathered from the first few pages, we're dealing with the main character of Marie, who is rather obviously based on Marie de France, a mystical nun based in England known best for writing sometimes rather saucy Breton Lais - poetry concerning courtly love, but with an erotic undercurrent - and which tradition she pretty much invented, in doing so. The Lais themselves are often a little supernatural-y, based on Celtic and Roman / Greek myth to some extent, and are worth reading themselves (I'm not sure just how prominently the stories found in them will be replicated here), so I'm expecting that since Marie had a reputation as being a bit of a mystic, that we'll see such elements here in some form or other. I'm looking forward to reading this book myself, and I hope we will all enjoy it together.

[DeletedUser79558]

Something I've noticed early on - when Marie arrives at the monastery, Groff discusses the parlous state of the place, and says that many of the nuns working have no idea of what they're doing in that role, and are unsuited to the task - this is something common to monastic life. Benedict, in his Rule, discusses the dangers of people getting a bit too proud and haughty if they're good at something, and so to keep them humble (humility and obedience being the two most important vows, alongside stability), they're frequently put to work doing something they have absolutely no aptitude for. Nice to see a little touch like that, which accurately reflects work in many medieval monasteries.

[Sprite]

What?!? Castle Anthrax in Monty Python and the Holy Grail is not historically accurate? I'm shocked! Shocked I tell you!

Joking aside... I'm listening to the audio book, enjoying it

It's fascinating how the ideal of 'suffering = godliness/goodness' persists through the ages. Also... medieval setting = so many horrific ways for a person to die.

I'm reminded of 'Hild' by Nicola Griffith, a fictionalized telling of the life of Hilda of Whitby, set much earlier in seventh-century Britain. (I read it last year.)

[Fillyjonk]

I started! I will be done by the 15th I hope. It is a short book.

Lemming for my masters degree, my focus was Medieval Religious lit —-SUPER Into the cycle plays SO this is cool. Cool pick.

[lostcheerio]

Mine is 500 pages so clearly I got extra content.

prance.gif

[Sprite]

I've finished Matrix.

I will resist spoilers, except to say that the author really nailed the description of hot flashes... and I love stories about subversive women.

[DeletedUser79558]

I'm still only a few pages in - had to finish off the current book I was reading before getting back into the Matrix saddle. Enjoying it so far though.

I have been wondering about the title (and maybe it will become more clear as I read through more - it's an odd choice. Matrix is Latin, obvs, and tends to mean mother, but it's not a common use of the term, mater being the common form for mother generally, and also the one that tends to be used in monastic literature to denote the woman in charge of a female monastery (that and abbatissa, the feminine form of abbas, which means abbot). I've checked Whitaker (one of the main online Latin dictionaries, my copy of Lewis and Short (the Latin dictionary, about 1200 pages long), Du Cange's Glossarium (even longer than L&S at several thousand pages, but more of a discussion of words and phrases than a dictionary, though it does specialise in medieval terms), and my trusty old Dictionary of Ecclesiastical Latin which is much more basic than the others, but does sometimes pick up on more specialised usage.

Mater uses a masculine ending (-er), so matrix is sometimes used as a more feminine ending - sort of emphasising the feminine - but the main definitions of matrix are less motherly as we would think it, and more impersonal in some ways, or even animalistic - from L&S for example:

"I.a mother in respect to propagation (in lit. signif. not used of women).
I. Lit., a breeding-animal: of breeding-cows, Varr. R. R. 2, 5, 12; of breeding-ewes, Col. 7, 3, 12; of laying-hens, id. 8, 2, 6; 8, 5, 11.—
B. Transf.
1. Of plants, the parent-stem, Suet. Aug. 94.—
2. The womb, matrix (late Lat.): “matricis dolor,” Veg. Vet. 2, 17, 5; Sen. Contr. 2, 13, 6.—
3. A public register, list, roll: “in matricibus beneficiariorum,” Tert. Fug. in Persec. 12.—
II. Trop., a source, origin, cause (cf. mater, II.; “eccl. Lat.): Eva matrix generis feminini,” the progenitress, Tert. Virg. Vel. 5: “primordialis lex data Adae, quasi matrix omnium praeceptorum Dei,” id. adv. Jud. 2; id. adv. Haer. 21: “matrix et origo cunctorum,” id. adv. Valent. 7.—As an appellation of Venus, Inscr. Orell, 1373."

