Mistress of the Art of Death by Ariana Franklin

Mistress of the Art of Death opens with a clever parody of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.  It describes a group of pilgrims traveling toward Cambridge in Medieval times.  Among the group is a doctor, trained in Solerno Italy in the art of examining the bodies of the dead.  More unusual even than the doctor’s specialty in these superstitious times is the fact that she is a woman.  She is traveling incognito with an investigator/spy to look into the deaths and disappearances of children in Cambridge.  The children’s deaths are being blamed on the local Jews and King Henry has asked help from his cousin, the King of Italy, to solve the murders before all the Jews in Cambridge become victims of an angry populace.

Franklin’s novel is both an engaging and suspenseful murder mystery and a detailed historical novel.  The mystery of the children’s deaths, and the uncovering of the identity of the perverted child killer, is intriguing.  But it is the exploration of the character of Dr. Vesuvia Adelia Rachel Ortese Aguilar that is central to the novel.  Adelia is a woman of science in a time of superstition.  She is an independent woman in a time when women have no power and no rights.  She is an agnostic and a humanist in a time when the Church and the Crown are struggling for supremacy: when Thomas a Becket’s death is still fresh.

To do her work as a doctor Adelia must pretend that she is just the assistant to one of her male companions.  Much of the fun in the book is reading how she holds her own with the men around her.  As the mystery unfolds there is political intrigue, religious controversy and even a little romance.  The novel has a satisfying ending yet leads me to hope there will be a sequel and another opportunity to spend time with this fascinating character.