The Miracle Thief (31 page)

1.
How do you define a miracle? Do you believe in them?

2.
Everyone puts their faith in something. What do you place your faith in?

3.
Juliana counseled her daughter not to despise the life she had been given. Do you think this was good advice? Would you have said something different to Gisele instead?

4.
Was Juliana right in leaving Charles?

5.
Juliana believed that by retreating to live at the abbey, she had left the world behind. She says, “Our abbey was not a kingdom. Our doings did not affect the world beyond our gates.” Was she right? Have you ever retreated, hoping to leave the world behind? Did it work?

6.
In some ways this book is set up as a battle between God and men. Gisele states, “My fate had already been determined by men. I did not think there was anything God could do now to intervene.” At another point the queen mother says, “God always gets his way in the end, does He not? How can you fight Providence and ever hope to win?” With which of those ideas do you agree?

7.
Contrast the descriptions of Paradise and Valhalla. How did each culture's view of death affect their actions?

8.
When Anna is lost in the woods, she tries to find her way out. At one point she thinks, “What purpose had the boulder served but to mark the place at which I had known myself to be lost? And why should I be so set on returning there? It could do nothing for me but keep me waylaid. In order to be found, I had to be willing to leave it behind.” What did each character have to be willing to leave behind in order to move forward?

9.
Anna had been told her disability was a curse from God. Was there any way in which it might have been a blessing?

10.
Why do you think Anna was healed when so many other pilgrims were not?

11.
At one point, Gisele states, “How easy it is to trust in God when you do not have to trust Him for your life.” Andulf replies, “On the contrary. I think it would be far more difficult to trust if nothing depended upon my faith.” Which character do you agree with?

12.
Did Gisele make the right choice in terms of her relationship with Andulf? What other ending would you have written for her?

13.
Would you rather live in a world without faith or without hope?

14.
Who was the miracle thief?

IRIS ANTHONY

Q:
Let's get this question over with right away. Do you believe in miracles?

A:
Of course I do! Don't you? Who wants to live in a world where the miraculous could never occur? Art critic Bernard Berenson once said: “Miracles happen to those who believe in them.” I also think it matters who you put your faith in. If you place all your faith in yourself, all of your efforts at improvement begin and end with you. If you place your faith in something beyond yourself, then the door to other possibilities swings open.

Q:
Speaking of faith, that seemed to be a prevalent theme in this book. But this isn't the Dark Ages. Weren't you worried you might turn some readers off?

A:
It would be difficult to write a book about the Dark Ages that didn't involve some aspect of faith. Life was steeped in Christianity. People saw the hand of Providence everywhere. It's often stated that a person is composed of the mind, spirit, and body. Those in the Dark Ages would have agreed. The idea that some people in the modern era deny their spirituality altogether would have been completely shocking to them. Everyone back then—pagans included—worshipped someone or something.

People of the Dark Ages asked the same questions about life and death, purpose and meaning, that we do today. What I wanted to discover is whether we have arrived at different answers, whether an interval of a thousand years has changed anything about the way we view the interaction between what is sacred and what is secular.

Q:
I'm fascinated by this idea that novelists write to answer their own questions.

A:
It's a rather selfish undertaking, isn't it? Holding readers captive for a hundred thousand words and however many hours it takes to read them in order to discover the answer to a question they might never have even wanted to consider. It would be so much more efficient if I had the ability to write short stories!

Q:
So what did you discover?

A:
One of the most basic tenets of Christianity is the concept of grace—the undeserved favor of God. But one thing that seems to have remained constant across the ages is humanity's unwillingness to accept that grace at face value. You can see that need to prove worthiness scrawled across the history of the faith. By definition, however, that undertaking is futile.

I discovered the doors of the faith are wide open to all kinds of reprobates…but only if you're willing to admit that you are one. You can understand how that would be a big blow to the ego. Hence the need to prove that you have somehow earned God's favor…which brings us back to the original definition of grace. The whole concept is ingenious!

Q:
Did you do research on miracles? Or maybe the better question is
how
would you go about researching miracles?

A:
During the period, miracles had to be vouched for by witnesses. It was no good to show up at a church and proclaim yourself healed…or your missing ax found or your child suddenly healed. You had to have witnesses swear to the fact that your ax was actually missing or your child had truly been ill. Some of the miracles attested to back then were things that we, in our modern age, can all agree were coincidence, but some were truly inexplicable. Beyond that, in preparation for writing the miracle scene in the novel, I wanted to know what it would feel like. I talked to people who have experienced miracles, asking what it felt like and how they knew they had been healed.

Q:
Was there anything that surprised you about the time period?

