A Heretic Monk and Murder at Oxford

This is the first of S.J. Parris’ thrilling Tudor mysteries centered on the former Italian monk and philosopher/scientist Giordano Bruno. The battlefront of the novel is in England, where Elizabeth I is fighting to keep her reign secure from Catholic forces in Europe and within her own country that want to topple her and capture the throne for Mary, Elizabeth’s imprisoned cousin and Catholic Queen of Scots.

This first book gives us some background on our unlikely hero; Bruno has been buried in an Italian monastery for 16 years where his thirst for knowledge clashed repeatedly with the Church hierarchy. The book opens with Bruno discovered hiding in the monastery’s latrine with the writings of Erasmus, and he is forced to flee for his life as the Inquisition’s torturers ride into town. He spends several years traveling through Italy and France, staying ahead of the Inquisition, soaking up knowledge, earning a reputation as a philosopher/poet/author/mathematician, and developing an expertise in the “art of memory” with which he captures the sponsorship of the French King.

Bruno ultimately ends up in London, living on the dole of the French ambassador while working secretly as a spy for Elizabeth’s personal secretary and spymaster Francis Walsingham. Bruno takes his first cautious breath of freedom under the enlightened reign of Elizabeth I, but also learns to his dismay that his new Protestant masters are every bit as bloody-minded when it comes to rooting out, torturing, and executing anyone suspected of complicity in a “papist conspiracy” against the crown.

Walsingham deploys our hero to Oxford to uncover a suspected anti-Elizabeth conspiracy in that academic center. Bruno is also hoping to discover in Oxford’s dusty libraries a rare and elusive book, which he needs for his studies if he is to complete his revolutionary treatise on the infinite nature of the universe. Bruno’s cover at Oxford is to debate the Copernican theory of heliocentrism with the Dean of Oxford, a rigid and orthodox man whose intelligent and independent-minded daughter chafes at her father’s authoritarianism while proving irresistible to the love-starved Bruno. Horrible murders erupt on the scene which seem to mimic the deaths of Protestant martyrs, and the simple answer is to blame the papists. But Bruno sees below the surface of things, and quickly starts to unravel a complicated conspiracy/counter-conspiracy of unlikely villains while trying to court the rebellious Sophia, who has a huge secret of her own.

Parris’ writing is effective and fast-paced, and part of a growing genre of medieval thrillers which combine well-researched historical characters and plots with a dusty, dank, chain-clanking, thumbscrew-creaking appeal to a modern audience. All in all, great fun.