Publisher's Synopsis
Its the year 1553. From the Italian village of Ancona, young Benjamin and his tutor, the Portuguese anatomist and physician Amatus Lusitanus - both ot them Jews coerced to convert to Christianity by the Holy Inquisition - are summoned to Rome by the renowned artist Michelangelo Buonarroti for a secret meeting. There, at the hub of the Catholic Church, both are caught up in a plot that will take Benjamin to France and what is now Switzerland, passing through the intellectual ferment of the Sorbonne, the College Royal in Paris, the Gymnasium in Strasbourg and the rigorous regime in Protestant Geneva, ruled by John Calvin, in search of information that could change the history of medicine. Rescuing the tradition of the historical novel, Pedro Puech merges in "THE TWO CHAMBERS" fictional and historical characters as Calvin, Michelangelo and Lusitanus, reconstituting the academic and political environment in Europe of the 16th century, the tension and turbulence caused by the inflamed theological discussions and the persecution by Catholics and Protestants against followers of doctrines that dared to question, among other dogmas, the Holy Trinity, as the Unitarians and arrians. In this scenario, a confused Benjamin runs risks and lives a journey of fear, but also of knowledge, during which he will face the vanity taken to extremes by figures such as the doctor of Pope Julius III, Realdo Colombo, the intransigence and convictions in the person of Michael Servetus fervent Christian who rejected the Trinity, believing in God as a single entity, which is why he was called - like others - "Unitarian"; and see again the face of religious intolerance, watching a process similar to the one that led his father to burn at the stake by the Inquisition for refusing to abandon their religion in favor of Christianity, in Portugal. Puech portrays in his book the two sides of Renaissance Europe, where humanism, artistic and scientific revolutions lived with religious intolerance and totalitarian regimes, both secular and theocratic rulers. Its protagonist guides the reader through this confusing period, tracing the path up to the origins of a great scientific discovery and helping to understand some of its most iconic characters, such as the anatomist, physician, theologian and astrologer, Michael Servetus.
