from Medieval Academy News

Of Trenchers and Trestle Tables: Recent Young Adult Novels Set in the Middle Ages
by Rebecca Barnhouse

By the time they get to college classes, students have all kinds of ideas about the Middle Ages—from television, movies, comic books, and especially from those Medieval Times restaurants they’re so eager to tell us about. Another source of their perceptions about the medieval world is fiction written for teenaged readers.

Recent young adult novels set in the Middle Ages tend to fall into two broad categories: those that feature authentic medieval people, and those that feature contemporary teens plunked into medieval settings. A common practice among writers is to throw in a trencher and a trestle table, dress characters in gowns, tunics and hose, yet have the medieval characters share the values of modern readers—tolerance for diversity, for example, and a willingness to stand up to authority.

Of all the novelists currently writing about the Middle Ages for a teenaged audience, Michael Cadnum is one of the best. Not only is he a lyrical stylist, he insists on the differences between medieval and modern attitudes and beliefs. He follows his successful tale of Robin Hood, told from the point of view of the Sheriff of Nottingham (In a Dark Wood [Orchard, 1998]), with a novel of the Crusades. In The Book of the Lion (Viking, 2000), Cadnum isn’t afraid to risk his characters being unsympathetic to modern readers.

For example, seventeen-year-old Edmund, a squire serving in the Crusades, listens approvingly as the knight he serves tells him that “the female soul is dwarfed and hideous.” When King Richard orders the slaughter of 2,700 Muslim prisoners—men, women, and children—Edmund does not take part in the killing. Later, however, he doubts himself, saying, “I had betrayed my king, and, I began to believe, Heaven.” Not for Cadnum the frequent side-stepping of repugnant moral stances that other novelists often take. And his characters live and breathe Christianity, the kind that makes them sing songs about the Virgin and feel virtuous for slaying infidels. Much of the novel is taken up with Edmund’s journey from Nottingham to Acre, and the details are fascinating and convincing. Medievalists will like Cadnum’s work, but young readers may have to be persuaded to read it, since the world it portrays is brutal and the main characters are not just like them.

In contrast to Edmund, enter Lady Edith, a fifteen-year-old widow journeying from England to Jerusalem just for the adventure in Joan Elizabeth Goodman’s Peregrine (Houghton Mifflin, 2000), a stand-alone sequel to The Winter Hare (Houghton Mifflin, 1996). Although both her husband and her infant daughter have recently died, Edith gives no thought to their souls, an unlikely stance in twelfth-century England. When she reaches the Holy Land, Edith quickly comes to understand that the stories she has been told about Jews stealing Christian children are meant to frighten children and “to allow their elders to keep on hating Jews.” From a wise old Jewish man she learns that “Jews, Christians, Moslems, we are all of the same family,” a sentiment she embraces.

Of course, Edith also runs into Margery Kempe in her travels, in the year 1144, a mere 270 years before Margery’s trip to the Holy Land! Here is a costume drama replete with the accidence of the medieval world (those trenchers and trestle tables make an early appearance) but lacking in substance. Edith is escaping a threatened marriage, a common theme in novels about the Middle Ages, and her journey is filled with improbable events. For example, she takes under her wing a Welsh princess who, also having escaped a forced marriage, is living like a wild child in the forest. Although the romantic Rhiannon, who is able to read Edith’s thoughts, may appeal to young readers, she is a creature from a fantasy or adventure novel, not historical fiction.

Even further removed from history is Berit Haahr’s The Minstrel’s Tale (Delacorte, 2000). Ostensibly set around the year 1330, this slight novel owes more to “Ye Olde Renaissance Fayres” than it does to the Middle Ages. Thirteen-year-old Lady Judith cuts her hair, dons boy’s clothes, and runs away to avoid marriage to a much older man, “the repulsive Lord Norbert.” She befriends a peregrine falcon who defends her as she journeys the two hundred miles to Eltham Palace, where she hopes to fulfill her dreams of being a musician by joining the King’s Minstrels. Along the way, she staves off the advances of a young woman who, thinking she is a boy, wants to marry her. She also develops a modern social conscience, worrying about girls’ lack of education and the treatment of serfs. She lengthens her journey by helping some beleaguered peasants bring in their harvest. In the happily-ever-after ending, Judith gets to be a musician and to marry the man she loves, with no consequences. She still gets to be rich, too.

Although scholars will be either amused or horrified by this fantasy-vision of the Middle Ages, young readers will be drawn to Judith’s adventures, her animal companion, and her easy escape from an unpleasant fate. The enticing cover, in which Judith stands before a romantic landscape wearing nifty clothing—her falcon on her shoulder and a pair of pan pipes in her hands—will attract young readers, but the medieval world is represented mainly by a few ‘tises, ‘twases, and trencher tables.

A good balance between the cerebral works of Cadnum and the adventure novels of Goodman and Haahr can be found in Karen Cushman’s works. Her fiction appeals to younger readers, and her approach may be the best way to bridge the chasm separating the medieval and modern periods. She overcomes differences in values by her use of humor, by creating likeable characters, and by doing her research. Occasionally she sacrifices a point of accuracy for the sake of the story. Her award-winning novels Catherine, Called Birdy (Clarion, 1994) and The Midwife’s Apprentice (Clarion, 1995) featured girls living in England in 1290, one in a manor house, one in the village.

In her latest novel, Matilda Bone (Clarion, 2000), Cushman gives us the story of a fourteenth-century English girl, one who was raised by a priest to value reading, writing, and prayers, but who finds herself living with an illiterate bonesetter. In many novels set in the Middle Ages, characters yearn for an education, but here, thirteen-year old Matilda already has one. However, instead of being able to use her Latin or French or Greek, she is forced to learn practical skills: buying fish in the market without being cheated, building fires, cooking, and as an apprentice to the bonesetter, actually touching people in order to help them. Cushman contrasts the town’s learned physician, who relies on astrology and Galen, with the practical remedies of the barber-surgeons and bonesetters.

In all her novels, Cushman’s tone is light-hearted, even when she deals with serious subjects, and her heroines are strong and resourceful, but not too far out of keeping with reality. In all of her work, the texture of medieval life comes through in the sensory details that reveal careful research and nuanced writing. Matilda Bone is less successful as a novel than Catherine, Called Birdy in part because Cushman is too eager to share her knowledge of medieval medicine with her readers, and sometimes she focuses on it to the exclusion of characterization. Yet in each of these works, she skillfully uses humor to balance the more off-putting aspects of the Middle Ages with the ones readers will find fascinating.

Because The Midwife’s Apprentice won the prestigious Newbery Award, Cushman’s works will be present on bookstore and library shelves and on required reading lists for years to come. Thus, Cushman’s vision may have a profound effect on the ways the Middle Ages are perceived by young readers and their teachers. Some of these perceptions will stay with them when these readers take college classes about the Middle Ages, as will the views of the medieval world portrayed by other novelists. Although medievalists will doubtless find things to quibble with about Cushman’s view of the medieval world, we should be happy that she is careful with her research and that she makes her young readers want to know more about the Middle Ages.

Editor’s note. Rebecca Barnhouse, Associate Professor of English, Youngstown State University, specializes in both Old English literature and young adult literature. She is the author of Recasting the Past: The Middle Ages in Young Adult Literature (Boynton/Cook, 2000) and The Old English Hexateuch: Aspects and Approaches, edited with Benjamin C. Withers (Medieval Institute Publications, 2000).