80 pages • 2 hours read
Adam GidwitzThe Inquisitor’s Tale
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
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Jeanne
The first of the three magical children we meet, Jeanne has the power of sight and prophecy. Her childhood origin story—being saved from a snake by her saintly dog, Gwenforte—sets up a life of strange happenings, including the ability to see into the future. Jeanne is a peasant and uses the snobbish assumptions of people higher up the social ladder as a weapon against them. She’s also courageous, empathetic, and just, and she often uses her talent for prophecy to fight for people who, like her, are underestimated or overlooked.
William
William, the second of the three magical children, is strong in both body and mind. He’s a real scholar, who loves debate and intellectual precision; he also has a miraculous strength which allows him to shatter stones and fight huge crowds. As a biracial character in a predominantly pale-skinned medieval France, he has a special insight into some of the book’s points about close-mindedness and exclusion. Over the course of the story, he suffers from feelings of isolation and loneliness, even when he’s part of a group: his life has taught him that the people around him will often treat him as an outsider, and he struggles to overcome his assumption that he’ll always be left out.
Jacob
The third of the three magical children, Jacob is a wise child who has the miraculous power to heal. He’s clever, seeing more clearly than supposedly wise people around him, and he’s kind, wishing to help people who are in pain. He sees God as the source of his powers, and his deep Jewish faith underpins his miracle-working. Jacob has a wry perspective, and his sense of reason often puts him at odds with the more credulous people around him. This quality makes him a helpful companion for the modern reader: he is, for instance, the only character who isn’t totally matter of fact at the announcement of a farting dragon terrorizing the countryside.
Michelangelo
An imposing figure—gigantic, ruddy, and hairy—Michelangelo at first appears to be a terrifying monk, but he is, in fact, the Archangel Michael. He is, as one would expect from an angel, deeply good, but he’s not ethereal: he has real likes and dislikes, he has a good time vacationing on Mont-Saint-Michel, and he enjoys roaming the world in a burly human body.
The Inquisitor
The inquisitor is our narrator throughout the book, but we only slowly begin to learn his identity. He is a neglected younger son, driven to distinguish himself as a spy for the Inquisition. His story is the story of transformation through listening, learning, and observing: at first, he believes the children to be heretics; then, he believes them to be saints whom he’ll need to kill to perfect their martyrdom and officially canonize them; finally, he understands that their goodness is the complicated goodness of the world, and that their lives are worth more than his former principles or his ego.
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By Adam Gidwitz
