Heresy by S.J. Parris
A mystery book review
The actual history behind this mystery novel is as wild as any adventure story. On the brink of a heresy trial after being discovered reading Erasmus in his monastery’s privy, Giordano Bruno fled. He wandered Europe for a time, lived in Paris under the protection of Henri III, and traveled to England in 1583. There, one scholar has proposed, he may have become a spy for Queen Elizabeth's secretary Francis Walsingham. With Copernicus, Bruno believed the Earth orbited the sun; he also thought the universe was infinite and the sun one of many stars orbited by planets.
Parris’s novel portrays Bruno arriving at Oxford University and hoping to share his astronomical theories with a community of thoughtful scholars. Instead, he lands amid a covertly seething conflict between the Protestant rector installed by Elizabeth's ministers and the venerable professors who renounced their Catholic faith to keep their positions. Both sides ridicule his theories. Then a series of grisly murders seems to mimic episodes from the rector's favorite text, John Foxe's Book of Martyrs. As Bruno investigates, he becomes indispensable to some parties, threatening to others.
Bruno's philosophy gets the story rolling as he searches for a missing volume of esoteric magic, but his ideas never impede the mystery's pacing. A list of characters might have been helpful, as some of the academics introduced during a group dinner are less individually memorable than others. The key characters, though, including the rector's beautiful and learned daughter, are distinctive and unforgettable. The most surprising parts of Heresy are grounded in the historical record, as when Bruno tells a friend, "The divinity is in all of us and in the substance of the universe. . . . When we understand this, we can become equal to God." (2010, 435 pages)