The Inquisitor’s Tale

Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2016

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Chapter 8

Chapters 9-17

Chapters 18-27

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Themes

The Power of Difference

All three of the magical children are, in one way or another, outsiders, oppressed by the dominant culture of the world around them. Jeanne is a peasant and a girl; William is an illegitimate child and biracial; Jacob is Jewish. They are all members of groups whom the dominant medieval (and modern) cultures consider different, or outside of the norm. But, as William points out when he makes his lists of great people who aren’t white Christian men, “the norm” is a much more complicated thing than those who uphold it would like us to believe.

Not being a part of the most powerful groups in the medieval French society Gidwitz describes—which is to say, not being white, Christian, rich, and/or male—is also a source of strength for the children. They can often see things that the people in power cannot see, and use the powerful people’s blindness against them—for instance, when Jeanne and her parents are able to trick the knights who are hunting her into searching through a dunghill because “peasants do like filth, don’t they?” (22).

As the children become friends, they must overcome their own fear of each other’s differences, too. While they do not necessarily agree about everything, they learn to respect each other’s viewpoints and to love each other both in spite of, and because of, what makes them different.

The Inquisitor’s Tale is also interested in the unreliability of first impressions. For instance, the reversal in which Michelangelo is revealed to have been working for the good all along, while the supposedly holy Abbot Hubert is a bloodthirsty zealot, demonstrates that prejudice (in its simplest sense as “pre-judgment”) both has major consequences and is difficult to shake.

The Inquisitor’s Tale suggests that difference carries with it both difficulties and special powers—and that we shun, stereotype, and underestimate people who are different from us at our peril.

Storytelling as Unity

The Inquisitor’s Tale is—like the Canterbury Tales and the Decameron, among other famous medieval narratives—told in the form of short stories through the eyes and voices of different storytellers. These multiple perspectives help to support the book’s big ideas about community, humanity, and joviality.

As the story goes on, more and more people gather around the table where the narrator is soliciting bits and pieces of the children’s story. Storytelling is shown to be both a unifying human activity and a way of overcoming difference. The various speakers question, harangue, insult, and praise each other, getting more and more involved as the plot thickens. Together, they weave a tapestry of story, making their many individual threads of narrative and opinion into one big shared picture.

This, the book suggests, is what stories can do for humans. These ideas reflect in the structure of the book itself, which doesn’t just interweave its ideas, plots, and characters, but tells the story of the telling of a story. Both structurally and thematically, The Inquisitor’s Tale shows how stories can work to create togetherness, cohesion, and shared pleasure out of separate human perspectives.

Reckoning with Complexity

If there’s one thing The Inquisitor’s Tale insists upon, it’s that human life is complicated, painful, incomprehensible, and deeply beautiful all at once.

The story grapples with big questions about the existence of evil in the world—questions that were central to medieval thought. The book’s debates about whether God creates evil or merely allows it to exist, references to the book of Job (in which an innocent man asks God why he’s suffering so much, and God replies that no human can understand His ways, so don’t look for clear answers), and tales of unspeakable cruelty to “outsiders” are all deeply rooted in medieval history. They remain unsolved problems to this day.

The book is also interested in the world’s beauty, and how our love for what we know to be good can motivate us to study and understand as far as we can. Every character in The Inquisitor’s Tale must go through a course of study, coming to terms with the complexity of the world and questioning their own systems of thought (more or less fruitfully). We first see this through the saintly children themselves, who must overcome their fear and mistrust of each other’s differences to become loving friends. The inquisitor, whose beliefs go through a slow conversion over the course of the book, demonstrates the difficulty of dealing with imperfection in himself and in others. Even the villainous Blanche de Castile is given an opportunity to change her mind—though it’s not totally clear whether she’s going to take it. Reckoning with a world bigger than oneself, the book suggests, is both essential and difficult: it’s a choice one must make, not something that happens naturally.

The story’s interest in the Talmud, the Hebrew holy texts that interpret and expand on the Torah, is a strong thread in this theme. The Talmudic stories that the book refers to suggest a wider attitude of scholarly curiosity toward what is difficult or confusing. One may not ever understand the world as God might, but one can absolutely do one’s best to reckon with complexity on human terms.