A Vision of Light A Margaret of Ashbury Novel

The bestselling novel that introduces Margaret of Ashbury and launches a trilogy featuring this irrepressible woman Margaret of Ashbury wants to write her life story. However, like most women in fourteenth-century England, she is illiterate. Three clerics contemptuously decline to be Margaret's scribe, and only the threat of starvation persuades Brother Gregory, a Carthusian friar with a mysterious past, to take on the task. As she narrates her life, we discover a woman of startling resourcefulness. Married off at the age of fourteen to a merchant reputed to be the Devil himself, Margaret was left for dead during the Black Plague. Incredibly, she survived, was apprenticed to an herbalist, and became a midwife. But most astonishing of all, Margaret has experienced a Mystic Uniona Vision of Light that endows her with the miraculous gift of healing. Because of this ability, Margaret has become suddenly differentto her tradition-bound parents, to the bishop's court that tries her for heresy, and ultimately to the man who falls in love with her. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Judith Merkle Riley is a professor of political science and has a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.