5/21/2023 0 Comments Mistress of the art of death![]() ![]() Not to mention plague, pestilence and appalling sanitary conditions - all of which are handled with saintly compassion in Ellis Peters’s Brother Cadfael series.Īriana Franklin enters the medieval lists with MISTRESS OF THE ART OF DEATH (Putnam, $25.95), a morbidly entertaining novel that outdoes the competition in depicting the perversities of human cruelty. ![]() Doherty’s “Hangman’s Hymn”) civil rebellion (Margaret Frazer’s “Traitor’s Tale”) barbaric medical practices (Philippa Morgan’s “Chaucer and the Doctor of Physic”) rotten government (Sharon Kay Penman’s “Prince of Darkness”) a corrupt clergy (Priscilla Royal’s “Tyrant of the Mind”) and endless foreign wars (Michael Jecks’s “Last Templar”). ![]() But even writers who work within the limits of a series manage to cover all the major paranoia points: religious superstition (P. Few historical novelists can match the literary panache and apocalyptic vision of Peter Ackroyd, whose treatment of 14th-century political intrigue in “The Clerkenwell Tales” transforms Chaucer’s Canterbury into a training camp for bomb-throwing terrorists. If it sometimes seems as if civilization is hurtling back into the Middle Ages, any number of medieval mysteries will obligingly corroborate your worst fears. ![]()
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