The Fire and the Rose by Robyn Cadwallader

Title: The Fire and the Rose

Author: Robyn Cadwallader

Genre: Historical Fiction

Publisher: 4^th Estate/HarperCollins Australia

Published: 3^rd May 2023

Format: Paperback

Pages: 384

Price: $32.99

Synopsis: rom Robyn Cadwallader, the award-winning and critically acclaimed author of The Anchoress and Book of Colours, comes a vibrant, richly imagined and deeply moving novel set in the turbulent world of thirteenth-century England.

England, 1276: Forced to leave her home village, Eleanor moves to Lincoln to work as a housemaid. She’s prickly, independent and stubborn, her prospects blighted by a port-wine birthmark across her face. Unusually for a woman, she has fine skills with ink and quill, and harbours a secret ambition to work as a scribe, a profession closed to women.

Eleanor discovers that Lincoln is a dangerous place, divided by religious prejudice, the Jews frequently the focus of violence and forced to wear a yellow badge. Eleanor falls in love with Asher, a Jewish spicer, who shares her love of books and words, but their relationship is forbidden by law. When Eleanor is pulled into the dark depths of the church’s machinations against Jews and the king issues an edict expelling all Jews from England, Eleanor and Asher are faced with an impossible choice.

Vivid, rich, deep and sensual, The Fire and the Rose is a tender and moving novel about how language, words and books have the power to change and shape lives. Most powerfully, it is also a novel about what it is to be made ‘other’, to be exiled from home and family. But it is also a call to recognise how much we need the other, the one we do not understand, making it a strikingly resonant and powerfully hopeful novel for our times.

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In 1276, Eleanor is forced to leave her home village, and moves to Lincoln, where she gets work as a housemaid. Unlike other girls of her time, though, Eleanor can read and write – an unusual talent in the thirteenth century for her gender and class, and even more unusual – she wants to be a scribe, a job usually reserved for educated men. Yet there is more to fear than people pointing at the birthmark across her face. Soon, Eleanor becomes aware of the dangers in Lincoln, which is divided by religious prejudice, and the Jewish community is often targeted violently, and forced to wear a yellow badge, all because of rumours going back decades about the death of a young boy, amongst many other things. Yet when Eleanor meets Asher, a Jewish spicer, all of these concerns go out the window when they fall in love – and once the king issues an edict to expel all Jews from England. This leaves Eleanor and Asher with an impossible choice.

The Fire and the Rose reaches back into history and looks at the ongoing discrimination against Jewish people based on rumours and false accusations from a society as well as the accusations from Christians about what they perceive the Jews to have done. It alludes to an ongoing conflict and discrimination against Jews that has never really gone away – they’ve just popped up at different times and enacted by different people. Whilst reading the book, there were several instances that reminded me of what happened to the Jews in the 1930s and 1940s – from the yellow badges, to rounding them up, putting them in prison, and expelling them from their homes. In this instance however, it was the Christians who were behind it, and who acted like they were in the right, all because of rumours and falsehoods. This part of the story was powerful and a good reminder that discrimination is wrong, that when those in power like the priests and heads of churches in these books, and the king tell you one thing, it is not necessarily the truth – and that perhaps instead of believing religious authorities, we should, like Eleanor, speak to the people affected to understand what they know and how they are affected by everything going on.

Medieval history is an area that isn’t often explored in historical fiction, but it is more likely that it is a setting that is used as part of fantasy world building. There is so much scope with historical fiction, and I’m sure there are just as many untold or rarely told stories in the medieval period, and people like Eleanor – women who defied convention and the expectations of her gender and class, because these are fascinating stories. I also think it is interesting to see just how far back the discrimination of Jewish people goes and who was behind it – in this instance, the Christians who saw fit to dictate what everyone did and whom at one point, Eleanor saw as hypocritical – preaching doing the right thing and being charitable, but in practise, those in charge of the churches and often those who followed the church laws where anything but charitable – and seeing the way she responded to these aspects of religion whilst still feeling conflicted as she felt she still held onto the tenets of the faith coupled with the contradictions in the teachings and the way the priests acted. It was interesting to see how she responded to Judaism too, and the similarities and differences between the faiths – and where she is determined to show everyone that the Jews are human too, despite everyone’s attempts to dissuade her. It shows that despite what the majority of people thought, there were those who were willing to look past differences in appearance and religion, and in a few cases, gender, so Eleanor could work as a scribe and teach her daughter to read and write. The story about gender empowerment is just as powerful because Eleanor meets people like Asher, Marchota, and Stephen Wooler who give her a chance and the support she needs throughout the novel. It shows that a community can come together when they need to, but also shows the darker side of people posing as helpful.

I felt that the way the one priest talked Eleanor into scribing church documents and then effectively gaslit her – that is, talked over her and told her she was wrong even though the documents were her evidence – when she asked why the church had lied about the driving force behind the Christian discrimination against the Jewish population of Lincoln and overall, in England during the turbulent years of the novel. Robyn Cadwallader has opened up history and revealed something about history that might not be well known to some people – and that shows that religions have always discriminated against each other, and in particular, that Christians have been behind much of the powerplays throughout history and have at times been a driving force behind acts of discrimination – that cannot be denied as a part of history, and Robyn researched this novel thoroughly – though she did acknowledge that some of the specific historical documents she referred to have been lost to history, yet the knowledge is still there at least so she was able to build the novel around these facts and other stories and legends linked to the expulsion of the Jews from England in the late 1200s.

It is powerful novels like this one that remind us that discrimination and racism has been present in many forms throughout history, and that those in power have always wanted to maintain that power – they do not want to share power nor did the priests and Christians in this novel want to accept something different – in many ways, the Jews were more accepting much of the time, and willing to help where they could because at the heart of it all, we are all human, all the characters were human. It showed the strength of hope and humanity in turbulent times and is a stark reminder, like Holocaust fiction, that discriminating against a group of people based on religion or race and falsehoods about these people is never acceptable – and illustrates the power imbalance of other religions and Christianity, and the imbalance of gender and class in the middle ages as well. It is as rich and vibrant as Robyn’s other books, and she always manages to explore stories from history that might be lost to us, and she unearths them beautifully. Another great story =for lovers of historical fiction.