The Cloister and the Hearth

Gerard, a gifted young illuminator in fifteenth-century Holland, falls in love with Margaret and is separated from her by his own family's ambitions for him — a separation that sends him wandering across Europe through war, plague, robbery, and the printing press's earliest days, in a story built, unknown to its hero, around the real parents of Erasmus of Rotterdam.

Charles Reade published The Cloister and the Hearth in 1861 after years spent researching medieval European life in unusual depth for a Victorian novelist — its dense, closely observed detail of the period's manners, trades, and travel was widely admired even by critics who found the rest of Reade's prolific output uneven, and it remains the novel on which his reputation chiefly rests.

This Bibliomancer edition presents the complete text.