The most important characters, though, including the rector's beautiful and learned daughter, are indeed distinctive. A list of characters would have been helpful, as some of the academics introduced during a group dinner are less individually memorable than others. As Bruno investigates, he becomes indispensable to some parties, threatening to others.īruno's philosophy briefly gets the story rolling as he searches for a missing volume of esoteric magic, but his ideas are not central to the plot and never impede the mystery's pacing. Then a series of grisly murders seem to mimic episodes from the rector's favorite text, John Foxe's Book of Martyrs.
With Copernicus, Bruno believed the Earth orbited the sun, but he also thought the universe was infinite and the sun one of many stars orbited by planets.Īrriving at Oxford University hoping to share his astronomical theories with a community of thoughtful scholars, Bruno instead lands amid a covertly seething conflict between the Protestant rector installed by Elizabeth's ministers and the venerable professors who renounced their Catholic faith to keep their positions.
There, one scholar has proposed, he may have become a spy for Queen Elizabeth's secretary Francis Walsingham. He wandered Europe for a time, lived in Paris under the protection of Henri III, and traveled to England in 1583. On the brink of a heresy trial after being discovered reading Erasmus in the privy of his monastery, Giordano Bruno fled.
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