Father Alberto and the Flying Girl by Timothy X Atack review – a fable of medieval madness

A parish priest cares for the mentally afflicted in an absorbing tale that combines antic comedy with serious moral themesIn 1474, in a fictional location in southern Europe, Father Alberto arrives from Jormel Abbey, where he has failed in his ambition to become a manuscript illuminator at their renowned scriptorium. He is the new parish priest of the villages of Hem and Long, whose congregants are generally “piebald and errant”, but not the most peculiar or refractory of his flock. Among his duties is to tend to the mentally afflicted of the convent of Saint Particular, patron saint of the unloved, who are confined in cells for the greater part of the year. The fearsome Abbess and the silent Sister Lorenza introduce Alberto to his charges using the Index, an annotated manuscript of the inmates whose strange minds are “filled o’er the brim”. They include Pieter Mastiff, a raging, blaspheming carpenter; Selina, compulsively naked and unhappily sexual; Carin Marina, a