Catherine karen cushman5/7/2023 “Men are horribly duplicitous creatures,” she tells her best friend Aelis (Isis Hainsworth), while also swooning over her handsome uncle George (Joe Alwyn), a Crusade survivor with, she notes, remarkably good teeth. Catherine endures the trials of medieval girlhood – namely, the prospect of a forced marriage as soon as she can bear children – but also the relatable slogs of adolescence from time immemorial: reckoning with one’s period, hopeless crushes, mind-altering jealousy, friend breakups and makeups, recorder lessons.Ĭatherine detests her father, her slouchy brother Robert (Dean-Charles Chapman, another Thrones veteran and routinely funny here), but she most detests marriage, which she views, rightly, as a trap, particularly after her betrothal to a lecherous, repulsive old lord she calls Shaggy Beard (Paul Kaye). Said diary, the narration of Cushman’s 1994 novel, becomes one of the more successful voiceovers that I’ve seen, a spirited year-in-the-life in what could be described, favorably, as a 13th-century Eighth Grade. All this she reports with satisfied glee, and endearing naivete (finding out where children come from and what’s a virgin is a running bit) in her diary, composed for her brother Edward (Archie Renaux), a monk at a local abbey.
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