Knowledge of Angels

by Jill Paton Walsh

This "disturbing and beautiful novel of ideas" (Ursula K. Le Guin) is enacted by a wide variety of characters on a Mediterranean island before the Reformation: a saintly monk whose faith is sorely tested; a wild, flesh-eating child who is captured by mountain shepherds and taken to the cardinal prince of the island; a castaway who swims ashore to a very strange welcome. Peopled by peasants, servants, shepherds, priests, nuns young and old, Knowledge of Angels sets off a wonderful fireworks of attitudes toward God and poses a hundred unrelenting questions. Is a tolerant engineering wizard who can speak to the priests of the Church in Latin but who will not confess to a belief in God truly a heretic? Must he undergo punishment, or will he undermine the faith of those who are testing his? Will the wolf-girl, who has never heard the name of God spoken, turn into a full-fledged human being, or will she always be at heart the same thing that she was when found? The story unfolds in unexpecte