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The Book of the Maidservant
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The Book of the Maidservant
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The Book of the Maidservant
Audiobook6 hours

The Book of the Maidservant

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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About this audiobook

"A funny and wise book about friendship, loyalty, and love."-Karen Cushman

Johanna is a servant girl to Dame Margery Kempe, a renowned medieval holy woman. Dame Margery feels the suffering the Virgin Mary felt for her son but cares little for the misery she sees every day. When she announces that Johanna will accompany her on a pilgrimage to Rome, the suffering truly begins. After walking all day, Johanna must fetch water, wash clothes, and cook for the entire party of pilgrims. Then arguing breaks out between Dame Margery and the other travelers, and Johanna is caught in the middle. As the fighting escalates, Dame Margery turns her back on the whole group, including Johanna. Abandoned in a foreign land where she doesn't even speak the language, the young maidservant must find her own way to Rome.

Inspired by the fifteenth-century text The Book of Margery Kempe, the first autobiography in English, debut novelist Rebecca Barnhouse chronicles Johanna's painful journey through fear, anger, and physical hardship to ultimate redemption.


From the Hardcover edition.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateOct 27, 2009
ISBN9780739385548
Unavailable
The Book of the Maidservant

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Reviews for The Book of the Maidservant

Rating: 3.4444407407407414 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

27 ratings4 reviews

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Margery Kempe's memoir has become a standard syllabus inclusion for feminist literature courses. Well-off but not noble, Margery bore 14 children before claiming to have had a vision of Christ telling her to become abstinent. She got her husband to comply by paying off his debts. As her visions increased, so did her hysterical crying when she experienced them. Some claim this was a ploy for public attention, but others believe that she was a true visionary. Although she was illiterate, she dictated her quite fascinating memoir The Book of Margery Kempe, to a scribe.[The Book of the Maidservant] is just that: the story of the maid who accompanied Kempe on her pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Kempe had been warned that her maid would cause her trouble, and perhaps, from her point of view, she did. But according to Barnhouse's novel, the maidservant (here named Joanna) suffered considerable trials of her own along the way, including harsh treatment by Kempe, continuing harassment from a would-be rapist, being taken advantage of other pilgrims who loaded her with more and more work, and getting lost and separated from her mistress in Rome. Kempe does not come off well here: Barnhouse obviously adheres to the opinion that Margery was an ambitious, indulged woman who broke the rules of medieval English society and used religion as a way to exalt her status and to get her own way. Nevertheless, her novel is an engaging look into the customs and class structure of the times, and Joanna is a very likable, if somewhat hapless, character. She creates a solid picture of what these pilgrimages must have been like, especially for those who, like Joanna, had no choice but to make them.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    inspired by The Book of Margery Kempe, the first autobiography in English; many references to Mary and other Catholic beliefs so might have an audience with the parochial students. It didn't grab me and I like this time in history, maybe another day.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    In this historical fiction work set in 15th Century Europe, Johanna serves as a maidservant to Dame Margery Kempe, a holy woman given to fits of religious passion, who, despite her great piety, mistreats her servants. When Dame Margery decides to go on a pilgrimage to Rome, she takes Johanna with her, and after a dangerous journey full of conflicts, abandons Johanna in Venice. Without speaking the local language, any money, or any idea of how to return to England, Johanna must find a way to survive on her own.The narrative is packed with small details about Medieval life, so Johanna's story conveys a fully-realized picture of the 15th Century, and the well developed setting makes Johanna's character, situation and danger believable. Johanna is an engaging narrator, and a great strength of this book is her character development, for as the journey progresses, Johanna transforms from an angry, but timid, servant to a resourceful woman who is able to confront both her own personal demons and the mistress who mistreated her. A wonderful scene near the end of the novel conveys the extent of Johanna's growth as she admits/realizes that she has been deceiving herself about the circumstances that brought her to be in Margery's employ, and that the person she has cast as the villain in her life is not at all the one responsible for her misfortune. As the author's note explains, the character of Dame Margery is based on a real person, who is known because she is the author of the first English autobiography, and while fiction, much of the story is based on Dame Margery's account as well as those of other pilgrims. The reader, however, does not need to be familiar with the historical context to appreciate the story, and this book would be enjoyed by high school age readers.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Tho a teen book, I found it interesting and with a good arc of charactar growth. I wish the ending had been more definitive.I'd actually like a sequel!