John the Pupil

January 26, 2015
In this multilayered, intellectually challenging historical novel, Flusfeder (The Gift) considers medieval science, religion, and education through a young scholar’s journey from Oxford, England, to Viterbo, Italy. In 1267, real-life freethinker Roger Bacon sends off John, his fictional favorite pupil, accompanied by strong, silent Brother Bernard and sweet-tempered Brother Andrew, on the pretense of a pilgrimage, to deliver a copy of Bacon’s Opus Majus and samples of his inventions to the Pope. At Canterbury, they meet Simeon the Palmer, a pilgrim-for-hire who supplements his income by robbing other pilgrims. In France, John finds contentment tending a garden in a monastery. At Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti’s Italian palace, John’s companions find temptation. By the time John reaches the Pope, he has experienced friendship and conflict, witnessed sin and martyrdom, suffered loss and doubt. The core of the novel is John’s first-person chronicle of the adventures, interspersed with fables and legends of saints, capturing the violence, superstition, and spirituality characteristic of the Middle Ages. Academic endnotes amplify selected references: Cavalcanti, for example, appears in Dante’s Inferno, waiting for his son, the Florentine poet Guido Cavalcanti. The footnotes’ excruciating erudition belie the fact that they are essential reading: they provide place names along the pilgrims’ progress, they both support and undermine the faux chronicle’s credibility, and they include the author’s passionate rant against historical fiction; this is, after all, an antihistorical historical novel.