Take a journey through the cobblestone streets of thirteenth-century Bruges in this enchanting novel about religious devotion, female mysticism, and the sacrifices of women—their bodies, their faith, and their safety—in a time when godliness was synonymous with male authority.
When young Aleys is promised by her wool merchant father to marry a wealthy member of the weavers’ guild, she knows the domestic life of a wife is not her fate. Guided by her deep devotion to the Christian God, Aleys flees and vows herself to the Church, forgoing financial security and a life of comfort. She eventually finds herself sheltered by a community of quietly defiant women—beguines – who have taken informal vows to the Church and live, work, and illegally translate scripture together. Through her time with the beguines, Aleys’ understanding of faith, worship, love, and even God are completely transformed as she goes on a journey to absolute divine servitude while dodging the attempts of a corrupt Bishop to eradicate her influence.
Edwards places readers in the shoes of various characters throughout this tale, providing a complete picture of a topic historically shrouded in mystery: women’s influence in the Christian canon. In a genre that can sometimes skew illegible, Canticle takes readers on a spectacular emotional journey examining the genesis of Christian saints along with the intentionally undocumented and strategically denied role of women in the Church through buttery, poetic prose and characters that feel timeless. This novel serves as a lesson that those who interpret scripture hold more power than those that wrote it ever could, and the necessary role of women in faith. Canticle is a profound and riveting story for those curious about religion and politics in thirteenth-century Europe or the unwritten history of women that we are now left to explore through literature, memory, and gut instinct.
Image via Spiegel & Grau
