The Inquisitor’s Tale

The Inquisitor’s Tale is a 2016 work of historical fiction for children, written by Adam Gidwitz and illustrated by Hatem Aly. It received a 2017 Newbery Honor. This guide refers to the 2016 Penguin edition.

Plot Summary

The story begins in a medieval French inn, where a mysterious narrator is asking questions about the three mysterious outlaw children with magical powers and their holy dog.

Nearly everyone in this tavern has a part of the story to tell, and the book develops through different storytellers’ perspectives. The children are believed to be saints. The first of them, Jeanne, is a peasant with the power of prophecy; her dog, Gwenforte, returned from the dead and is a local saint. The second, William, is an oblate (a monk-in-training), the illegitimate son of a lord and an unknown North African woman, and miraculously huge and strong. The third, Jacob, is a Jewish boy whose parents died in a hateful Christian raid on their village; he has healing powers.

Believing Jeanne to be a witch and Gwenforte a pagan idol, knights ride out to kill her. A mysterious monk named Michelangelo de Bologna is pursuing Jeanne. She escapes Michelangelo, but the knights capture her and intend to take her to the cathedral city of Saint-Denis for judgement and execution.

William is expelled from his monastery for shattering a stone bench in anger over a senior monk’s bigotry. His abbot sends him to Saint-Denis to study and gives him a load of sacred books.

Jacob escapes from the destruction of his village after miraculously healing an injured man. He can’t find his parents, but he remembers that they told him to go find his cousin Yehuda in Saint-Denis. He runs into the other two children at an inn, where the knights have captured Jeanne. William and Jeanne fight the knights off, and the three children (and Gwenforte) all escape into the forest.

At first, the children are suspicious of each other’s pronounced cultural differences, but they slowly begin to love and appreciate each other through talking and telling stories, developing the themes of The Power of Difference and Storytelling as Unity. They agree to go to Saint-Denis together, but the knights capture Jeanne and Jacob. As they travel, the knights slowly soften. The children learn that the knights are traumatized from the crusades. At last, they all become friends, and together they defeat a terrible farting dragon.

William catches up with them, and the three set out to meet the kindly Abbot Hubert in Saint-Denis. Once there, they find that Hubert is a bloodthirsty zealot, and Michelangelo has been trying to rescue them. Michelangelo wants the children to help prevent the King of France from burning thousands of copies of the holy Jewish Talmud. The band of friends sets out to persuade the king and finds him in disguise at a monastery. Jeanne, with her power of vision, first identifies him and then befriends him by helping him to recover a lost holy relic.

The King takes the friends to Paris, and on the way, he reveals his careless bigotry against his Jewish subjects. At the palace, Jeanne agrees to fake a vision to dissuade the King’s book burning, but fails. In the end, the King’s horrible mother, Blanche de Castile, provokes Jacob into revealing his objection to the book-burning directly, and the King waves his objections aside.

At the book burning, the children can’t salvage any books, and Michelangelo is burned alive on the pyres. Heartbroken, the children retreat and try to make a new plan. They decide to retrieve the books that William left at the inn, as there are copies of the Talmud among them.

At the inn, the narrator says he’ll guide the children to Mont-Saint-Michel, where a monk can copy and redistribute the Talmud. Along the way, the narrator reveals that he’s an inquisitor sent to kill the children. Their story persuades him to help them.

When Blanche de Castile rides into quicksand in pursuit of the children, they rescue her, and the King pardons them, recognizing their sainthood. Following a vision, the children reunite with Michelangelo, who is alive and is actually the Archangel Michael.