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The Inquisition Was Not Exclusively Dominican: Franciscans Also Investigated

The Inquisition Was Not Exclusively Dominican: Franciscans Also Investigated

Leave a Comment / May 28, 2026

There are scenes in A Tale of Paris & Paris: Echoes of Troy that unsettle readers who arrive with their assumptions intact. The inquisitors who descend upon Cortona in 1450 are not the black-and-white Dominicans of legend, the Domini canes, the Hounds of God, the scholastic terrors immortalized in every gothic retelling of the medieval […]

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The Cosmological Thread: Souls Finding Each Other Across Lifetimes

The Cosmological Thread: Souls Finding Each Other Across Lifetimes

Leave a Comment / May 28, 2026

There is a thread that runs through everything I write. It does not announce itself. It does not appear in chapter summaries or back-cover copy. But it is there in every novel, in every narrator’s voice, in every reunion between characters who meet for what the plot calls the first time and recognize each other

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The Pen Name and the Alter Ego: Who Is Edmond Thornfield?

The Pen Name and the Alter Ego: Who Is Edmond Thornfield?

1 Comment / May 28, 2026

There is a moment known to every writer who has ever chosen a nom de plume when the invented name becomes more real than the given one. I cannot say when that moment arrived for me. I know only that it has. The name Edmond Thornfield was not assembled at random. Each of its two

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Cortona, 1450 AD | Building the World of A Tale of Paris & Paris: Echoes of Troy

Building the World of A Tale of Paris & Paris: Echoes of Troy | Cortona, 1450 AD

2 Comments / May 27, 2026

In my visits to Cortona, I always enter the citadel at the beginning of Via Nazionale, still known by the Cortonesi as Via di Ruga Piana, as it has been for centuries, the only leveled street in the whole city. The first time I did, the moment I laid my hands upon the remaining stones

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Brother Elias, Sinner

Brother Elias, Sinner, the Man Who Built San Francesco of Cortona

Leave a Comment / May 26, 2026

There is a grave irony embedded in the Church of San Francesco of Cortona. The man who built it, who brought its most precious relic from Constantinople, who wished with all his heart to be buried there—and was—that man died outside the order that bore his master’s name, expelled, excommunicated, and unredeemed by any Franciscan

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BOOK REVIEW

Asterios and the Labyrinth | Reviewed by Leonard Smuts for Readers’ Favorite

Leave a Comment / May 26, 2026

Set on the island of Crete during the Minoan Bronze Age some 3,500 years ago, Asterios and the Labyrinth (Mythos of Knossos) by Edmond Thornfield is a tale of gods, kings, heroes, revolts, and magical powers. The Minoans, a wealthy people known for their farming and commerce, experienced some turbulence following the death of King

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PART TWO | The Heroes at the Gate: Assembling the Hunters of Khalydōn

PART TWO | The Heroes at the Gate: Assembling the Hunters of Khalydōn

Leave a Comment / May 25, 2026

In the world of Atalanta of the Wild, worthy men do not simply walk into a king’s megaron. They are announced. A court herald strikes his staff upon the stone floor, and the name, lineage, and fame of the arriving hero ring out across the hall before the man himself has taken three steps into

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PART ONE | No Clock for The Calydonian Boar Hunt: What the Ancient Sources Tell Us—and What They Don't

PART ONE | No Clock for The Calydonian Boar Hunt: What the Ancient Sources Tell Us—and What They Don’t

Leave a Comment / May 25, 2026

Every novelist who works with ancient mythology eventually arrives at the same uncomfortable discovery: the sources disagree, they fall silent, or they compress into a few lines of poetry what would have taken days or weeks of human effort to accomplish. The Calydonian Boar Hunt presented me with those three problems, and the most instructive

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Who Is Artemis in Atalanta of the Wild?

Who Is Artemis in Atalanta of the Wild?

Leave a Comment / May 25, 2026

Of all the gods of the Greek pantheon, Artemis is the one most commonly misread. Popular imagination has settled on her as a figure of cold severity, the virgin huntress, remote and punishing, more comfortable among animals than among people, quick to anger and slow to forgive. There is evidence for this reading in the

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Six Novels That Taught Me About Men

Six Novels That Taught Me About Men

Leave a Comment / May 24, 2026

There is a particular dishonesty that runs through a great deal of fiction written by and about men, a tendency to grant male characters the external architecture of complexity without the internal substance of it. Men in such novels have ambitions, rivalries, codes of honor, and moments of violence, but their inner lives remain largely

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