1635: The Cannon Law
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4.4 • 5 Ratings
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
The Dark Ages Strike Back!
After a cosmic accident sets the modern West Virginia town of Grantsville down in war-torn seventeenth century Europe, the United States of Europe is forged in the fire of battle. Now Spain makes its countermove on the Enlightenment brought by the West Virginians, as Cardinal Gaspare de Borja y de Velasco sets into motion a plot to establish Spanish hegemony over the city-states of Italy and to disgrace and assassinate a pope who has been friendly to the new ideas.
But there are those ó up-timers and locals alike ó who are determined that the fire of sweet reason so recently lit will never again be extinguished. To do so they must summon all the willpower and political craft they can muster. For they face the Heart of Medieval Darkness Itself, an implacable foe determined to use force of imperial arms and treasonous deceit to retain its grip on power ó and to be sure that life for all but the wealthy and connected remains nasty, brutish, and very short.
None of which is a surprise. You see, it's 1635. Everyone expects the Spanish Inquisition!
Alternate history master Eric Flint teams again with Andrew Dennis (1634: The Galileo Affair) in a return to war-torn Italy for the latest idea-laced thriller in Flint's massive "Assiti Shards" saga!
At the publisher's request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Flint and Dennis's solid follow-up to 1634: The Galileo Affair (2004), also set in Renaissance Italy, offers a deliciously Machiavellian plot. The temporally displaced modern Americans from Grantsville, W.Va., having met with a surprisingly friendly reception from Pope Urban VIII, who views with favor some of the 20th-century reforms instituted by the Holy See, run afoul of the Spanish inquisitor Cardinal Gaspar Borja y Velasco. Borja regards Urban's failure to condemn the whole lot to the stake as proof that the pope is unfit to sit on the throne of St. Peter, and believes that Spain's political and military power has earned it and him the right to pre-eminence. The cardinal orchestrates a campaign of dirty tricks and rabble rousing to undermine the pontiff's capable but nepotistic family. If this novel is not as rollicking as its predecessor, that may be because there really isn't anything funny about the Spanish Inquisition, Monty Python notwithstanding.
