Aline Kiner, The Mirror of Simple Souls (Pushkin Press 2023)
1310 Paris. Ysabel runs the infirmary in the Royal Beguinage where she was raised, the religious women shut away from the fumes of burning Templars. Now old, she takes in a little beggar, a red-haired girl, Maheut. She does what she can to nurse the girl, but what was the cure for anger? She gives the wild child a gift, an aquamarine. The stone will absorb her anger, Ysabel says.
Franciscan Humbert has brought messages from his master Jean de Querayn to Marguerite Porete, imprisoned by the Inquisition. Humbert is looking for the red-headed girl.
Maheut’s red hair—’the colour of the devil’—gets her trouble. And worse trouble—she’s pregnant. Ysabel foists Maheut on the widow Ade, unwillingly, and the widow and girl do not warm to one another. Maheut’s daughter Leonor connects with Ade in a way her mother never did.
Next Maheut is foisted upon silk merchant Jeanne du Faut. Marguerite is burned at the stake. Ade translates Maguerite’s heretical book, The Mirror of Simple Souls, into Latin and in the course of the work comes closer to Humbert, and their indiscretion is witnessed by Clémence.
The vengeful fingers of the Inquisition shatter the peaceful life of the Beguinage.
This rich historical drama is beautiful and unpretentious, a wonderful piece of historical fiction, fluidly capturing the feel of the period. Though it holds interest, the plot is slow, like the pace of life probably was back then. No one is murdered until page 247. It is told in present tense, bringing the reader right down into the story. Despite the wealth of detail, the Voice—14th century Ysabel, Ade, Maheut and Humbert—remains authentic, the characters completely sympathetic. It paints a wonderful picture of the world of the beguines, neither lay nor cloistered, ‘neither Martha, nor Mary’.
This review first appeared in Historical Novels Review.
Susie Helme 
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