Canticle Though she is from a respectable family of wool merchants in thirteenth century Bruges, teenaged Aleys knows she is not meant for a life of marriage and motherhood. With the help of a young scholar who lives nearby, she has been learning how to read the Latin scriptures, in addition to experiencing visions she believes are sent by God. But when her scholar friend leaves to join a monastery and her father promises her hand in marriage to an unpleasant merchant, Aleys runs away from home to join a group of ascetic monks so she might live a life devoted to God’s service. The monks are not best pleased to have a teenaged girl among them, and so Aleys is sent to live with a group of Beguines– a lay order of women who have decided to serve God and their community without taking religious vows. Among these women, Aleys discovers the joys of friendship, song, and service. All is not peaceful in Bruges, though, for illegal translations of the scriptures are being disseminated through the city, and the agents of the Church are searching for the translators. They have their eyes fixed on the Beguines, for there is more than one person who isn’t happy with the thought of independent women who don’t owe their allegiance to the Church. As rumors of miracles begin to swirl, Aleys discovers that her dreams of a simple life in service to God may be nothing more than an illusion, and that preserving the peace she has seen may require terrible sacrifices. It’s easy to look back across the centuries and wonder how people could have been so wrapped up in their beliefs that they chose to become wandering preachers who had to beg for food and shelter. We wonder at the people– mostly women– who decided to become anchorites who were walled up in a small room where they would spend the rest of their lives in prayer with little human contact. We might wonder if there was something wrong with them. Did they have some kind of disorder that drove them to do such things? Questions like this miss the essential nature of faith in Europe’s middle ages. God was not an abstract concept you idly prayed to on Sundays, and the Bible wasn’t some book you waved in people’s faces to try to make them do what you wanted. For them, God was a very real presence whose presence could be found in everything. He determined if you would be rich or poor, lived a long life or a short one, or if you would spend millennia in Purgatory. For some, the desire to spend their lives contemplating God was all-consuming, and they willingly went to great lengths for their faith. For most of us these days, this is hard to imagine, and many historical fiction authors who focus on European history sidestep the issue of religion altogether, or else make the truly devoted out to be wild-eyed zealots it would be best to keep your distance from. Fortunately, in Canticle, debut author Janet Rich Edwards does not fall for this trap. Aleys is a sympathetic girl who is genuinely devoted to God, and though she begins her journey in the Church wanting to be a wandering beggar, she is not portrayed as being crazy for wanting such a life. Aleys’ faith is treated with care and gravitas. She is no wide-eyed zealot you would keep your distance from. She is a likable girl whose desires are made clear from the book’s first pages and whose story, while vastly different from our own modern lives, is understandable. Aleys’ choices might seem strange at first, but it is clear she does not make them out of caprice or for the sake of the story. Rich Edwards might be a debut author, but her first novel reads like she has a dozen books behind her. With luminous prose, she shines a light on the kinds of choices a woman of deep faith might have made in the thirteenth century, showing us that while they may not have had as many choices as we do now, this doesn’t mean their lives lacked agency or meaning. There may be a few too many points of view scattered throughout the book and the villainous figure was a bit flat, but on the whole, Canticle is a marvelous story of faith, devotion, and loyalty. Thank you to Net Galley and Spiegel & Grau for the free advance copy for review. Traveling in Books is free today. But if you enjoyed this post, you can tell Traveling in Books that their writing is valuable by pledging a future subscription. You won't be charged unless they enable payments.
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Friday, 19 December 2025
Book Review: Canticle by Janet Rich Edwards
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