As one Oxford fellow after another falls to gruesome homicide, Bruno struggles to unravel Oxford’s “tangled loyalties.” Parris (the pseudonym of British journalist Stephanie Merritt) interweaves historical fact with psychological insight as Bruno, a humanist dangerously ahead of his time, begins his quest to light the fire of enlightenment in Europe. Heresy by SJ Parris Unusually for historical fiction, the characters are enlightened in this tale of an Italian former monk on an Oxford murder trail, says Wally Dalloway Wally Dalloway Sat 24. Befriended by the charismatic English courtier and soldier Sir Philip Sidney, the ambitious Bruno flees to more tolerant Protestant England, where Elizabeth I’s secretary of state, Sir Francis Walsingham, recruits him to spy, under the cover of philosophical disputation, on secretly Catholic Oxford scholars suspected of plotting treason. Parriss debut historical thriller shines a light on the religious turmoil of 16th-century England, when men swore an oath to one faith but practiced another.
In April 1583, he visited England for the first time. Set in 1583 against a backdrop of religious-political intrigue and barbaric judicial reprisals, Parris’s compelling debut centers on real-life Giordano Bruno, a former Italian monk excommunicated by the Roman Catholic church and hunted across Europe by the Inquisition for his belief in a heliocentric infinite universe. The historical Bruno ended up in Paris where he secured the patronage of some of France's most powerful men, notably King Henry III.
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