Matrix

My rating: 3 stars

Spoilers below:

So the thing about this is that it seems like it ought to have knocked it out of the park with me. Literally no men! Premodern domestic life! Women getting old and that not diminishing their power and agency! I will be thinking for a while about why it didn’t. Things I’m thinking:

  • Her visions being seen as ooohhhhh too edgy didn’t fit with my understanding of the period. There is a fever-dream quality to a lot of medieval stuff, and if you can’t pick out a particular heresy in it, it isn’t as though they’d gotten the doctrine quite as tight as it’s held today…
  • I’ll confess I’m late to the party, but: no mention of shearing, scouring, spinning, weaving, fulling… And yet they are clothed.
  • I wonder if some of the parts that were calculated for the literary effect of their strangeness just weren’t strange enough to me to hit right. Prime, terce, etc.