Lorraine Groff tells the dizzying epic of 12th-century nun and sensual poet Marie de France;

In one book after another, Lorraine Groff loves to depict communities, from a small upstate New York village to Templeton Ghosts to utopia to two of: Fury – marriage – passing through a 1960s hippie communeArcadiarecently reprinted in paperback by L’Olivier. Matrix is no exception to the rule attached to the medieval abbey of women, where the 17-year-old Marie de France was appointed abbot by Eleanor of Aquitaine, wanting to get rid of her bastard and rude half-sister in this blessed year 1158… The desperate young girl is far from imagining that this dark and miserable place, where his peers are starving, will allow him to become a shrewd businessman, a political strategist, undaunted by any transgression, and a leader. a congregation to which he would restore power and prosperity.

In making her heroine a feminist ahead of her time who refuses to let herself be shackled by her time, Lauren Groff uses: Matrix in a lively and sensual language that pays tribute to the female body with its many nuances and secrets, like a life in harmony with nature, seasons, landscapes.

In the video, Super-8 years By Annie Erno and David Erno, excerpt

Miss Figaro. – How did you become interested in Marie de France?
Lauren Groff. – Twenty years ago, I studied at the university for about a year and got acquainted with the brilliant works of the time, such as: Song of Roland, Romance of the Rose, or the many versions of the legend of Tristan and Iseult. I felt great joy when we finally got to the study leave Marie de France, because the sharp wit and voluptuous sensibility of this text resonated deeply with me. I’ve long admired Marie de France, and over the years I’ve tried to write a number of drafts around her without success; a translation that was too formal, a novel that had neither tail nor head, a short story… Then, when I was at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in 2019, listening to Professor Cathy Buggy give a lecture on nunnery in the Middle Ages about, I had a kind of worldliness. the vision of Matrix.

What connection did you want to establish between Marie de France and Eleanor of Aquitaine?
I adore Alienor and rely on the version I give of the real queen, on which we have many sources. I think she was one of the most powerful people in history, and stories written by men have treated her terribly in the past. She was brilliant, subversive, and used the institutions that imprisoned her—the narrow view of woman, the church, marriage—as much as they used her. I consider Marie and Eleanor’s love to be in Matrix it is deeply complicated. it includes hatred, jealousy, one-sided sexual desire, repulsion, imitation, and admiration. After all, I think these two exceptional women had only one person in the world who could understand them.

Was it difficult to find the balance between fiction and historical sources?
It was quite a challenge. We know very little about Marie de France, despite the brilliant theories of historians; most people who spoke to me suggested that he was an English Congregational abbot, born in France, and somehow related to Henry II. I tried to achieve several goals in parallel. be as historically accurate as possible; to take into account the extremely different metaphysical and medical visions that existed at the time; to ensure that the reader can understand how the times have changed not only in terms of liturgy and abbey life, but also agriculture; remember what it was like to live in a time without journalism or real academic resources; note the folk wisdom that was largely based on mythology and storytelling. I’ve done a lot of research and several historian friends have read the novel throughout its composition, but any errors will of course be my responsibility.

But I think in our culture we tend to look at menopause with shame, to see it as some kind of decline and failure.

Lauren Groff

Did you want to make sensuality and sensuality central to the novel?
Actually, it came from my reading leave About Marie de France. he was so attentive to the exact quality of the animal’s flesh, senses, smells, furs, silks, and fabrics, that I was intimately convinced that the man beneath these parts was profound. sensual. I think it could be considered heresy, at least for the Catholic Church, but I believe that God dwells in the human body, in the glory and sometimes the pain of his encounter with the world. One of my role models for Mary was the medieval great abbess Hildegard of Bingen, a polymath whose music we still play today. Hildegard’s visions were divinely inspired only after her menopause. But I think in our culture we tend to look at menopause with shame, to see it as some kind of decline and failure. With luck, however, people with a womb can all go through this phase, which can mark a kind of spiritual renewal, bringing not only another body, but also a new form of strength and wisdom.

Mary is alternately seen as a saint or a witch. What do you think he is?
Aren’t saints and wizards, after all, on the same spectrum of independence and subversion? Both are punished because they insist on being treated as full human beings with all the rights they deserve; the only difference is that saints are honored after death. My Mary is both and neither.

Do you think your novel is also a mirror of our times, especially regarding the status of women?
In fact, I wrote this book to make it a tuning fork; it has always been created to connect past and present, to emphasize resonances between eras. When I started this text, I felt stuck in the present moment. it was the end of the grueling Trump years, and I felt threats and fears constantly crashing over my head like a series of great waves, as fast as I could. hold my breath And even if I believe that it is the prerogative of the artist to confront the time in which he lives, I felt too depressed to write about the contemporary. Then I realized that writing about historical periods is equivalent to writing about the present by the group. I could talk about my obsessions, but do so in a way that allowed me to ignore social media, technology, dumb orange-faced baby-men, the planetary rise of the new fascism, or the escalation of climate change, albeit an early climate. The change actually made it into the novel.