It takes the scraps we know of the real-life poet Marie de France, the possibilities we can imagine for a community of women on their own, and it builds a whole utopian world from them. Lauren Groff’s Matr ix, a finalist for the National Book Award and the Vox Book Club’s October pick, embodies that fantasy once again. Seeing her there, and knowing it was possible to reach that sort of power.

You can imagine not even becoming the pope yourself but just seeing another woman as the pope. You can imagine a woman as God’s emissary on Earth, ruling over every country and fiefdom in Europe. To be a woman living a life as circumscribed as that of a medieval nun, such that your every waking moment would have a task assigned to it, to live a life of such intense drudgery - and to still think, “There, there, there’s the proof. I’ve thought of that book often in the time since: all the frustration, the palpable yearning after some sort of power or independence, packed in those two scribbled words. In the margins next to Pope Joan’s entry - in firm, enthusiastic script - one of them had written the words “papa femina.” Female pope. The nuns who owned the book were evidently fascinated by this legend.

It was a fat, old tome on the history of the popes that looked unspeakably dull, and it was open in its display case to the entry on Pope Joan, the apocryphal figure who was thought to have disguised her gender and become pope in the Middle Ages. Two years ago, I saw a book at a library exhibit that once belonged to a medieval nunnery. The Vox Book Club is linking to to support local and independent booksellers.

Matrix groff