Anyone who grew up reading about the saints is conditioned to expect a dash of drama in accounts of holy people’s lives: plucked-out eyes, levitation, demise in the form of ravening Colosseum lions. Normally, each saint’s life features one primary showstopper, such as a supernatural ability, a quirky practice of self-discipline or a gory demise. 

Canticle

by Janet Rich Edwards

Spiegel & Grau
368p $30

In Canticle, a page-turner of a debut novel by Janet Rich Edwards, the life of the teenage protagonist, Aleys, instead offers a saintly variety show. There will be religious visions, miraculous healings, a cloistering, a burning at the stake and that old classic, an escape from a lecherous suitor. Perhaps more than one lecherous suitor. Canticle offers the Catholic equivalent of a monster truck rally: Just when you think the story has settled into one track, it delivers a fresh surprise.

In her acknowledgments, Edwards thanks some mystic greats—St. Clare of Assisi, St. Teresa of Ávila, St. Catherine of Genoa and Meister Eckhart—for providing inspiration for Aleys’s words, visions and twists of fate. A reader steeped in hagiographies could almost play bingo by clocking plot developments reminiscent of biographical details of favorite saints. That’s not to say Canticle is flippant with its allusions, only that they are abundant. With a story constructed out of historical research that is as in-depth as it is lightly worn, Edwards makes this material feel classic, not clichéd. 

The story begins in 1295 in Damme, a West Flanders town near Brugge, where Aleys is growing up as the oldest daughter in a wool-producing family. She’s a good girl, loves her mama, loves Jesus and stories from her mother’s psalter too. “Bees love her like she’s a tulip. They don’t sting her. She doesn’t know why,” Edwards writes in her first hint at Aleys’s blessed nature. 

Aleys is a pious and prayerful child, and loves listening to her mother tell the lives of saints from the psalter she inherited from an aunt who was the abbess of a convent. As is typical for the time period, none of them can read, but Aleys’s mother has memorized the stories and recounts them vividly. Aleys’s siblings enjoy the drama and gore of the stories, but Aleys admires the piety of the saints. 

“So sure, so full of passion. Everyone loves them, despite how strange they are,” she thinks, and tries to “get God’s attention” through fasting and making her own hairshirt. Aleys’s characterization is relatable for all who went through a childhood I-want-to-be-a-saint phase. The key to Canticle is that Aleys never grows out of it.

Aleys yearns for a spiritual life, but secular twists of fate interfere. Her mother dies in childbirth; the loss of her steady household management, bartering and accounting skills causes the family’s business to falter. Her father hires a tutor so the children can keep records in Dutch, and Aleys meets a boy studying to become a manuscript-copying monk who agrees to help her learn Latin, which few men know, let alone women. Aleys prays fervently, learning to read the psalter, and eventually experiences her first mystical vision, of an angel who tells her to “Seek.”

The Franciscan order is less than 100 years old at this time, and when the family’s parish priest gets sick, a Franciscan, Friar Lukas, takes over. “Everyone is impressed by the wandering friars who strive to live like Christ’s apostles,” Edwards writes. In this era, priests and bishops (including Friar Lukas’s brother) grew wealthy selling wine from their vineyards and the indulgences parishioners buy for forgiveness of sins. Wealthy families pay the church to install their sons in powerful positions in the clergy. Franciscans—with their vow of poverty and simple brown robes—seem purer to Aleys, who aspires to join them, just as St. Clare joined St. Francis of Assisi.

But worldly matters again intervene: Moths attack the family’s wool, leaving the family teetering on the edge of starvation. Aleys’s father sees no choice but to accept a wealthy guild president’s offer to marry off 16-year-old Aleys in exchange for the family receiving a stall at the Lakenhalle, the center of commerce for cloth and wool in bustling medieval Brugge. Aleys rebels against the marriage, certain any union would “break the promise she made to God.” She runs to Friar Lukas to join the Franciscans. Friar Lukas accepts her, thinking a woman in the order will win converts. 

However, he cannot house a woman alongside the male friars, so he turns to the beguines, “good women who seek a Godly life, though they lack either the dowry or the desire to become nuns. They live without men, but the town gossips about the begijnhof like it’s a brothel.” Aleys worries the rumors about the beguines might be true, that they are “wanton,” but has no choice but to live with them. Her longed-for life of contemplation and prayer must wait, as the beguines are a lay religious group committed to working vigorously in the community, helping the poor and sick.

Canticle proceeds at a galloping pace—all the plot developments outlined above occur in just the first 15 percent of the book, setting Aleys up for an eventful life of prayer, service and community—all of which give way to clamor and political machinations when people begin to spread rumors that she can perform miraculous healings and that she might be a saint. 

Medieval-tinged symbols, fashion and iconography have enjoyed a cultural moment in the United States over the past few years, with “castlecore” trending in interior design, dragons and knights clashing in popular fantasy novels and fashionable young people accessorizing with princess hats. It is a part of the trend that the medieval literature scholar Megan L. Cook has called “dirtbag medievalism” for the way it draws on and mashes up details from any point in the 1,000-year span of the Middle Ages and dehistoricizes them in a pleasing way for modern audiences.

Canticle, on the other hand, illuminates one specific time and place through its vibrant story, and demonstrates how fascinating life in the late 1200s could be in this bustling mercantile city, without even bringing dragons into it. The story of the beguines alone is worth the price of admission for this novel. This group of women carved out a place for themselves and contributed to their community in a way that did not fit into the traditional roles of wife, mother or nun. During their time in the beguinage, they adhered to its rules, religion and rigor, but they took no vow and were free to come and go. It is little wonder that the pope was not sure what to do with them. Edwards shows a variety of reasons why a woman might end up in such a community, including the desire to escape an abusive husband. 

Another highlight of Canticle is Edwards’s depiction of Aleys’s prayer and mystical visitations. She illuminates their erotic intensity and unexpected revelations as deftly as Ron Hansen did in his 1991 novel Mariette in Ecstasy, giving readers who have never experienced a divine vision some idea of what one might feel like.

Canticle is a diverting, richly imagined romp of a novel, and even those of us who have read enough histories of saints to know how they generally end will enjoy learning how Edwards realizes Aleys’s ambitions. 

This article appears in June 2026.

Jenny Shank’s story collection Mixed Company won the Colorado Book Award and the George Garrett Prize, and her first novel, The Ringer, won the High Plains Book Award, and her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Washington Post and Image. She teaches at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver.