When I started my A Level English Literature studies in the late 1980s, the first text I had to read was one of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale). I’d never encountered medieval literature before, but from the outset I was hooked. This was partly owing to the language – since my other A level subjects were French and Spanish, I enjoyed having to ‘decipher’ the 14th century English (even though, in retrospect, the task we were given by our English teacher of ‘translating’ the whole text into modern English was a surefire way to put the vast majority of my classmates off medieval literature!). I was also amused by the outspokenness of the narrator (Chaucer’s Wife of Bath is strikingly modern and very frank when it comes to talking about sexual matters), and intrigued by the philosophical and theological discussions.
As a result I was keen to study more medieval literature when I embarked on my English undergraduate degree. Because my degree also included French, I was fortunate enough to spend a year studying in France (in Lyon), where I registered for two modules in medieval French literature (to provide a point of comparison), on one of which I was introduced to the work of Marie de France, the first known woman to have written poetry in French.
Very little is known of Marie de France. We know that her first name was Marie, but the ‘de France’ bit comes from one of her works where she writes ‘Marie ai num, si sui de France’ which translates as ‘My name is Marie; I am from France’. She was active in the latter part of the 12th century, and although from France spent much of her life in England – she and her writings were known at the court of the English king Henry II (who reigned from 1154-1189). Marie’s works include the Lais (a collection of short rhymed tales of love and chivalry) and a translation of Aesop’s Fables from medieval English into French. According to her Wikipedia entry a number of possible candidates have been suggested for Marie’s true identity, including four women in religious orders: Marie, Abbess of Shaftesbury and half-sister of Henry II; Marie, Abbess of Reading; Marie I of Boulogne, who was also Abbess of Romsey, and Marie, Abbess of Barking.
From these threads the American writer Lauren Groff weaves a fictionalised account of Marie’s life in her novel Matrix, published in 2021. Groff’s Marie is the illegitimate half-sister of the English king, the product of rape, and thus safer housed in a religious order than in the royal court. The novel opens in March 1158 with 17 year-old Marie riding through the English drizzle to the remote royal abbey where she is to be prioress, having been ejected from court by Henry II’s queen Eleanor of Aquitaine.
Like Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, the first medieval woman I made literary contact with, Groff’s Marie is an unconventional figure: gay (she is in love with Eleanor), physically overbearing (Eleanor describes her as ‘Three heads too tall, with her great rough stomping about, with her terrible deep voice, her massive hands … a creature absent of beauty), lacking in the feminine arts but gifted in ‘disputations … sword practicing …’ and able to ‘run a large estate… write in four languages … keep account books’. Lacking any sense of a religious vocation, Marie arrives at the abbey feeling that ‘All will be gray… the rest of her life gray.’
But, perhaps inevitably, Marie will bring colour to the abbey and to the lives of the nuns who live there, building a largely self-sufficient female community able to deal with many challenges, both internal and external.
One of the key ways in which Marie improves the lot of the nuns is with regards to food. When Marie arrives at the abbey, the food on offer is far from promising:
On a table is set some food, hard dark rye bread with a thin sheen of butter, wine… brought in better times from Burgundy, a soup with four slices of turnip in each bowl. The abbess tells Marie that they are in a famine, the nuns starve, alas, but suffering purifies the soul and makes these holy meek women even more holy in the eyes of god.
Marie finds the food ‘tasteless’ and when she is woken in the early hours for the service of Matins has a vision of her previous life in the court which includes ‘the smell of good food carried on platters to the tables’. However, over time things change. More nuns join, the abbey becomes wealthier and the food improves: ‘on Fridays, Marie has pilchards and salmon served, for the abbey can at last afford it’. More food is referenced in the narrative, including ‘gooseberry tart’, ‘apple cakes’, ‘nut tarts’ and, the one that caught my attention, ‘a cake of filbert and honey’.
Filberts are a type of nut from the hazelnut family. They are sometimes referred to as though they are indistinguishable from hazelnuts and cobnuts, but strictly speaking all three are slightly different. But for the purposes of baking, hazelnuts can be substituted. As I wrote in a post a while back, sugar was not widely known or used in the Middle Ages, being hugely expensive, so honey was a common substitute – this cake only uses honey as the sweetening agent.
A NUN’S HONEY AND HAZELNUT CAKE
Ingredients (cuts into approx. 8 slices):
75g whole hazelnuts
100g plain flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
pinch of salt
175g unsalted butter
75g honey
3 large eggs
For the icing:
100g icing sugar
1-2 tablespoons warm water
2-3 tablespoons chopped roasted hazelnuts
Method:
Begin by roasting and grinding the hazelnuts. Preheat the oven to 180C / 160C fan / Gas mark 4. Place the whole hazelnuts on a lined baking tray or small roasting tin and place in the oven for 10-15 minutes (making sure they do not burn). Remove the roasted hazelnuts from the oven (whilst keeping the oven on), wrap in a clean tea towel and leave to cool for 10 minutes. Then rub the skins off them in the teatowel. Place the skinned, roasted nuts in a food processor and blitz to a sandy texture, making sure you stop before the mixture gets oily.
Grease and line a loaf tin.
Place the ground hazelnuts, flour, baking powder and salt in a large bowl and mix together. Place the butter and honey in a large saucepan and melt over a gentle heat. Allow the mixture to cool, and then add the three eggs, one at a time, beating well between each addition. Pour the liquid mixture into the dry mixture and mix together into a smooth batter. Pour the batter into the lined loaf tin and place in the oven for 40-50 minutes until the cake is risen and golden-brown and a skewer or cake tester inserted into the cake comes out clean or with just a crumb or two sticking to it. If the cake is getting very brown on the top but isn’t cooked, cover with a sheet of foil.
Remove the cooked cake from the oven and allow to cool in the tin for 10-15 minutes, before removing from the tin and finishing off the cooling on a wire rack.
When the cake is cold you can ice it. Mix together the icing sugar with the water to make a thin but not too runny mixture (don’t add all the water at once, but add gradually until you get the right consistency). Pour the icing over the cake and scatter the chopped hazelnuts on top. Allow to set before cutting into generous slices.
