I recently tried to solve a medieval religious mystery. I didn't want to detect a murderer lurking in the cloister -- I'll leave that to The Name of the Rose and the Brother Cadfael books.
Rather, my quest was to explain how one almost forgotten Italian thinker seemingly tapped into a mind-boggling underworld of ancient mystical speculations, in a way that defies all our assumptions about the narrow and blinkered nature of the European Middle Ages.
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