Similarly in Whitaker: "dam, female animal kept for breeding"

I have come across some mentions in Du Cange of ecclesia matrix in place of ecclesia mater (mother church), but again, it's more usual to see the -er ending there.

It'll be interesting to see as the book progresses if there's a clue to why she chose Matrix rather than Mater.

[bothers]

Well, being a medieval nun just sounds awful.


General observation: gosh, the names! I know it's a bit silly, but the invasion timeline of the British Isles is so packed with aggressors over such a long period of time that it's kind of hard for me to keep the different time periods straight in my head.

Like, intellectually I know that Augustine brought Christianity to the various Aetheldudes a super long time ago, and all that would have been going on more or less concurrently with the Norse and the Danes and the Anglo Saxons and the Normans all squabbling with each other over who gets to dominate this tiny, horrible, rainy rock in the middle of the ocean. So yes, it makes total sense that you'd have established Christian nuns with middle english names, and intellectually-speaking this is something that I understand fine... but for some reason actually seeing the names in front of me just doesn't stop being strange to me.

Maybe because it feels like in my head the different groups were all separated into different and distinct eras? Which obviously doesn't even make any sense because history is a continuous event, not discrete units of time like keys on a piano. Maybe the same thing that breaks your brain a bit when you find out that Oxford University is older than Machu Picchu, or when you see that meme saying there was a window of time where a samurai could theoretically have sent a fax to Abraham Lincoln.

History, you guys. Time is weird.

[DeletedUser79558]

Originally Posted by bothers

Well, being a medieval nun just sounds awful.


General observation: gosh, the names! I know it's a bit silly, but the invasion timeline of the British Isles is so packed with aggressors over such a long period of time that it's kind of hard for me to keep the different time periods straight in my head.

Like, intellectually I know that Augustine brought Christianity to the various Aetheldudes a super long time ago, and all that would have been going on more or less concurrently with the Norse and the Danes and the Anglo Saxons and the Normans all squabbling with each other over who gets to dominate this tiny, horrible, rainy rock in the middle of the ocean. So yes, it makes total sense that you'd have established Christian nuns with middle english names, and intellectually-speaking this is something that I understand fine... but for some reason actually seeing the names in front of me just doesn't stop being strange to me.

Maybe because it feels like in my head the different groups were all separated into different and distinct eras? Which obviously doesn't even make any sense because history is a continuous event, not discrete units of time like keys on a piano. Maybe the same thing that breaks your brain a bit when you find out that Oxford University is older than Machu Picchu, or when you see that meme saying there was a window of time where a samurai could theoretically have sent a fax to Abraham Lincoln.

History, you guys. Time is weird.

It's a class thing! By the time the novel is set (I can't remember the exact dates given, but we're looking at the late 12th C 1180s I think), at lest at the start of the book, so that's well over 100 years since the Norman invasion (and end of the Danelaw, harrying of the north etc). By this time, the Norman aristos were well-established in England and regarded as "English" who spoke French (as Marie does - there's some early stuff where she can't understand the nuns who speak English), because that was the language of the aristos and royalty in England. They're often referred to as Anglo-Normans (and really, that's what they're speaking and writing, not French, but... and which is a little different to 'normal' Norman), whereas the common people are still speaking English. So where you see most of the nuns speaking English, they're probably oblates (those given to the monastery as chlidren) who were orphaned, abandoned, etc, or who came from the very lower gentry from what would have been the previous anglo-saxon aristos, whereas those who speak French (or both) are almost certainly from Anglo-Norman families of some standing. It's why you'll see that Marie has trouble chatting to ordinary nuns sometimes, but doesn't have any (or much, anyway) problem chatting to those nuns who are obedientiaries and the like - in any monastery, the ones in power will have come from powerful secular families, with one or two very rare exceptions.

[bothers]

... what's the deal with people from secular families being sent to a religious monastery? I mean, it looks like Marie has been sent there just to get her out of the way, but that can't be the case all the time, can it?

[DeletedUser79558]

Originally Posted by bothers

... what's the deal with people from secular families being sent to a religious monastery? I mean, it looks like Marie has been sent there just to get her out of the way, but that can't be the case all the time, can it?

