The Woman Who Cast Bells
A Novel of Fourteenth-Century England

About this book:

In the soot-blackened foundry of medieval York, Master Thomas de Grantham lies dead in his bed, leaving behind a half-cast bell for the Minster, a debt that will swallow his workshop whole, and a widow who knows more about bronze than any man in the guild. Joanna has spent two decades at her husband's elbow—calculating proportions, judging the scream of molten metal, coaxing sweet voices from copper and tin—while the Church insists a woman's touch would curdle the bronze. Now, with the Archbishop's seal on the commission and bailiffs circling like crows, she makes a desperate choice: she cuts her hair, pulls on Thomas's grease-stained coat, and steps into his boots to finish the tenor bell herself.

But the foundry holds secrets older than the Roman wall beneath its floor. The tin hasn't arrived, the charcoal is wet, and a half-witted apprentice watches her with eyes that see too much. Across the river, the Minster's great tower looms—its current bells flawed, its dean impatient, its archdeacon sniffing for heresy in the smoke. As Joanna fights to master a craft forbidden to her sex, she discovers Thomas kept his own dangerous ledger: payments to men who dug too deep, a bell cast for a banned cult, and a fracture in the metal that sings of treason. Every strike of her hammer echoes with the question no founder dares ask aloud—what if the voice she pulls from the fire is not the Church's, but her own?

Rich with the reek of charcoal and horse-dung, the clang of calipers, and the terrible beauty of liquid fire poured into clay, *The Woman Who Cast Bells* is a novel of craft and courage, of a woman forging her place in a world that would silence her—and of the bell that will either save her or shatter everything she's built.