A:
Everything! Here's a secret: I procrastinated in starting this novel because I had such a difficult time imagining the world about which I was supposed to be writing. The Dark Ages didn't look like the world of the high Middle Ages, with knights in shining armor and turreted castles, but neither did it look like the world the ancient Romans left behind either. There were castles in the Dark Ages, but they were mostly motte and bailey construction of solitary wooden towers built on top of a mound of earth. There were walled estates, but often the fortifications were wooden palisades, not sturdy stone walls. And there were knights, but there was no code of chivalry. It might sound odd, but the hardest thing for me to remember was that there were no chimneys. Fires vented through holes in the roof and they were kindled at the center of rooms, not along the walls. More than one scene had to be rewritten or repositioned because I imagined the fire in the wrong place.

Q:
How did you come up with the idea for this story?

A:
Like most of my novels, the idea for this one came as I was researching a different book. I came across a mention of the book
Furta Sacra
by Patrick J. Geary that talked about armies of monks setting out to steal relics from each other. During this period, the concept of stealing relics was approved of and even encouraged. But odder than that was the belief that the relics themselves would decide their fate. If you were successful in your theft, then the relic wanted to go with you. If you failed, then obviously it wanted to stay right where it was. It was such an interesting belief that I began to wonder, “What would happen if…” The story developed from there.

Q:
I love History's series
Vikings
. Your Danes aren't portrayed in the same way.

A:
There were so many things I discovered about Vikings during my research that I hadn't known and so many things I came to admire in their culture. But my Danes are the villains in this story, not the protagonists. They're also seen through the eyes of people outside their community who don't understand their language, their culture, or their religion. If they act like thugs, it's because, for all intents and purposes, that's the way they appeared to the Franks of the time.

Q:
What was the big deal about relics?

A:
Relics, which are objects used as memorials of saints, became part of the practice of the Christian faith in the first century. The church quite clearly says they are not to be worshipped, but only venerated for the purpose of commemorating a saint. The idea of the relic is foreshadowed in the Old Testament. Clothes, kerchiefs, and even the shadow of the Apostle Peter are spoken of in conjunction with miracles in the New Testament. In the Carolingian period, every church was required to have a relic for its altar. Since the supply of saints was limited, the options for acquiring relics were also limited. You could buy one from a relic dealer, you could steal one from someone else, or you could go out and look for a relic that no one else had previously found. A fairly brisk market in what I think of as “secondary” relics arose: dust from the tomb of a saint, filings from a martyr's chains, and other objects of that nature.

Q:
So was there really a Saint Catherine?

A:
There were several Saint Catherines venerated by the Church. Like Princess Gisele, Saint Catherine of Alexandria is one of those obscure figures of the Dark Ages who may not, in actuality, have ever existed. Her feast day is in November, and she is numbered among the Fourteen Holy Helpers. In the eleventh century, one of her relics was, in fact, brought to Rouen, and a church was built to house it.

There are several hagiographies of her life, according to which she was a pagan princess (or daughter of a wealthy man) who was martyred in the fourth century at the order of Roman Emperor Maxentius (or Maximinus or Maximian). Devoted to scholarly pursuits, she converted to Christianity at the age of fourteen. She then visited Emperor Maxentius to try to convert him as well. Though he pitted the empire's greatest philosophers against her, she confounded them with her arguments, and they converted to her faith. Maxentius promptly ordered them executed. She converted the empress as well…who was also executed. After the emperor imprisoned Catherine for her impertinence, she converted two hundred soldiers who were then immediately killed.

Enraged, Maxentius had her tortured. When she would not denounce Christ, the emperor offered her a royal marriage (whether to himself or some other noble is disputed). When she refused, he tried to have her broken on a spiked wheel, but it mysteriously disintegrated, and she was beheaded instead. Her body, from which sprang a perpetual flow of oil, was later discovered on Mount Sinai.

Catherine is the patron saint of maidens, students, scholars, the dying, wheelwrights, mechanics, craftsmen who work with wheels, librarians, theologians, preachers, orators, and philosophers.

To my agent, Natasha Kern, and my editor, Shana Drehs, who not only allowed me to write a book about miracles, but also encouraged me to do so. And to K, who never tired of asking me to tell the story of my story.

PHOTO BY TIM COBURN

Iris Anthony is a pseudonym. The writer behind the name is an award-winning author of over a dozen novels. Disguised as her alter ego, Iris has lived on three continents and traveled to five. She has given up on keeping a diary, buying a château, and liking tea. She stills hopes one day to be able to knit a sweater, play golf on the Old Course, and visit Antarctica. Iris lives in the Washington, D.C., metro area in a house decorated with French antiques and Flemish lace. Learn more about Iris at
www.irisanthony.com
.