A Golden Web (15 page)

Mondino’s sons, and Mondino himself, joined in helping Otto shield Alessandra from the crowd of men clamoring for her blood. Between the four of them, they were able to bring her, unharmed, to Mondino’s house, although by a circuitous route. By the time they got there, she was shaking with fever. “My notebooks!” she
cried. “Otto, you must make sure they’re safe!”

He sent word to Dame Edita to hide the notebooks where no one would find them.

Mondino and Mina put Alessandra in their very own bed. Otto sent his servant out for broth made from a rooster. Mondino himself made a poultice to cool the fever, and then the fever was replaced by chills.

An angry red rash appeared on the back of Alessandra’s hand. Mondino bled her, but only a little because she was so weak. She ate a couple of spoonfuls of the broth. She slept, and when she woke during the night, she was delirious.

The rash traveled up her arm. At times she met Otto’s eyes and recognition would come into them again—and then she slept.

Her arm turned the pink of passionflowers. Mina called the priest. Otto sent a messenger to Persiceto.

She spoke so faintly, only Otto could hear her.

“Aristotle…,” she said, then closed her eyes.

“Save your strength, my love!”

She pressed his hand and looked at him, and moistened
her lips. “Although I revere him, Aristotle was wrong about many things.”

This, after twenty-four hours of fever and insensible raving. And yet her forehead was still burning. “The three-chambered heart,” Otto said, his hopes rising. “The unvascularized brain.” He desperately wanted to spare her the effort of speaking.

She shook her head, and he could see from the way she winced that her head was aching. He looked over his shoulder, intending to ask Mina for a fresh compress. But Alessandra, with surprising strength, pulled him closer. “He was wrong about the capacity of women.”

He smiled at her, trying very hard not to cry. “Spectacularly so!”

“He said…” She paused, her lips parted, gathering strength. “He said, ‘The courage of a man is shown in commanding, of a woman in obeying.’ By that measure, Otto, I am a coward.”

“Then by that measure, my darling, I am a woman—for I am ready to obey your every command.”

She smiled, very faintly; then closed her eyes again, resting.

He changed the compress and took her two feet in his hands, rubbing them because they were cold, then kissing them because he loved her so much and feared she was dying.

She sighed and seemed to breathe more easily. Everyone around the bedside was praying. But as far as Otto was concerned, he and Alessandra were alone together.

She opened her eyes again and looked frightened until she saw him. “Otto!”

“I’m here.” He touched her cheek with his.

And then he heard the words, so faint as to seem from another world: “I would not like to be forgotten.”

There was a slick of tears then between their cheeks. “You will not be forgotten, Alessandra Giliani!”

Even fainter. “Promise me?”

I found Alessandra Giliani by accident, in the course of looking into the life and work of another female anatomist who lived in Bologna four hundred years later, in the eighteenth century. The little bit of biographical information I found about Alessandra—this daring teenager who dreamed of doing medical research at a time in history when women were burned at the stake with very little provocation—convinced me that a novel just had to be written about her short and marvelous life.

I spent several weeks in and around Bologna, exploring
the vast holdings of the beautiful archives and libraries there, housed in buildings that are themselves works of art. I slowly parsed academic articles written in Italian, pored over gorgeous illuminated manuscripts, crept around in crypts, and stared at paintings. In all of these, I was looking for the details that tell us what it was really like to live in the province of Emilia-Romagna in the early fourteenth century. What did it feel like to be a young girl then?

I knew that all the contemporaneous paintings of scenes from the Bible had fourteenth-century people posing for them: These were Alessandra’s contemporaries, whose ways of reading, sitting, working, learning, loving, and sleeping could be winkled out from these images. A wooden baby walker, a cradle with its rockers arranged end to end rather than side to side, a person hauling water, lovers sequestered in a private room at a public bathhouse, the very plants and flowers were all pieces of the mosaic I started constructing.

The place itself—the quality of the light, the way the birds sang, and even the drift of plum blossoms wafting down on me as I walked off the path of a pilgrim
age road—all of these seemed like dispatches to me from another dimension, where Alessandra still lived and wanted her story told.

Now, whether Alessandra Giliani really did live is somewhat of a point of academic controversy. I was unable to find a written record of her name in original documents preceding the eighteenth century. One librarian to whom I spoke speculated that Alessandra’s accomplishments were so at odds with all that was considered proper that records of not only her but also her entire family may have been destroyed. At least one scholar of medical history feels that it was, in fact, a chronicler of Persiceto in the eighteenth century who made up the whole story.

A funerary urn containing Alessandra’s mortal remains is supposed to have been placed in the wall of a particular church in Bologna—perhaps the church that stands today in the Campo di S. Pietro e Marcellino. That church was covered in scaffolding during the entire time I was there. I am still trying to find more precise information about whether and where this urn exists today (I recently ran across a source that claims it’s in Florence!). The stone of the urn is said to be inscribed with the following words:

In quest’urna le ceneri di Alessandra Giliani, una giovane di Persiceto, abile nelle dimostrazioni anatomiche e discepola, eguagliata da pochi, di uno dei più famosi medici, Mondino de’ Liuzzi, attendono la resurrezione. Essa visse 19 anni. Morì, consumata dal suo duro lavoro, il 26 marzo, anno di grazia 1326. Ottone Agenius Lustrulanus, con la sua perdita deprivato della sua parte migliore, suo eccellente compagno che ne meritò il meglio, eresse questa lapide.

“In this urn, awaiting the Resurrection, are the mortal remains of Alessandra Giliani, young woman of Persiceto, adept at anatomical demonstrations and unequalled disciple of the most famous doctor, Mondino de’ Liuzzi. She died at the age of 19, consumed by her hard work, on the 26th of March, year of our Lord 1326. This plaque was put here by Ottone [Otto] Agenius Lustrulanus, deprived by her loss of his better half, his excellent companion who deserved the best.”

After I returned home from Italy, I continued reading everything I could find about fourteenth-century medical education and practice, child rearing and early edu
cation, home life, gender roles, and the production of books. Alessandra and her family felt utterly real to me (even though all the members of her family are made up, including what to me is quite a logical guess that her father might have been a stationer, giving Alessandra wide access—so unusual for the time—to hundreds of books).

There are records referring to Mondino’s second wife, Mina, and all their children, as well as to their country place in Barbiano. All the facts about Mondino—apart from his personal interactions with Alessandra—are based on research. I don’t know for a fact that Alessandra boarded with him—although that, too, seemed logical, given the way things worked back then. Bene is made up. But it was a practice for parishes to sometimes raise money to send one of their best and brightest to medical school.

I’ve tried to give as realistic a picture as I could of how books were made and distributed in the late Middle Ages. The University of Bologna—the very oldest university in Europe—was an amazing place in the fourteenth century, perhaps more like the University of California at Berkeley in the 1960s than anything else. The students were in charge. They hired teachers and fired them. If a
student challenged a professor and could prove himself right—well, then that student became the professor. It was a true meritocracy and also probably a pretty rough and tumble place.

The advent of the university—and the sudden need for books—was as much an information revolution as the rise of the internet has been in our own time.

I never thought that history would become one of my life’s passions. I never even liked history when I was at school, apart from the context of literature, music, and art. But history has lately been revealed to me as the place where I live, where we all live, side by invisible side with others who—if we get quiet enough and listen carefully enough—will touch us and tell us their stories.

—
Barbara Quick