Lesley Smith

Susan Alford

Ten-year-old Lucas Quinn, his twin sister, Lily, and their father Eli are hiking through the Colorado woods one morning when Lucas suddenly perceives an over-powering sense of evil. Paralyzed by fear, Lucas is unable to warn his father and sister until it is too late. He stands, frozen, watching while Eli valiantly battles a beautiful demon, and ultimately dies at her hands. A fierce warrior of light appears and helps Lucas escape to the safety of home. Though the park rangers report that Eli was attacked and killed by bears, Lucas and his mother, Mia, know differently. They spend the next eight years moving the family from place to place, always trying to stay ahead of the menacing presence at the edges of their lives. When Lucas and Lily turn eighteen, the family moves to Cleveland, Tennessee, home of Centenary College. There, the twins enroll in classes, make friends-and learn the secret of their true identities. Part of an ancient league of light-bearers called the Sorcha, Lucas and Lily discover they each hold a powerful, supernatural gift. Will the twins find the rest of the Sorcha before the demons seeking their lives find them?

Awaken

Sorcha

Conrad Leyser

Who can concentrate on thoughts of Scripture or philosophy and be able to endure babies crying ... ? Will he put up with the constant muddle and squalor which small children bring into the home? The wealthy can do so ... but philosophers lead a very different life ... So, according to Peter Abelard, did his wife Heloise state in characteristically stark terms the antithetical demands of family and scholarship. Heloise was not alone in making this assumption. Sources from Jerome onward never cease to remind us that the life of the mind stands at odds with life in the family. For all that we have moved in the past two generations beyond kings and battles, fiefs and barons, motherhood has remained a blind spot for medieval historians. Whatever the reasons, the result is that the historiography of the medieval period is largely motherless. The aim of this book is to insist that this picture is intolerably one-dimensional, and to begin to change it. The volume is focussed on the paradox of motherhood in the European Middle Ages: to be a mother is at once to hold great power, and by the same token to be acutely vulnerable. The essays look to analyse the powers and the dangers of motherhood within the warp and weft of social history, beginning with the premise that religious discourse or practice served as a medium in which mothers (and others) could assess their situation, defend claims, and make accusations. Within this frame, three main themes emerge: survival, agency, and institutionalization. The volume spans the length and breadth of the Middle Ages, from late Roman North Africa through ninth-century Byzantium to late medieval Somerset, drawing in a range of types of historian, including textual scholars, literary critics, students of religion and economic historians. The unity of the volume arises from the very diversity of approaches within it, all addressed to the central topic.

Essays Presented to Henrietta Leyser

Motherhood, Religion, and Society in Medieval Europe, 400–1400

The variety of experience available to medieval scholars and the vitality of medieval thought are both reflected in this collection of original essays by distinguished historians. Intellectual Life in the Middle Ages is presented to Margaret Gibson, whose own work has ranged from Boethius to Lanfranc and to the study of the Bible in the middle ages.

Lesley Smith

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