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Susanna Gregory: Doctor Matthew Bartholomew, Master of Medicine and Detection Jean Coakley Readers familiar with places where small minds rise to high positions should find themselves right at home in mid-fourteenth-century Cambridge University, where murder hastens promotion, tradition reigns supreme, and town and gown are at daggers drawn. It is an institution whose political and pedagogical rituals author Susanna Gregory (pseud.) knows intimately. A Cambridge Ph.D. with specialties in mammalian teeth and bones and a Fellow of one of its colleges since 1987, she has also written widely on castles , cathedrals, historic houses, seals, marine pollution, medical demographics , the cultural consequences of AIDS, and a variety of related historical and scientific topics. She has "always been interested in medieval architecture," she says, and "love[s] looking at old maps and working out how cities have changed and developed over the centuries."l This, coupled with her previous experience in a coroner's office and "as a police officer ... involved with identifying the odd body through forensic means,"2 adds an accuracy and richness of detail which makes her mysteries extraordinarily interesting and believable. Set during the Black Death and its aftermath, 1348-1353, Gregory's four "Chronicles of Matthew Bartholomew"-A Plague on Both Your Houses (1996), An Unholy Alliance (1996), A Bone of Contention (1997), and A Deadly Brew (1998)-recreate medieval Cambridge in microcosm. Beginning with A Plague on Both Your Houses, which sets the scene, introduces Gregory's dramatis personae, and establishes their motivations and frailties, each novel features a progression of carefully articulated subplots which contextualize contemporary personal, professional, institutional, ethical, and religious concerns. As a teacher, a physician, and above all a good man trying to lead a virtuous life while determining where he stands, Doctor Matthew Bartholomew is the logical protagonist to examine the questions at issue in this era of medical, institutional, and social change. A junior faculty member in minor orders teaching a marginalized discipline, accused more than once of heresy, and a townie to boot, he is caught up in a system where collegiality is at best a polite fiction and political intrigue a fine art. When greed and ambition metastasize into murder, jeopardizing the University's survival and threatening to reveal the skeletons in its closets, he is dragooned to discover the cause and dispense a cure. 85 86 The Detective as Historian Except for occasional forays to near-by Trumpington, Saffron Waldon, Denny Abbey, and the Fens, the action takes place mainly in Cambridge,3 focusing largely on the University's then endowed colleges4 and the less prestigious student lodging houses called "hostels" owned and/or managed by senior faculty as profit-making ventures. In order of their founding, these colleges are: Peterhouse (1280)-where Dr. Bartholomew began his education ; Michaelhouse (1324)-where he now teaches medicine and serves as reluctant detective in residence; Clare Hall (1325); King's Hall (1337); Pembroke Hall-called Valance Marie in the narratives after its foundress (1346); Gonville Hall (1348); Trinity Hall (1350); and Corpus Christi (1352)-founded by the local merchant guild and called Bene't College in the series.s Conceived as orderly venues for educating "non-monastic scholars , who were mostly secular clergy and at least in minor orders" (Crawley 2), in theology, civil and canon law, and the newly intellectualized practice of medicine, they quickly developed internal and external rivalries which erupted into violence at the slightest provocation. University hegemony over municipal decision-making intensified town-gown friction, as did scholars' lax punishment under canon law while townsmen faced the full rigor of the King's harsh justice for the same offenses. Complicating this already explosive mix was the plague, which originated in China and by 1346 had made its way inexorably across Asia Minor to Europe, carried ironically by European traders fleeing its ravages. Philip Ziegler quotes one contemporary chronicler's description of these refugees' fate in The Black Death: "In January of the year 1348 ... three galleys put in at Genoa, driven by a fierce wind from the East, horribly infected and laden with a variety of spices and other valuable goods. When the [Genoese saw] ... how suddenly and irremediably they infected other people, they were driven forth from that port by burning arrows and diverse engines of war; for no man dared touch them.... Thus, they were scattered from port to port." But by the time ... the Genoese authorities reacted, it was too late. The infection was ashore and nothing was to stop...

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