Summer Reading: “Down the Common” by Ann Baer

In this blog series, I’m reviewing a smattering of fiction set in the Middle Ages. Last week’s book was the wonderful novel Pilgrimage by Lucy Pick. Today, I’m taking a look at a less recent book–Down the Common: A Year in the Life of a Medieval Woman, by Ann Baer (M. Evans & Co., 1998).

DowntheCommonDown the Common follows a peasant woman, Marion, through the months of a typical year in the small English village in which she lives. Each chapter bears the name of one month; the succession of months, along with the arduous yet lovingly described labors that accompany each one, forms the backbone of the plot. It doesn’t sound like much; yet the book manages to be meditative rather than merely descriptive.

Marion herself isn’t an overly meditative person, and this is part of what I appreciate about Down the Common. Marion isn’t a true “heroine.” Baer doesn’t try to make her modern by giving her a sense of self, like many authors do with medieval characters. As an aspiring fiction writer, I’ve often wondered how I would handle the Middle Ages. How do you characterize someone from a pre-modern era? How do you get inside the head of, for example, the laborers pictured on the cover of Baer’s book? I imagine my characters would end up being anachronistically modern.

Baer manages this difficulty pretty well, if not perfectly. We know that Marion isn’t very self-aware partly because we’re explicitly told so. For example, we read passages like, “Marion would never have thought to wonder why ” this or that happens. These interjections disrupt the point of view and narrative flow a bit. Still, it’s admirable that Baer refuses to let Marion “rise above adversity” or “find herself.” The labors of the months are the true heroines of this book. It’s like the calendar pages in a book of hours have come to life.

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Très Riches Heures of Jean de Berry, ca. 1411

As an art historian, I found this delightful. I immediately thought of the calendar pages from the Très Riches Heures of Jean de Berry (pictured). But as a Christian, it’s disturbing. The calendar pages in a book of hours describe the rhythm of the year, and they precede the daily prayers. They’re part of a spiritual journey—through each day and through the year. In Down the Common, the year comes full circle—each season has its labors and feasts. Yet in this circle, there is no sense of the fullness of time, no sense of God’s story unfolding through the church year.

Instead, the liturgical year unfurls simply because it is what happens. It’s another labor. Marion and her fellow villagers believe what they’ve been told; and really, they don’t know what they believe. They attend Mass to influence God in their favor, in the same way that they bury a miscarried goat fetus under the stable threshold to prevent more misfortune. The villagers are led by a priest who is barely literate and carries around a board to which a single sheet of vellum has been glued. This is his “missal.”

It makes me wonder. Is Baer’s book an example of we moderns casting the Middle Ages as superstitious? All ritual and no belief? Or is this what “faith” was like for most of the people who lived then—the people who didn’t produce the texts and paintings we revere today? In claiming that the Middle Ages has a wonderful Christian worldview, have I and other historians assigned agency where there is none, or very little?

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Très Riches Heures of Jean de Berry, ca. 1411

It’s good that this novel makes me doubt what I do as an historian. It reminds me that the past is “other.” It warns me to be careful about reading my own faith into the Middle Ages, although that is hardly avoidable.

Well, this was supposed to be a lighter review than it turned out to be! Know that Down the Common ends with a glimmer of hope (mingled as it is with fear). Sometimes a glimmer is all we have to hold onto . . . sometimes that has to be enough.

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