I love historic fiction that gives me a new look at how women in the past lived. I love even more such fiction when it explores issues surrounding motherhood. The Miracles of Prato by novelist Laurie Albanese and art historian Laura Morowitz is such a book. At first, I didn’t think it focused on motherhood. The descriptions I had read centered on the love story between Italian Renaissance painter monk Fra Filippo Lippi and nun-in-training Lucrezia Buti, who modeled for his greatest paintings. But as I was reading the book, the centrality of motherhood stood out to me more than the love story. Written about real people who actually did live together as husband and wife, producing children in defiance of the church, the story is well worth reading.

The book begins with a labor and delivery in a convent with this line: “There’s always blood.” The delivery is hard, but when the child finally arrives, the midwife nun takes the baby away from the screaming mother. The chapters that follow take us into the past to find out why. We go back to see the meeting of the parents, Fra Filippo and Lucrezia, the trauma that causes Fra Filippo to protect Lucrezia, how their love develops, their secret marriage, and the conception of the child. Then, the “blood” of the opening line is repeated, coming back to the birth then separation of mother and child, and we move forward with the story of what happens next.

The key to the novel is the parallels drawn between Lucrezia and the Madonna. When Fra Filippo first meets Lucrezia, he sees the face of the Madonna in her, and she then becomes the faces of his Madonnas in all he paints. This face then takes on major significance in the novel when Lucrezia attends the wife of a wealthy merchant during a difficult labor, and the wife blends the two women – the Madonna and the nun-in-training, and begins to see Lucrezia as the Madonna. When Lucrezia eventually conceives as a unwed mother in the eyes of the world, like the Madonna herself, the confluence between the two is complete. Lucrezia becomes in the eyes of the mothers of the city – the Madonna.

So, the novel proposes the question: if Mary, the mother of Jesus, had lived later, in the church created by the teachings of her son, would her child be taken from her as Lucrezia’s child was? And the Madonna herself provides an interesting answer.