The King's Nun: A Novel of King Charlemagne

Charlemagne is the subject of relatively few biographical or fictional works. The list is even shorter -- practically zero -- for his contemporary, Saint Amalberga, aka Amelia of Muenster-Bilzen Abbey in Belgium. So when I saw "The King's Nun" I eagerly pre-ordered it, hoping for a novel that would shed light on them. As author Catherine Monroe indicates in the reader's guide, there is very little historically dependable information on Amelia or the connection between herself and the king. According to sources, this Saint Amelia (the Catholic Church records two others) was born in 741 A.D. and died in 772. Charles came into the world one year after Amelia and lived much longer -- until 814. As a beautiful teenage virgin preparing to enter consecrated religious life, Amelia is said to have attracted the notice of Pepin the Short, King of the Franks, and his son, Charles. Charles pursued Amelia, who apparently preferred convent life to him. The Catholic Encyclopedia claims that the besotted young prince tried to carry her off, even breaking her arm in his attempt. She would not have him to husband, and Charles finally gave up the chase...marrying a series of five other women in his lifetime. I suppose writing a novel about those spare "facts" could be somewhat depressing, although, I can imagine a feisty battle of the sexes between these two young, bullheaded people. "The King's Nun" is not such a story, however. Monroe chooses to depart quite a bit from the "known" facts. Her story begins in the year 793 A.D. when, historically accurately, Charles is married to Fastrada and his traitorous son, Pepin the Hunchback, has to be punished for hs crimes against the kingdom. So, Charles is an experienced, seasoned man and sovereign. Monroe inserts a seventeen-year-old Amelia into this setting, and allows the young novice and the middle-aged king to meet and fall into a kind of mystical love: "He came to me out of the mists that cloak the forests of the Ardennes....When I first saw him, he was nothing more than a shimmering darkness, undulating and without form in a shroud of vapor." So begins a love story that destiny -- that of his destiny as Emperor Charlemagne and her destiny as Saint Amelia, official patron of farmers and fishermen and often invoked for healing of arm and shoulder injuries such as the king, not Amelia, suffers in this novel -- cannot give anything but a bittersweet ending. Monroe spins a myth of love that must be put aside for God and country. And she makes some headway on her stated goals of depicting the complex character of Charlemagne and of telling how Amelia lived at the abbey and then traveled to the village of Temsche where she did in fact help found a church dedicated to Mary, Mother of God. Monroe says she "wanted to explore how women might have been affected by the events of the day" and "look at how life might been different for women as opposed to men." She also looks into the pagan, Jewish, and Christian religious trad