Heresy
-
-
4.1 • 8 Ratings
-
-
- $5.99
-
- $5.99
Publisher Description
England is rife with conspiracies to assassinate Elizabeth I and return the country to Rome—plots that foment in places like the fiercely papist University of Oxford. Giordano Bruno—renegade monk, poet, scientist, and magician—arrives in London, fleeing the Roman Inquisition. Bruno believes that the Earth orbits the sun, and this alone could have him burned at the stake, but he also seeks a lost book of ancient truth, which he believes will end the Wars of Religion. Bruno is recruited by Elizabeth's spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, and sent undercover to Oxford, but his mission is thrown off course by a series of grisly murders. Bruno suspects that the murderer is trying to send a message— but what and to whom? Stalking the killer through the shadowy cloisters of the colleges and back streets of Oxford, he soon learns that sometimes even the wisest men cannot tell truth from heresy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set in 1583 against a backdrop of religious-political intrigue and barbaric judicial reprisals, Parris's compelling debut centers on real-life Giordano Bruno, a former Italian monk excommunicated by the Roman Catholic church and hunted across Europe by the Inquisition for his belief in a heliocentric infinite universe. Befriended by the charismatic English courtier and soldier Sir Philip Sidney, the ambitious Bruno flees to more tolerant Protestant England, where Elizabeth I's secretary of state, Sir Francis Walsingham, recruits him to spy, under the cover of philosophical disputation, on secretly Catholic Oxford scholars suspected of plotting treason. As one Oxford fellow after another falls to gruesome homicide, Bruno struggles to unravel Oxford's "tangled loyalties." Parris (the pseudonym of British journalist Stephanie Merritt) interweaves historical fact with psychological insight as Bruno, a humanist dangerously ahead of his time, begins his quest to light the fire of enlightenment in Europe.
