Travels with a Medieval Queen by Mary Taylor Simeti

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Travels with a Medieval Queen by Europe Travel Books

Travels with a Medieval Queen by Mary Taylor Simeti
Price: $3.00

Features

Hardcover: 352 pages

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition December 7, 2001

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0374278784

ISBN-13: 978-0374278786

Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 7.1 x 1.3 inches

Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds

From Publishers Weekly
Simeti offers a delightful, reflective reconstruction of a journey undertaken in 1194-1195 by the Sicilian princess Constance from the dark forests of Germany back to her ancestral island in the company of her cold, conquering husband, the Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI. Simeti, who has lived in Sicily for 40 years and written about the island in Pomp and Sustenance and On Persephone's Island, retraces Constance's itinerary in the relative comfort of her car, creating a pleasant exchange between the two journeys. She empathizes intensely with the princess's more grueling travails, from the horseback ride across the Alps, to the dangerous experience of childbirth (which, with her first child, Constance chose to undergo in public to prove that the child was hers). Throughout the book's 12 chapters corresponding to the months of Constance's trip, Simeti renders her sense of connection with her subject: they are both expatriates caught between two cultures, maneuvering for space in a male world. As Simeti is aware, much of the reconstruction is a projection of her own experience, since few documents speak directly to Constance's life. The author senses and evokes possibilities, introducing invented characters like the princess's Arab nurse or fictitious relationships such as her wooing by the courtly poet Frederick von Hausen. She dips into medieval scholarship, rather than immersing herself fully, though her friendship with Columbia University professor Caroline Walker Bynum bears fruit in the discussion of individualism in the Middle Ages. Like another 12th-century traveler, Gerald of Wales, Simeti is fond of engrossing intellectual side trips (astrology, chess, medicine, etc.). 144 b&w and 10 color photos.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Constance of Hauteville, the medieval queen featured here, was the daughter of Sicily's king and the wife of Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI. Few details about her life exist, but it is known that she had her only son at the age of 40 while returning to Sicily in 1194 to help her husband claim the Sicilian throne. Constance is buried in Sicily, which is where Simeti, an American who has lived there for almost 40 years, first learned about her and became fascinated by the mystery surrounding her life. Retracing Constance's return trip to Sicily, Simeti (On Persephone's Island) combines historical facts with her own speculations. The historical information, which fortunately makes up the bulk of the text, is well researched and quite interesting. The travelog sections, on the other hand, are flat. The reader often feels cheated by the author's contrived imaginings, which are neither fact nor fiction. In the end, it seems that the blending of genres simply doesn't work. Still, so little is available on Constance that this book fills an obvious gap. For libraries with medieval collections. Kathleen Shanahan, Kensington, MD
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Reader Reviews
It's a daunting task to attempt to write a biography of someone when few primary sources exist. Constance, the last child of the Norman King Roger II of Sicily was an intriguing woman whose personal story teased, eluded and captivated author Mary Taylor Simeti for years, as she states in the pages of this biography-cum-travelogue-cum-personal memoir, but with whom she felt a strange kinship. Both were strangers in a strange land---Constance in her 10-year exile from her Sicilian homeland when she married Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI---Simeti when she married a Sicilian, settled there, and raised her children far from America. Simeti happily found a home in Sicily (and this is her 4th book dealing with Sicilian subjects); Constance finally returned, in triumph, to the land of her forebears, having borne a child along the way (a first child, at the age of forty!), the infant who would become Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor and Sicilian King. Simeti flatly states that she did not know if she had enough material to write a biography. She then takes the daring chance of fleshing out her thin material by musing about a fictitious (though likely) Arab nursemaid, a possible (though unlikely) relationship with a German courtier, and a close friendship (most plausible) with an Italian abbess, and sets out to reconstruct Constance's final trip home to Palermo, using logic, old documents, and intuition, to guess the actual route of the journey south. Simeti takes the further leap of relating to Constance as a woman and mother whose hopes, fears, and ambitions for her child were not so different from those of any other mother, despite the yawning chasm of centuries and cultures. Not a traditional biography, or history, by any means, and some points are surely controversial, but this is a compelling narrative that makes this little-known queen come alive as a personage in her own right. Simeti freely admits that although she was a history major, she is not an historian, but she shows great powers of empathy with Constance. Moreover, living in Sicily for 40 years has made her quite knowledgeable about and sensitive to the people, the land, and its ancient history. (I wish only that Simeti had taken more time in her journey to visit more sites and take more photographs!) The story of the Norman conquest of Sicily, when the House of Hauteville wrested control of this rich kingdom from Arab control, and what happened when Teutons from the North stepped in two centuries later at the death of Constance's young nephew, William II, after the throne was claimed by an illegitimate grandson of Roger II, isn't well-known, but it is highly dramatic, replete with colorful characters, intrigues, and adventure. I look forward to more explorations of Sicilian history from this talented writer, someone who loves what she does and has the ability to make otherwise dusty history come alive for her readers. A final note---Simeti talks about her own life and experiences in this unusual book but never in a jarring manner---which makes one wonder at the disturbing ad hominem remarks addressed to the author in the previous reviews---rather, the contemporary travelogue-cum-memoir has its own charm and nicely brackets the trip and experiences of Queen Constance, who becomes ever more human to us as she makes her crucial life's passage from the cold, monochromatic German castle of Trifels to the warmth and beauty of the colorful Mediterranean island her heart never really left. And there is never any question of where Simeti's heart is. Comment | Permalink | (Report this)

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