By Paul Carrier
The Vatican was no fan of the Dutch humanist back in the day, so the Italian-born Bruno must flee the Monastery of San Domenico Maggiore in Naples one step ahead of the Inquisition.
Thus begins an adventure that eventually carries Bruno to England, where Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, enlists his help in ferreting out suspected traitors at Oxford University who may be involved in a Catholic plot against the queen. “Your honor,” Bruno replies when Walsingham swears him to secrecy at the outset of his mission, “I was once a priest - I can lie as well as any man.”
The urbane, freethinking Bruno heads to Oxford with the public purpose of defending Copernicus' claim that the earth revolves around the sun. The now excommunicated monk makes the journey at a time when England’s Protestant rulers and Catholic minority co-exist in a sometimes deadly miasma of mutual hatred and distrust.
Heresy is set during what is known as the early modern period of human history, but it is an alien world to 21st century minds. Not only is the bitter rivalry between Catholic and Protestant nations a cornerstone of international relations, but governments execute people for their religious beliefs, using trumped up criminal charges to disguise their true motives. Dissenting views are heretical, and heresy is synonymous with treason.
Christianity “desperately needed a new philosophy, one that would draw us together as we passed from the shadows of religious wars into the enlightenment of our shared humanity and shared divinity,” says Bruno, whose views, we quickly learn, are far too advanced for his time.
Of course, Bruno’s unstated goals are far more important than championing Copernicus. In addition to exposing conspirators who are out to dethrone Elizabeth, Bruno hopes to find a lost work written by an ancient Egyptian, Hermes Trismegistus. This mysterious treatise “could destroy the authority of the Christian church,” Bruno tells us, because it would “teach men nothing less than the secret of knowing the Divine Mind. It would teach men how to become like God.”
Espionage and Egyptian philosophy initially take a back seat, however, when Bruno finds himself investigating the murder of Roger Mercer, the subrector at Oxford’s Lincoln College. Shortly after Bruno’s arrival, Mercer is mauled to death by a starving Irish wolfhound in a walled and locked garden that the dog could not have entered unless someone deliberately let it in. That is followed by other murders on campus, as well as the disappearance of a college official’s daughter.
Bruno is an engaging protagonist, partly because his Italian origins and Catholic roots make him a perennial outsider in England, despite his friends in high places. Take the food, for example. English pottage, Bruno explains with disgust, is “a sludgy concoction produced by mixing oatmeal with the juice left over from stewing meat, something that should rightly be served to livestock but which the English seemed to find an indispensable addition to any table.”
Although S, J. Parris is to be credited with making Bruno the central character in Heresy, she cannot, and does not, lay claim to having created him.
Born in 1548, the real-life Bruno was a Dominican friar whose cosmological theories “went beyond the Copernican model in proposing that the sun was essentially a star, and moreover, that the universe contained an infinite number of inhabited worlds populated by other intelligent beings,” according to Wikipedia. Bruno believed in pantheism, which the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary defines as “a doctrine that equates God with the forces and laws of the universe.” Like the historical Bruno, his fictionalized self is a renowned expert on memory.
In a 2010 interview with historicalnovels.info, Parris said she first read about Bruno “when I was at university and studying Elizabethan literature. He seemed such a fascinating character - a radical thinker ahead of his time, unafraid to challenge received ideas - and he was clearly a charmer, as he lived by his wits for years while he travelled around Europe in exile. I thought immediately how brilliantly his life would lend itself to fiction and I couldn't believe no one had written a novel about him.”
