A compact scrapbook of sixteenth-century Europe, L'Oeuvre au noir will delight historians of this period. Marguerite Yourcenar's vision encompasses the whole changing scene of human activity, with its violence and horror, simplicity and intrigue, the ignorance and superstition of the poor severely contrasted with the hypocrisy of the ecclesiastical and new merchant classes, at a time when the development of travel and trade was leading the way to a reawakening of the inquiring mind.

All this has been condensed with considerable skill to a novel form which, if classical in conception, is of a style no longer found in present-day novels. With ordered precision L'Oeuvre au noir is divided into three parts, the subdivisions of which correspond to stages in the travels of a fictional hero, Zénon, an alchemist-philosopher from Bruges, modelled on the lives of Erasmus and Colet among others, in his quest for "the truth...