R.I.P. Mary Daly

A Facebook link led me to the NY Times obituary of the feminist theologian who, ensconced in Boston College, excoriated Christianity. She was a late igniter of the Enlightenment powerfully advocating women's dignity. Her books are great fun to read, and saved my serious suburban friend from depression by pointing out that the condition is an invention of the patriarchal psychiatric power structure; now she is ready to take up flirting. Daly, in literary heaven, weaves a corrected Summa with her favorite cats and bunnies.

Notes on Rosa Montero's Historia del Rey Transparente

The Wikipedia article informs us that this novel won a national prize when it appeared in 2005. Lamentably, an English translation hasn't appeared.

The setting is Provence, c. 1200, with the violent but decentralized feudal order gradually giving way to the dominion of a national church and French state. The heroine is a plucky peasant who becomes a knight-errant, traveling with a healer who holds dear the legends of Camelot as a more innocent and marvelous age. Gradually she accumulates an entourage, a freakish family of choice (as advocated by us [neo-]hippies and Daniel Quinn), and throws her lot with the persecuted Cathars.

Montero explains in the afterword that this period has long fascinated her, and that the narrative juxtaposes events, like the Children's Crusade and Richard the Lion-Hearted's reign, that were some decades apart. I didn't notice these deviations from history; only an unfortunate mention of Ottoman lore was gratingly anachronistic. The Necronomicon was also spotted locked in a monastery library together with a book with our title, but I can imagine an implied wink at the reader. The tale of the see-through king plays a tragicomic role inspired by the pre-Lovecraft lethal play, the Yellow King.