Son of Dust
By H.F.M. Prescott

448 Pages • $13.95

INTRODUCTION
by Mike Aquilina

Son of Dust
By H.F.M. Prescott

[Open a pdf version]

It has been several decades since Yale University Press last published
a romance novel. But then, it has been several decades since
H. F. M. Prescott produced her academically acclaimed—yet spellbinding and best-selling—volumes of historical fiction. She has had no successor.

Most of her novels, like this one, Son of Dust, are indeed romances. They’re against-all-odds love stories, with nail-biting and page-turning plots, ample feats of derring-do, caddish treachery, heroic fidelity, and a constant and powerful undertow of sexual desire.

Three things, however, set Prescott’s novels apart from the bodice rippers arrayed in the drugstore: (1) their historical precision, (2) their spiritual and philosophical depth, and (3) their literary artistry. She did not write costume pageants or steamy melodramas. She produced imaginative histories. Yet she wrote them with such simplicity and sensuality that the consumers of popular fiction kept her works on the charts.

Hilda Frances Margaret Prescott was born in Cheshire, England, in 1896, the daughter of an Anglican clergyman. She studied at Oxford and Manchester and held master’s degrees from both. She taught briefly at the high school and college levels before turning full-time to writing in 1923. Her first three novels are set in medieval France, the third being Son of Dust, published in 1932.

Her novels often revolve around questions of religious, political, and romantic allegiance—and these categories are inseparably intertwined, making for high drama. Characters measure their duty to God against fidelity to a difficult lover or a demanding duke. For Prescott, erotic desire drives much of human history, whether personal or international. Yet it is a providential force; God made the world that way.

In religion, Prescott’s sympathies were decidedly Anglo-Catholic, and these set her apart from other historians. Mainstream English authors, both academic historians and historical novelists, tended to read Protestantism back into pre-Reformation events. Their heroes were proto-Protestants, their villains venal “papists.” The Mass was shown to be idolatrous; “Romish” doctrines, customs, and traditions, such as relics and monks, shown to be superstitious. The church, starting with the pope, was held to oppress its people and keep them in ignorance. With the Middle Ages read this way, the anti-Roman revolt of the Reformation was seen not only as inevitable and necessary, but also as a grand victory for human freedom and enlightenment against popish tyranny and ignorance.

But Prescott would have none of that. She respected medieval civilization and recognized its profound sacral foundations. As an Anglo-Catholic, she believed that the Church of England had lost something at the Reformation, however “necessary” that event was. Her characters are Catholic believers who go to Mass, pray for the dead, venerate the saints, and don’t begrudge any bit of it. Roman Catholic critics and readers felt at home in her pages, as they will today. And so will many of today’s leading academic historians. Prescott anticipated, by fifty years, the historical reconsiderations of the late twentieth century, especially the work of J. J. Scarisbrick, Eamon Duffy, Christopher Haigh, and others. Since Prescott died in 1972, she did not live to see this movement’s triumph at the close of the twentieth century.

Son of Dust draws from the chronicles of noble families in Norman France in the eleventh century. The action takes place in the years just before the Norman invasion of England and the Battle of Hastings (1066). Indeed, William the Conqueror (Guillelm of Normandy) plays an important role in the drama. The novel’s plot, however, concerns quite another battle, one that is certainly not confined to any period in history: the ever-present conflict between spirit and flesh (see chapter 5 of St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians). Traditional Christian doctrine holds that the sexual drive is powerful and good, but it is not simply benign. Original sin has left us with a San Andreas–sized fault line running through our sexuality. In no other area of life are we so prone to self-deception. Yet, like nothing else in life, erotic desire holds out the promise of love, happiness, companionship, and fulfillment. Eros, says Pope Benedict XVI, is “that love between man and woman which is neither planned nor willed, but somehow imposes itself upon human beings.”

Prescott’s characters represent a variety of approaches to the problem. Robert of Saint Ceneri and his wife, Aelis, enjoy a satisfying, natural happiness in their love. Raol Malacorona aspires to be pure spirit and reject the flesh as something beastly. Geroy is content to indulge the beastly, committing adultery and casual rape over the course of the story. Fulcun longs for pure love yet lives by all the wrongheaded clichés of courtly romance—that true love should be spontaneous, forbidden, perilous, desperate, and adventuresome. As he and Alde consummate their sinful love, they cover over the true nature of their deed with sweet euphemisms and rationalizations.

But God is not fooled. Prescott’s universe turns on the principle of sacramental realism. There is nothing merely symbolic about her portrayal of the mysteries of faith. The cleric Herfast is “dirty, ignorant, drunken, but a priest,” and dire consequences follow upon his decree of excommunication. At Holy Communion, a priest “laid God . . . upon Mauger’s tongue.” The sacraments are more real than anything in creation, and any breach of their discipline, any impiety, can bring on horrific consequences, in both the natural and supernatural orders. The marital bond is no less real than the character of holy orders, no less sacramental than the presence of Jesus in the Eucharist—and the marriage bond is just as intolerant of compromise.

Thus, Fulcun and Alde’s illicit union, though gilded in their own fevered imaginations, is a mortal sin. Committed in a state of nature, it evokes Eden and creation’s primal couple, Adam and Eve. And within the novel their adultery functions as a sort of original sin—bringing death, devastation, and disenfranchisement to the entire Geroy clan and its lands.

Sin leads to further sin, and to a darkened intellect that cannot choose well or wisely. Conflicting loyalties and a warped sense of duty almost always follow in the wake of adultery. It takes the entire novel for Fulcun and Alde to extricate themselves (by God’s persistent grace) from their tangled bonds.

The artistic miracle is that they do, and rather believably. They ascend from eros to a higher love, a diviner love—agape—climbing a difficult path of renunciation, purification, and healing. It is not spoiling the ending to say that over the course of the story, they grow in self-knowledge, discipline, repentance—and they achieve a full, and dramatically surprising, redemption.

H. F. M. Prescott’s novels are great acts of restoration—not only for her characters, but for her readers, too. The chronicles of medieval Europe, especially England, were for many centuries distorted by partisanship. History is always written by the victors, and in England the Protestant regime prevailed. From the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, historians committed to a cause, both religious and patriotic, perpetually ground the old axes of the English Reformation. And literary artists were no less to blame. Alfred Tennyson removed the sacramental character from the Holy Grail legends and recast them as Broad Church Anglican quests for the world’s most prized antique—but nothing more.

As academic history grew more agnostic, it actually gained a greater degree of objectivity. It rose above the controversies swirling about the Reformation—or at least it stood apart from them. Hilda Prescott, as an Anglo-Catholic, also stood above the fray, though she kept her profoundly Christian convictions and sensibilities.

In spite of the work of Eamon Duffy and the art of Hilda Prescott, pop culture is still dominated by what some scholars call “the Monty Python school of history”—that is, the certain knowledge that the Middle Ages were irredeemably bad times, because ordinary people bathed little, read less, lived in serfdom, and sometimes died of plague. In Son of Dust, we see that those times—though surely flawed—were about as civilized as our own. If the medievals lived with social injustices, sexual depravities, and ignorance, well—we should read the newspapers—so do we.

You need not be a habitual reader of romances to get caught up in this powerful love story. You need only be human. Nor need you be a scholar of history to become rapt in scenes from many centuries ago. But by the book’s end, you might be able to pass a history exam, in spite of yourself. Learning should always be so enjoyable, and so good for the soul.

Mike Aquilina is coauthor of  The Grail Code: Quest for the Real Presence and author of many other books on Christian history, doctrine, and devotion. He is vice president of the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology and has been cohost of five popular television series.

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