Bringing Medievalist Mama to Substack + Advent book recommendations

Moving my dear little blog–now over four years old–to Substack, which I find a more suitable platform than WordPress. And some of my favorite books for the upcoming season.

I started a blog called Florentissima when the world shut down in March, 2020. I had just lost my job, was approaching a year of (tragically virtual) graduate studies on the medieval Visigothic church, and wanted an outlet for nerding out about Isidore of Seville, monastic gardens, and whatever other pieces of medieval spirituality, literature, and culture struck me as interesting. Over time my blog expanded to cover my experiences in grad school, Old Hispanic liturgiology, and a year spent living in the United Kingdom. After returning to the U.S.A. I rebranded to Medievalist Mama as happy circumstances reoriented my identity around motherhood, and started engaging more with other writers who, like me, balance vibrant intellectual interests with the mundane demands of marriage, motherhood, and household management.

I have decided that the Substack interface is much more incentivizing to the kind of writing I like to do, as the WordPress interface now bears too many connotations of various Search Engine Optimization blogging I have done during my professional pursuits as a content marketing specialist. As a result, I will be slowly migrating my old posts and website URL from over there to over here, and publishing new content here. The idea will be the same as of old–sporadic reflections on the Visigothic liturgy, seasonal and paraliturgical living, and whatever my life as a medievalist mama brings to the fore.

For now, my older reflections are only at medievalistmama.com, but hopefully by the end of the month they will all be here. If you subscribed to medievalistmama.com in the past or florentissima in the even further past, you are now subscribed to this newsletter. (If you no longer want to receive my writing, you can unsubscribe at the bottom of this email.) I am, as always, on instagram @florentissima.

I am loath to bore you with a post entirely dedicated to “housekeeping,” so fear not! As the days get darker, the nights get colder, and the toddler wakes up earlier, I have had a lot of time to reflect on books to read as the year draws to a close .All of these books are excellent reads any time of year, but I find them especially pertinent to the themes of the liturgical and seasonal calendar during November and December.

• Winters in the World: A Journey through the Anglo-Saxon Year
  Reading academic books on medieval subjects is my guilty pleasure, but I have a hard time finding the time to adequately immerse myself in scholarly jargon.

  Kristin Haakenson
  over at
  Hearthstone Fables
  has been leading an incredible virtual book club on Winters in the World this fall. Eleanor Parker manages to maintain “pop history” readability while presenting a wealth of academically sound research and information about how the liturgical year developed in Anglo-Saxon England. Ever since living in Cambridge, I have marveled about how and why English traditions around the liturgy and the seasons developed so differently from those in other countries–and I am learning that Anglo-Saxon poetry may hold some of the answers.

• Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

  I am not a huge nonfiction reader, but I was riveted by

  Katherine May
  ’s exploration of appreciating winter in the natural world and the little “winters” where our bodies and souls demand a pause or even a short hibernation from the hustle and bustle of everyday life. May is a secular writer looking at Winter from a personal perspective, but she discusses a variety of Christian and pagan winter traditions that reveal how people have, for centuries, woven what is arguably the most unpleasant season (for those of us who experience four seasons) into beautiful rituals. I found this book a powerful call to action–or rather, call to rest–amidst a culture that eggs us on to maintain full speed ahead at all times.

• In the First Circle

  I am a big fan of Solzhenitsyn, especially his ability to make an incredibly depressing and all-encompassingly miserable story somehow uplifting. In the First Circle is one such novel and a great deal of the storyline takes place on Christmas Eve 1949. One of the poignant vignettes of life on the sharashka (prisoner-staffed research laboratory within the Soviet gulag system) is the celebration of Christmas by prisoners on the Protestant and western Catholic calendar, observed with varying emotions by their fellow-prisoners and begrudging guards. As if the Gulag setting doesn’t give it away, the plot is headed in a rather dismal direction for most of the sympathetic characters. However, with his mastery of catharsis, Solzhenitsyn manages to run the gamut of human emotion in a way that ends up leaving the reader (at least in my case) feeling hope, rather than despair, in the face of colossal evil. Given how many colossally evil forces are at work near and far in our world today, reading cathartic novels like this one is a very healing exercise for the psyche–the perfect lead-up to the Christmas season.

• Lord of the World

  The homily at Mass Sunday, when I was able to listen between bouts of toddler-wrangling, focused on how the liturgical term “Advent” is rooted in the Latin adventus used with reference to Christ’s second coming. With that in mind, what better seasonal reading than Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson’s iconic apocalyptic novel? The first time I picked up this book, it was not my cup of tea. However, last year I found it more palatable and relevant–did I mention evil forces at work in our world?–albeit a bit of a whirling hurricane plot-wise. If you need a good motive to fix your mind upon the end of the world and, like me, prefer fiction over nonfiction as an avenue for such contemplation, you won’t find much better material than this book.

• Murder on the Orient Express

  I had never read any Agatha Christie at all until last year, when I started with this Poirot classic, set during a famously ferocious snowstorm. It’s an incredibly fun cozy read and, for someone like myself who had read very few mystery novels as an adult, a welcoming introduction to the genre. Last winter, following my read of this novel, I roped my husband into watching the 2017 Kenneth Branagh adaptation with me, which was enjoyable if a bit disappointing. This winter, we will improve our tastes with the (supposedly much better) 1974 version, which features some of my favorite classic movie stars like Ingrid Bergman and Sean Connery.

• Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives

  I feel it inappropriate to give Advent book recommendations without at least one spiritual The shortest and last-written of Pope Benedict XVI’s Jesus of Nazareth trilogy, this is the only one that I have found myself able to pick up again and again for some quick and casual reading in anticipation of Christmas. One of my favorite things about Pope Benedict’s writing is how he interweaves scholarly sources to situate Biblical events in the historical context. This approach provides an incredibly vivid meditative walk alongside the scriptural infancy narratives as well as spiritual insights characteristic of the author’s theological expertise.

Do you agree with my recommendations? What are your favorite snowbound books?

Fiatis florentissimi,

Medievalist Mama