Janet Rich Edwards’s debut historical fiction novel, Canticle (2025), is set in late-13th-century Flanders, a hub of the European wool trade. The story follows Aleys, a draper’s daughter whose intense, personal faith puts her on a collision course with the institutional Church. After her mother’s death, Aleys flees an arranged marriage and finds refuge in a begijnhof—a semi-monastic community of devout laywomen—where her mystical visions and miraculous healings bring her both fame and peril. The novel explores themes such as The Pursuit of Unmediated Divinity and The Transgressive Power of Female Spiritual Authority.

Canticle is informed by the history of medieval female mystics, Beguine communities, and anchorites. Edwards, a professor of epidemiology at Harvard University with a focus on women’s health, draws on extensive research to create a vivid portrait of a world where women sought spiritual and intellectual autonomy outside the confines of patriarchal structures. The novel examines how personal faith can be weaponized by political and religious institutions, ultimately Redefining Sainthood as Communal Love and Sacrifice rather than the performance of spectacular miracles.

This guide refers to the 2025 Spiegel & Grau first edition.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of illness, death, child death, graphic violence, sexual violence, child abuse, physical abuse, disordered eating, self-harm, pregnancy loss, gender discrimination, and substance use.

Plot Summary

Set in the wool-trading cities of late-13th-century Flanders, the novel opens with a flash-forward: In 1299, Aleys walks through the square in Brugge toward the stake where she will be burned as a heretic, even as the crowd chants “Sint!” (saint) in her honor.

The story returns to 1295. Thirteen-year-old Aleys lives in the canal town of Damme with her family. Her father, referred to as Papa, is a draper who sells wool through the Lakenhalle, Brugge’s guild-run cloth hall. Her mother, called Mama, owns an illuminated Latin psalter, a book of psalms inherited from an aunt who was an abbess, though she herself can’t read. Mama uses its vivid illustrations to tell her children stories of the saints, embedding in Aleys a deep appreciation of faith. Mama tells Aleys that every girl receives three charmed events, like wishes, in the years before she weds.

When Mama dies in childbirth, Aleys is devastated. She blames herself for failing to pray hard enough, having offered all three wishes to save her mother’s life. While her siblings—Griete, Claus, and Henryk—gradually recover, Aleys remains beset by grief, even while she takes on Mama’s household duties.

Papa hires a tutor to teach the children to read and write in Dutch. Aleys learns quickly but longs to read the Latin psalter. Papa gives it to her, and she begins to teach herself Latin by matching words to prayers she knows by heart. Her progress accelerates when she meets Finn, a boy from a nearby dye yard who has memorized Latin passages but can’t read. They strike a bargain: She teaches him to decode written words, while he teaches her their meanings. Meeting secretly in fields and later in an apple tree, they study the Canticle of Canticles, the biblical Song of Songs, whose seductive poetry blurs sacred and sensual longing. Aleys falls in love with Finn, but he announces that he’s joining a monastery. Shattered, Aleys resolves that she is meant for God rather than a man.

A crisis soon forces Aleys from home. Moths destroy the family’s produce garden and stores of wool, threatening financial ruin. Pieter Mertens, the powerful head of the drapers’ guild, offers the family a Lakenhalle license in exchange for Aleys’s hand in marriage. Papa, despite an earlier promise, agrees. Aleys feels betrayed and secretly contacts Friar Lukas, the head of the Franciscan friars in Brugge. Lukas has long prayed for a woman of faith to help establish a Franciscan sisterhood. He accepts Aleys into the order. On the eve of her wedding, Aleys flees home with only her psalter. Lukas cuts off her braid in the parish church. When Papa arrives the next morning, he relinquishes her, claiming that she is “no longer [his]” (54).

Lukas places Aleys in the begijnhof, a walled community of devout laywomen, on probation: She must recruit at least one woman to the Franciscan order within two months. Grand Mistress Sophia Vermeulen leads the community with quiet authority. Katrijn Janssens, a draper and widow who manages the begijnhof’s wool business, opposes Aleys’s presence. Aleys also meets Cecilia, a cheerful young country girl; Ida, an intense beguine who works at the city hospital; and Marte, the begijnhof’s servant, who fled her abusive husband.

