Some Bones and a Story – Afterword

Women posing as men. Virgins who defied their families and friends and ran off. Abbesses who founded new rules and orders, women of political and administrative ability. Women who could do magic — float in the air, read hearts at a distance. It was as though certain ideas about how women should live their lives had been escorted firmly out the front door of the church only to climb in again through the back window.

There are stories to inspire a thousand books of poems. The ones I have used as the basis for this collection are mostly the shadowy ones, sometimes the wildly fantastical and clearly apocryphal. These were the tales that let me in.  For instance, the legend about Saint Martha taming a dragon. Martha! That quintessential housewife with her traditional attributes of ladle and broom. How did a dragon come in?

For Martha — as for Marina, Pelagia, Catherine of Alexandria, Wilgefortis, Brigid, Anne, Xene, and Scholastica — the historical records are a faint trace or non-existent. There may be a passing reference in documents, around which a thicket of tale and oral tradition has grown up. In these cases, I felt relatively free to build my own hut from the twigs and branches.

However, four of the women in this book have more solid records. Eustochium of Padua, Veronica of Binasco, Louisa Albertoni, and Dorothea of Montau were all of the 14^th and 15^th centuries. None was officially canonized — they exist in a just-south-of-sainthood status as “Blesseds.” The “˜facts” that I used as starting points for each of their poems (such as Veronica crying a quart of tears, or Louisa baking her charitable coins into bread) were historically recorded incidents.

However, I haven’t been able to track down the additional historical material that no doubt exists. In particular, I know there is a seven-volume life of the mystic, Dorothea of Montau, written in Latin. In that book, there must be information about her one surviving daughter who became a Benedictine nun, but I know nothing more than the bare fact that such a daughter existed.

And the truth is, I didn’t want to know much more. I had a story I wanted to tell about how the children of intensely idealistic parents can feel abandoned. I needed a saint with a biography a little like my own grandmother’s. Dorothea filled the bill.

I took the bare bones of biographical events and built my own stories around them. I tried not to actively contradict what I knew to be historically the case. Dorothea’s cell really did have three windows. Eustochium was indeed found with a cross burned on her chest after her death.

At the same time I know the real stories would be otherwise — here I mean “stories” in the sense of the narrative that we each construct to describe and explain our lives. These monologues are not historical reconstruction. They are the narratives by a woman of my time and place — certainly not of a woman from14^th-century Prussia or first-century Palestine.

So I apologize to Dorothea’s unnamed daughter and the others, who would have explained their lives quite otherwise.