Simeti tells the fascinating story of Constance of Hauteville, a twelfthcentury Sicilian princess renowned for her independent spirit and intrepid nature. Though the daughter of a Norman king, and wife of one Holy Roman Emperor and mother of another, Constance carved out her own unique niche in the annals of history. In 1194, Constance traveled south in order to reclaim the Sicilian throne, giving birth in public along the way. The author recounts this year-long journey in historical, cultural, and geographical terms. After undertaking extensive research into the general medieval mindset and the specific life of Constance, she physically retraces the arduous route that took Constance from Germany to Sicily. Along the way, she reimagines the adventures and emotions of a woman torn between the conflicting cultures of northern and southern Europe. An intriguing combination of travelogue, cultural history, and biography. --Margaret Flanagan

Constance of Hauteville, the medieval queen featured here, was the daughter of Sicily's king and the wife of Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI. Few details about her life exist, but it is known that she had her only son at the age of 40 while returning to Sicily in 1194 to help her husband claim the Sicilian throne. Constance is buried in Sicily, which is where Simeti, an American who has lived there for almost 40 years, first learned about her and became fascinated by the mystery surrounding her life. Retracing Constance's return trip to Sicily, Simeti (On Persephone's Island) combines historical facts with her own speculations. The historical information, which fortunately makes up the bulk of the text, is well researched and quite interesting. The travelog sections, on the other hand, are flat. The reader often feels cheated by the author's contrived imaginings, which are neither fact nor fiction. In the end, it seems that the blending of genres simply doesn't work. Still, so little is available on Constance that this book fills an obvious gap. For libraries with medieval collections. Kathleen Shanahan, Kensington, MD (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Simeti offers a delightful, reflective reconstruction of a journey undertaken in 1194-1195 by the Sicilian princess Constance from the dark forests of Germany back to her ancestral island in the company of her cold, conquering husband, the Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI. Simeti, who has lived in Sicily for 40 years and written about the island in Pomp and Sustenance and On Persephone's Island, retraces Constance's itinerary in the relative comfort of her car, creating a pleasant exchange between the two journeys. She empathizes intensely with the princess's more grueling travails, from the horseback ride across the Alps, to the dangerous experience of childbirth (which, with her first child, Constance chose to undergo in public to prove that the child was hers). Throughout the book's 12 chapters corresponding to the months of Constance's trip, Simeti renders her sense of connection with her subject: they are both expatriates caught between two cultures, maneuvering for space in a male world. As Simeti is aware, much of the reconstruction is a projection of her own experience, since few documents speak directly to Constance's life. The author senses and evokes possibilities, introducing invented characters like the princess's Arab nurse or fictitious relationships such as her wooing by the courtly poet Frederick von Hausen. She dips into medieval scholarship, rather than immersing herself fully, though her friendship with Columbia University professor Caroline Walker Bynum bears fruit in the discussion of individualism in the Middle Ages. Like another 12th-century traveler, Gerald of Wales, Simeti is fond of engrossing intellectual side trips (astrology, chess, medicine, etc.). 144 b&w and 10 color photos. (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Memoirist Simeti (On Persephone's Island, 1986, etc.) tells the story of Constance d'Hauteville, whose marriage linked the medieval Norman kingdom of Sicily with the Holy Roman Empire. In 1186, the 32-year-old Constance, heir to the throne of Sicily, married Henry, rock-ribbed son of the dashing Emperor Frederick Barbarossa and ten years her junior. When her half-brother William II died childless three years later and the succession went to another male relative, Henry, now emperor, determined to enforce Constance's claim and take Sicily for himself. It took two tries, and in 1194, en route to Sicily the second time, the 40-year-old empress discovered to everyone's astonishment that she was pregnant. The child she bore became Frederick II, one of the most powerful and controversial figures of the Middle Ages. Part travelogue, part history, Taylor's narrative moves between Constance's final journey and her own trip 800 years later along the same (reconstructed) route. Simeti, an American who has lived in Sicily for many years, offers lively descriptions of important Italian sites and buildings, illuminating background on medieval people and practices, and some reflections on the continuities and discontinuities over time of various human experiences: travel, selfhood, childbirth, and, naturally, expatriation. Articulate and well-grounded in medieval studies, the author is a self-styled "incautious amateur," filling gaps in the record with imaginative conjecture. Unfortunately, Simeti also invests her informed, intelligent reconstructions with the trappings of self-indulgent fantasy; she needlessly invents names for unattested figures, dramatizes undocumented relationships, and smugly apologizes for doing so at every opportunity. Even worse, Simeti uses Constance's 1194 itinerary as an organizing principle for a story that begins more than 30 years earlier. (A chronology is provided-too late-at the end.) For the general reader unfamiliar with the major events of the late-12th century, this episodic approach would be confusing in any case; combined with Simeti's modern-day anecdotes and detours, it verges on incoherence. An engrossing story, sadly contorted in the telling.