As she says herself, 'I am a fiction writer not a historian.' Could have fooled me. Yes, Sarah Dunant has a way with words, but I wish she spent as much time developing her plots as she does researching her history. I purposely stayed away from this thread until I finished the book and now I find there is no discussion! I liked it so so. No wonder that Luther (who would have been a young monk at the time of this book) had his work cut out. The clergy plotted and schemed with the best of them.Īlthough there must have been simple and holy men many were very worldly keeping mistress and no doubt taking an interest in choir and altar boys. Monks ran the only hospitals, they farmed thousands of acres, only the King was a bigger land-owner. Their monasteries, throughout Europe, were centres of hospitality and learning, they ran the universities where they provided education for the younger sons of the nobility and the bright grammer school boys (in England even as late as the nineteenth century, the 'landless' son often went into the C of E. The senior Churchmen of the Medieval period were often Princes in their own right, they controlled City States and as the only educated men, acted in what today would be the Civil Service for kings and emperors. Captb'fire, the corruption of the Church in pre-Reformation times days makes today's goings-on look like a bit of 'slap and tickle' at a Sunday School picnic.
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