"Joanna Russ - Souls" - читать интересную книгу автора (Russ Joanna)

pages with her other hand just as if she were reading.
"Little two-years," said the Abbess Herrade, who was a kind
woman, "what are you doing?" She thought it amusing, I suppose,
that Radegunde should pretend to read this great book, the largest
and finest in the Abbey, which had many, many books more than
any other nunnery or monastery I have ever heard of: a full forty
then, as I remember. And then little Radegunde was doing the book
no harm.
"Reading, Mother," said the little girl.
"Oh, reading?" said the Abbess, smiling. "Then tell me what you are
reading," and she pointed to the page.
"This," said Radegunde, "is a great D with flowers and other

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beautiful things about it, which is to show that Dominus, our Lord
God, is the greatest thing and the most beautiful and makes
everything to grow and be beautiful, and then it goes on to say
Domine nobis pacem, which means Give peace to us, O Lord."
Then the Abbess began to be frightened but she said only, "Who
showed you this?" thinking that Radegunde had heard someone read
and tell the words or had been pestering the nuns on the sly.
"No one," said the child. "Shall I go on?" and she read page after
page of the Latin, in each case telling what the words meant.
There is more to the story, but I will say only that after many
prayers the Abbess Herrade sent her foster daughter far southwards,
even to Poitiers, where Saint Radegunde had ruled an Abbey before,
and some say even to Rome, and in these places Radegunde was
taught all learning, for all learning there is in the world remains in
these places. Radegunde came back a grown woman and nursed the
Abbess through her last illness and then became Abbess in her turn.
They say that the great folk of the Church down there in the south
wanted to keep her because she was such a prodigy of female piety
and learning, there where life is safe and comfortable and less rude
than it is here, but she said that the gray skies and flooding winters
of her birthplace called to her very soul. She often told me the story
when I was a child: how headstrong she had been and how defiant,
and how she had sickened so desperately for her native land that
they had sent her back, deciding that a rude life in the mud of a
northern village would be a good cure for such a rebellious soul as
hers.
"And so it was," she would say, patting my cheek or tweaking my

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ear. "See how humble I am now?" for you understand, all this about