Marie de France
The novel opens with seventeen-year-old protagonist Marie de France riding through a forest in the cold of March. She rides an old warhorse, drawing attention from the villagers. But it is not the horse which is the attraction:
“She is tall, a giantess of a maiden, and her elbows and knees stick out, ungainly”
What’s This Evolution Thing?
Imagine the effect of living in medieval times when the darkness of the age was not just darkness without context. Think of how far human civilization looked to have fallen from the brilliant heights of ancient civilizations long since toppled? Evolution becomes an ironic viewpoint:
“Humanity must be disintegrating to dust, the people of today paltry in comparison with what they had been a millennium before. The Romans, the Greeks, such giants compared with the Normans, or far worse, the paltry brittle-boned English. In a thousand more years humans will be as thoughtless as the cud-chewing kine of the fields.”
The Matrix
The book is title simply Matrix and not The Matrix. But there is definite sense of the matrix at work here. In this sense, the matrix refers to the mother and the, metaphorically speaking, the mother refers expansively and symbolic to motherhood
“I am the shepherdess of all the abbey’s souls, Marie says at last. I am the mother, here to protect and guide all of our sisters and our servants and villeinesses.”
Marie the Poet
The protagonist of the story is a real historical figure who gained fame for authoring a number of different works. Foremost of them is a short book of narrative poems that were written while Marie actively serving a nun. The two worlds could not but collide:
“The life of the abbey is the dream. The set of poems she is writing is the world.”
Jerusalem’s Fall
During her lifetime, Jerusalem falls again. This time to the Turkish infidels. She is nearly half a century on earth and angry that she has never been able to see the sacred city with her own eyes:
“Cedars, fig trees, lilies, gazelles. And now with Jerusalem’s fall, there is ripped a rent in the earthly kingdom of her god. Through such rents great evil does creep. She does not sleep at night, fearing a dark cloud she feels approaching.”