Aleys initially dismisses the beguines as insufficiently devout but gradually discovers their depth. She learns that Katrijn secretly translates Latin scripture into Dutch so that the beguines can access God’s word directly. At a Midsummer Eve celebration, the beguines sing the Song of Songs in Dutch, and Aleys realizes that she has misjudged them. Meanwhile, Jan Smet, Bishop of Tournai and Lukas’s older brother, faces pressure from a papal legate to root out illegal Dutch translations of the Bible. He orders his agent Willems to surveil the beguines.

Assigned to the city hospital, Aleys discovers an unexpected gift. While praying over a dying boy, she enters a visionary state, and he revives. News of the miracle quickly spreads through Brugge, but the healing power comes and goes unpredictably, while Aleys grows exhausted. The bishop forces a public demonstration, staging it with actors posing as patients. That same evening, Sophia collapses with what appears to be a stroke. Aleys races back to pray over her, but the miracle doesn’t come, and Sophia dies. Katrijn, devastated, banishes Aleys. Outside, the crowd tears Aleys’s robe apart for relics before she falls into a pond.

The bishop proposes enclosing Aleys in an anchorhold, a sealed cell attached to Sint-Salvator cathedral where she will live as a recluse for life. Exhausted, Aleys consents. Papa visits, accepts her calling, and tells her that she will always be his daughter. The enclosure ceremony is conducted in the manner of a funeral, and Lukas locks the door.

Inside, Aleys structures her days around the eight canonical hours of prayer. Marte becomes her attendant, and Aleys teaches Marte to read and write. Over months, Aleys experiences powerful mystical visions, including a fierce Mary who commands her to bear the truth. Marte undergoes her own awakening, writing a retelling of the story of Lot’s wife from Genesis, in which it is Lot, not his wife, who is turned into salt. Katrijn burns the parchment, but Ida supplies fresh pages and tells Marte to write it again.

Lukas deteriorates, consumed with envy of Aleys’s intimacy with God. On Midsummer Eve, he breaks into the anchorhold and attempts to force himself on her, framing the assault as a sacred union. Trapped between the open door, which represents excommunication, and Lukas’s violence, Aleys grabs a knife and stabs him. She realizes that—in the context of the story of Abraham—she is neither the bound sacrifice nor the obedient patriarch. She sees herself as the angel who stays the hand. She runs through the open door.

Aleys takes refuge at the begijnhof. Katrijn carries her inside because “it’s what Sophia would have done” (316). The bishop charges Aleys with heresy, a strategic escalation carrying a death sentence. At trial, the key charge centers on her mystical claim “my me is God” (248). Aleys defends herself, arguing that only through loving God can one become godly. When the bishop introduces Marte’s retelling as further evidence, Aleys claims authorship to protect Marte and the begijnhof. The legate excommunicates her, granting until day’s end to recant.

In her cell, Aleys faces a final test: Recanting would redirect punishment onto Marte and the beguines. In a mystical vision, Christ asks her to be his wounded doe, and she offers herself as a sacrifice. Finn, now a monk, arrives with a horse and an escape plan, but Aleys refuses, understanding that flight would condemn everyone she loves. She tells him to “try to be simple” (341), echoing Sophia’s long-ago counsel.

Marte braids Aleys’s hair one final time. Papa wraps her in her maroon cloak. As she walks to the stake, she perceives saints in the faces of the crowd and visionaries yet to come, understanding herself as part of a lineage of women who sought (and will seek) truth. The beguines encircle the pyre, each holding blank parchment. Katrijn begins the Ave Maria as the flames are lit. The bishop sees a woman consumed by fire; the legate sees a woman consuming the fire, ablaze with glory. There are no remains. The narrative leaves Aleys’s fate deliberately ambiguous.

In the aftermath, the bishop encloses Lukas in the empty anchorhold, where he will spend his remaining days praying to the saint he wronged. The Epilogue describes a blind beguine living in the begijnhof, always attended by Marte, who writes quietly in the small hours, an orange cat beside them. The novel ends with the tolling of bells.