Step into the Elizabethan world of the extraordinary Giordano Bruno: a philosopher, a magician, a professor, a spy, an initiate in a pan-European secret society. In this vivid novel, meet kings and queens, court alchemists, great playwrights, scoundrels, and come to know the greatest minds of the Western European Renaissance. Engage with the esoteric spiritual practices of the art of memory, visualization, and mysticism. Enter into the secret societies that sought to bring about a new culture and a new society. Award-winning, The Ash Wednesday Supper brings this remarkable era to life and illuminates how to live in integrity in our own. Winner of the Hopwood Award for Fiction "Enchanting and original." --John Michell, author of The View Over Atlantis and many other books. "This is a deeply serious and complicated novel at the level of ideas and demands a similar commitment from the reader. But the reader who persists finds himself immersed in a period and world of rapidly increasing fascinations, both human and private, and political and theological. The end came with all the force of fate, and for the writer to make history appear inevitable once again in fiction suggests the kind of obsession and constancy to the subject out of which comes the kind of writing we all care about most--or should." --Alan Cheuse, National Public Radio "Ash Wednesday Supper offers us a glimpse into a way of understanding that eludes us today--in this novel, Versluis reveals the intellect universalized as a mode of being for our time. Thoroughly recommended." --James Cowan, author of Fleeing Herod and The Deposition, winner of the Australian Gold Medal for Literature