Ordinary Devotion

Braided narratives of a medieval girl thrust into an unheard-of situation, the holy woman she is forced to serve—and a twenty-first-century scholar searching for them across time.
In fourteenth-century England, 12-year-old Elinor is enclosed with an anchoress, Lady Adela, in a cell at Wenfair Abbey. Other than occasional visits from one of the monks at the Abbey, Elinor has only the intense and mercurial Adela for company—until she becomes aware of the many women who visit the cell at night, whispering through the window when they find themselves unhappily pregnant, and desperate for holy—and practical—help.
In 2017, 35-year-old Liz Pace is an adjunct professor of medieval studies in upstate New York. She wrote her PhD dissertation on purgatory, but she is fascinated by anchoresses. Liz is pregnant for the first time, and preparing for her presentation at an important academic conference, which she hopes will land her a book contract, but which instead inspires a research trip to England—where she discovers a long-lost medieval book of hours, inscribed with the name Elinor.
Ordinary Devotion traces the lives of two women separated by hundreds of years, as they navigate the needs and demands of the body, and the burdens—and rewards—of faith, obligation, and devotion.