This is not Thomas More’s Utopia, a nation of innocent savages waiting only for God’s word to complete their happiness. Robin Singleton, a commissioner charged with securing the peaceable surrender of the Monastery of St Donatus in Scarnsea, has been brutally murdered and Cromwell realizes that his agenda will be jeopardized if the evidence of this opposition is allowed to see the light of day.

People used the new laws to settle old grievances, turning their enemies in for Catholic devotion that reminds me of neighbors turning on neighbors in Germany under the Third Reich.The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. It is set in a time of great upheaval; Henry VIII has declared himself head of the English church, and his ministers are looking at ways of dismantling the power of the priesthood. Independent on Sunday Sansom has a greater talent for animating period details than most of his contemporaries, his rendering of the Tudor winter in the first of the Shardlake series makes you reach for thick fleece blankets.

As someone with no religious affiliation or belief, it's sometimes hard to imagine how important the specifics of worship can be to an individual or group; what doesn't surprise is the ways in which the machinery of power or domineering individuals can make such strong convictions useful. This is shortly after King Henry VIII has broken with the Catholic church and created the Church of England, with himself as the head of the church. We meet the famous figure Thomas Cromwell very briefly, but in that page time he becomes an intimidating character with an aura that oozes from the page. As I said above, I think the habit of organizing large bodies of complex material, always with presentation as a factor, which I had for years as a solicitor working in civil litigation, has influenced my way of working. Overall, an engaging plot, interestingly written characters, and as I mentioned, an intriguing setting.

Thomas Cromwell is portrayed as a mean old brute which is quite interesting after reading Hilary Mantel’s version of him in which he is sympathised with, greatly. Under overwhelming time and secrecy pressure imposed by Cromwell, Shardlake begins a long set of interviews and immerses himself in the life of the monastery. Donatus at Scarnsea, we are shown first hand what it was like for the monks at this time to be at the mercy of the king. It is 1537, Henry VIII has declared himself head of the church of England and the process of dissolving all the monasteries in the country, now the larger and wealthier ones (after some smaller ones earlier on) is on, and Cromwell has appointed commissioners to see to it that this is accomplished. A view eastwards along the chancel of the church at the Cistercian monastery of Rievaulx Abbey in the Yorkshire Wolds.

We had once believed with Erasmus that faith and charity would be enough to settle religious differences between men. He has also written Winter in Madrid, a thriller set in Spain in 1940 in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War.Sansom takes enough time to impress upon us the general perception that monasteries and other religious houses were seen both as sources of land and revenue for the king and his nobles and also an evil where the abbots, monks, novices, etc. En este marco todo lo que huela a papismo o parafernalia eclesiástica está en el punto de mira de la reforma.

The reader feels the chill in his or her own bones as the characters struggle to stay warm in the middle of the freezing cold weather. I love the idea that each book is numbered and limited, they're extra special because they're personalised with those sought-after signatures, and they are not on tip-in pages. The Name of the Rose, I am embarrassed to say, was a DNF for me (the only book I started but didn’t finish in the last five years or so).If a ruler who wants to act honourably is surrounded by unscrupulous men, his downfall is inevitable. This serves well as counterpoint to the somewhat out-of-his-depth character of Matthew Shardlake, the newly appointed King’s commissioner investigating the murder of the previous commissioner at the Monastery of St.