CANTICLE

A young woman’s religious obsession affects those around her and highlights a tumultuous moment of great change for common people.

From childhood, Aleys, a woolmaker’s daughter in medieval Brugge, Belgium, seeks the divine, like her mother, who inherited a beautiful illuminated psalter. Although the saints’ stories were written in Latin, Aleys’ mother told them from memory in Dutch, giving her daughter dreams of hair shirts and pilgrimages. After the mother’s death in childbirth, Aleys joins the Franciscan friars at the behest of one Friar Lukas. He tasks her to live with an order of beguines—secular women dedicated to good works—and recruit some to become Franciscan nuns. However, she finds that the beguines have their own purposes, including a clandestine reading circle, leaving them with little desire for ecstatic spirituality. Aleys’ visions are well described but not parsed in modern terms like neurodiversity or mental illness. She heals a few sick and dying people but cannot save the beguines’ magistra, Sophia, from death. Katrijn, Sophia’s deputy—and, perhaps lover—casts Aleys out of the community. Lukas’s older brother Jaan, the bishop of Tournai, uses Aleys as a prop to convince townspeople of the church’s power. Confused by her unpredictable gifts, Aleys accepts Jaan’s offer to make her an anchorite. She’ll live in a sealed room attached to the church and never leave, gaining status as a holy woman. Even in strict confinement, Aleys has erotic visions of union with Jesus and Mary that echo the title’s reference to the Old Testament Song of Songs. Meanwhile, she teaches Marte, the beguine assigned to bring her meals, how to read and write, resulting in a showdown with an inquisitorial papal delegation. The ending might seem foregone, but author Rich Edwards has a twist or two in store, plus some stark examples of clerical corruption that are as relevant in the 21st century as they were in the 13th.

In elegant prose, this deceptively quiet novel juggles big spiritual ideas with big social issues.