THE GREEN MADONNA

Winner of the Westminster $7,500 Fiction Award for 1951, this is a 15th century romance, rooted in ecclesiastical abuses and the simmering rebellions of the serfs. For Robert, the young lord of Haldingham, as an artist seeks the perfect model for his green madonna and is aided by the Abbot of Rokewoode who produces cloistered Eleanor, dedicated to the Church. Robert's right to succession is questioned by his cousin, Gisbert, and the search for proof leads him not only into the past of their family but into the present- of clerical desecration of its privileges and the misery of the common people. His findings, after many adventures, right much wrong and make clear much that is dark and mysterious. Here are the germs of the English Reformation, the weakening of the Church's hold on the people, fallible men and frail women, heresy that is punishable by burning and the deadly oppression of the Church's jurisdiction, in deep scholarship that sometimes water-logs its period story.