Ordinary Devotion
A Novel
Available from Monkfish Books
A girl in medieval England and a woman in present-day upstate New York navigate the pressures and challenges of ambition and opportunity. Their struggles and stories interweave, overlap, and communicate across centuries as they contend with the needs and demands of the body, and the burdens—and rewards—of faith, obligation, and devotion.
“A richly drawn story of religious and scholastic devotion . . . Holt-Browning is a talented storyteller, summoning the dreary world of 14th-century England in vivid sensorial detail.” —Kirkus Reviews
About the Book
England, 1370: Twelve-year-old Elinor is enclosed with an anchoress, Lady Adela, in a cell at Wenfair Abbey. Other than occasional visits from one of the abbey monks, Elinor has only the intense and mercurial Adela for company—until she becomes aware of the women who visit the cell at night, whispering through the window when they find themselves unhappily pregnant, and desperate for holy—and practical—help.
In 2017, 35-year-old Liz Pace is an adjunct professor of medieval studies in upstate New York. She wrote her PhD dissertation on purgatory, but she is fascinated by anchoresses. Liz is pregnant for the first time, and preparing for her presentation at an important academic conference, which she hopes will land her a book contract, but which instead inspires a research trip to England—where she discovers a long-lost medieval book of hours, inscribed with the name Elinor.
Ordinary Devotion traces the lives of two women separated by hundreds of years, as they navigate the needs and demands of the body, and the burdens—and rewards—of faith, obligation, and devotion.
Advance Praise for Ordinary Devotion
Holt-Browning writes with sensitive insight … [and] explores timeless feminist questions with patience and grace.—Julie Chibbaro, author of Into the Dangerous World and Deadly
Kristen Holt-Browning invites us to ponder the liminal spaces between one world, one time and another, the vastness within what seems small, like the hazelnut in anchoress Julian of Norwich’s vision. … The modern and medieval stories spiral in and out of each other, intricate and vivid as the letters of illuminated manuscripts, connected by the mysteries of paradox: confinement and freedom, loss and fulfillment.—Elizabeth Cunningham, author of My Life as a Prayer and The Maeve Chronicles
Holt-Browning is adept at honing in on the passion for life, nature, and language that can sustain a person through the hardest times.—Nerissa Nields, of The Nields