It varied, but with women in particular (men were sometimes sent from noble families because there was nothing for them to inherit, numbers fell slightly when crusade were going on, as that was an alternative - they might be able to loot enough to get by that way), monasteries were seen as a) somewhere you could get an education, b) somewhere to put your troubled / troubling women, c) somewhere to keep them safe (either for life, or until they get married - in which case they're probably being sent as children / teenagers and won't take full vows), d) for retirement / welfare (lots of widows, but also orphans with either no / few relatives, or ones who didn't want to take on the burden of raising someone with no contributions to the finances, just costs, and who, if they marry, are going to require a dowry), e) to be given a powerful position (monasteries were large landowners, and quite a few were very wealthy), f) To have someone in the family devoting all their efforts to prayer for the rest of the family, g) for legitimate religious reasons (overcome with spiritual faith, etc). None of these in any particular order of magnitude or whatever.

When you took your vows, you were supposed to leave the secular world behind, but for some reason, some nuns, especially those in high positions in the monastery, still stayed in touch with their secular families and co-ordinated with them for political reasons. I know, I'm shocked too.

[bothers]

It sounds like a terrible trade for a little bit of power.

At the start of Chapter 3, Marie bribes a servant to go into town to buy some stuff for her. If the servants didn't actually (or wouldn't usually) live there, does that mean those were paid positions? I'm trying to reconcile the two facts in the book of "the nuns are starving to death" and "the nuns have servants working for them", which on the face of it is a puzzling juxtaposition.

If the servants are paid, where does the money come from? And if they're not paid, why are they doing it? I guess this is partly answered in Chap. 3 which has Marie sneaking into the barn with the animals to write poetry, where she tries to be quiet so she doesn't wake the servants sleeping in the loft, so there are at least some servants living there, just not with the nuns. But... then what's going on? Is it free lodging and all the turnips you can eat in exchange for watching a load of nuns die of malnutrition?

[lostcheerio]

The servant thing puzzled me too as it seems like the nuns are having to do a lot of the work anyway. Not just the knee-crushing prayer routine.

Speaking of, I have been looking at the different organization of the prayers throughout the day in different traditions... (yes i am writing a monastery one-shot tyvm that didn't take long!) and I'm wondering: I get that sometimes they combined reading prayers into one time, but in situations (like in the book?) where they are doing every prayer at the correctly appointed time, did the nuns get to split up this schedule or did every nun have to do every prayer? Seems like it would work better in shifts or did they believe the prayers wouldn't work right then?

[DeletedUser79558]

Originally Posted by lostcheerio

The servant thing puzzled me too as it seems like the nuns are having to do a lot of the work anyway. Not just the knee-crushing prayer routine.

Speaking of, I have been looking at the different organization of the prayers throughout the day in different traditions... (yes i am writing a monastery one-shot tyvm that didn't take long!) and I'm wondering: I get that sometimes they combined reading prayers into one time, but in situations (like in the book?) where they are doing every prayer at the correctly appointed time, did the nuns get to split up this schedule or did every nun have to do every prayer? Seems like it would work better in shifts or did they believe the prayers wouldn't work right then?

Nope, every choir nun, each prayer, at each time. If you're an obedientiary or higher, you might have duties to do at certain times (not usually missing the major offices though), but otherwise all nuns should be in there doing their praying - it's what they're there for, especially when they have servants. With other orders that have laybrothers / laysisters, they aren't usually at all offices, just the major ones.

Piggybacking to answer bothers' questions too: Why give up your life for a little bit of power? Because if you're a woman, you're often trading a horrible life where you have no power whatsoever for one where you are attaining some power. Noble women were often there to arrange marriages for, in order to strengthen ties between families, so you might be married off to someone three time your age, who you have little in common with, who doesn't particularly like you, who expects you to provide him with kids, and who may treat you abysmally. The notion of marrying for love for nobles is a fanciful one, hence the liking of courtly romances, and the start of literature being romance novels, written by and for women (so bollocks to anyone who suggests that real literature is written by serious men on serous topics).

As to the servants and where they live - this is, I think, one of the few things that Groff gets a bit wrong. Look on any floorplan of any monastery, and there's no place for them to sleep or live, because they didn't live at the monastery. They were often married, and almost always serfs, who (like the men who ploughed and sowed the monastery's lands) often certain labour to their noble landowner in return for their own patch of land to work, their cottage, etc. You might have some living on a grange farm, just because you have to be there anyway and it might be remote (monasteries were almost always remote, though often a village or even town would spring up nearby), but most would be married and living nearby.