The Owl Killers

by Karen Maitland

First published 2009

Amazon

4.2(555)

England, 1321. In the struggling village of Ulewic, a community of independent religious women establishes a beguinage devoted to prayer, work and charity. Led by Servant Martha, the women become essential to villagers facing hunger, flood and illness, but their independence challenges both local authority and familiar ideas about how women should live.

Opposition gathers around the secretive Owl Masters, masked men who maintain power through intimidation, ritual and violence. When calamity and suspicious deaths feed accusations of witchcraft, the beguines must defend themselves against a community in which Christian devotion, older beliefs, class resentment and fear have become almost impossible to separate.