Two men involved in the heretical Cathar sect in 14th-century France spend their lives on the move and under the threat of reprisals by the Catholic church in Kaberry’s historical novel.

In 1299, Guy Belibaste is annoyed; his father has sent him to confront three thieving shepherds just as Cathar “perfects” arrive at their French farm. Guy has always been intrigued by Catharism (a Christian Gnostic movement); his great-uncle was one of a past generation’s perfects, the key members of this movement, and was burned alive as part of the Catholic church’s persecution of the purportedly heretical group. Guy trips and accidentally causes the death of one of the shepherds. Since the others will claim murder, Guy flees with the visiting perfects, eventually becoming a perfect himself. In the same year, Pierre “Pedro” Maury leaves his own French village, unwilling to become a weaver like his father. He finds work as a shepherd with the help of a cousin—a Cathar follower—and joins the movement as well. Pedro and Guy soon connect and witness and perform, respectively, the Cathar spiritual rite of consolamentum, which is usually administered just before death. Over the next two decades, the men live their lives often on the run. Kaberry masterfully draws on the actual records kept by Bishop Jacques Fournier to further flesh out “the ghosts of all the players in the drama of the last Cathars of the Languedoc…revealed in all their human weaknesses, as well as their moments of glory.” (The bishop founded an Episcopal inquisition and hunted down Cathars; he later became Pope Benedict XII.) The author sets her protagonists on a finely rendered and often exhausting journey; their embrace of Catharism, while somewhat the result of circumstance and occasionally defied or doubted, is effectively presented as an authentic and understandable spiritual choice, given the corrupt, controlling Catholic church as it is depicted here.

An intensely realized epic of the yearnings and consequences of alternative faith in the Middle Ages.

A debut novel set in 14th-century France follows the plight of a woman accused of heresy by the Roman Catholic Church.

Bishop Jacques Fournier, notorious for his relentless persecution of suspected heretics, summons Béatrice de Lagleize for questioning. He’s convinced that she’s in some way involved with Cathars, a sect of heretics who don’t believe in sacramental transubstantiation and think that the devil created Earth and the bodies of human beings. Béatrice’s father was, in fact, a Cathar, and while she grew up in a noble family with the advantages that entails, she also matured under a cloud of suspicion. Terrified of Fournier after her first interrogation, she decides it’s best to flee rather than continue the inquisition, but she is arrested with her husband, Barthélemy. She’s thrown in a dungeon, her hair is forcibly shaved, and she’s subjected to seven more unyielding examinations, thrillingly rendered by Kaberry. In the meantime, Béatrice reflects deeply on the life she’s led and the way the stain of heresy has indelibly affected her. When only 16 years old, she was promised in marriage to Bérenger de Rocquefort, a much older man, because of his nobility and reputation for being a good Catholic. After she bears him five children in seven years and he dies, she remarries two more times. Yet the deaths of two husbands and a daughter exact a profound emotional toll on her and challenge her already beleaguered faith. She does her best to defend herself against Fournier’s accusations, but she’s been embedded in the Cathar world her whole life, sometimes as a distant sympathizer and sometimes as an accomplice. Kaberry seamlessly braids the historical and the dramatic, producing a work that is both scholarly and gripping. She paints a vividly grotesque picture of a monstrously corrupt Catholic Church, hated by many for its “greed, the extortionate taxes it demands, its debauched clergy.” However attractive or not Cathar doctrine is, it’s easy to see why subversive competitors of the church would arise. The author intelligently provokes questions about the relationship between authority and corruption—the Cathars, too, are capable of using theological doctrine as an instrument of self-aggrandizing dominion. Further, Béatrice is a beautifully drawn character—thoughtfully complex and deliciously enigmatic. While she is accused of doctrinal sedition, her real transgression is aching uncertainty about the details of her religion—and whether she can muster any faith at all: “She cannot hide her doubts and lies from herself or God, she can only be true to herself in her own mind. If there is a God, this most blasphemous of all thoughts worries her, can He see into her heart? Does He even care about her?” The plot’s pace can slow to a too leisurely amble, and the prose in some spots flirts with melodrama. Nonetheless, this is a captivating story, as emotionally moving as it is intellectually engaging.

A meticulously researched and stirringly executed blend of historical fact and fiction.