Dark as Night

Authors: Lars Holger Holm & Marie Jansen

Marie Jansen is a Swedish-Norwegian scholar of Anglo-Saxon and Latin. Among her many projects, the comparative linguistic analyses of unpublished manuscripts in the Vatican library are particularly noteworthy. She is an award-winning author of books written in Italian and a simultaneous interpreter, working for a host of prestigious companies and governmental institutions across Europe. She lives in Rome, where she continues to dedicate herself to the extensive and intensive study of its fabulous history.

This is a novel on the Vatican, William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe and the School of Night, based on research results and historical data.

The story kicks off in May 1982, when Beatrice Algheri — a young Latinist from Cambridge University doing research work in the Vatican manuscript reading room — by coincidence lays her hands on an officially unknown 11^th century manuscript: De Gestis Romanorum (The Deeds of the Romans). Together with an unexpected companion, the Iranian diplomat Fahrad Ghazeli, she feels compelled to undertake a journey which initially leads them to Padua, secretly guided there by Wolfgang Heiden, a German professor of Oriental languages. Here the haunting hunch grows into a quest for a truth so astounding that it could potentially rock the entire Shakespearean scholar community to its core. And as though that were not enough, the couple is also suspected of having stolen the protocols pertaining to Giordano Bruno’s trial and subsequent condemnation to the stakes from the incumbent pope’s private cabinet in the top-secret subterranean archives of the Vatican.

Text in English