With a story set in the fifteenth century featuring oppressed Christians, it is impossible to avoid talking about the Roman Catholic Church. In fact, they were the ones doing the oppressing. In a sense, it would be easy for me to paint the Catholic Church as pure evil—the persecutors of God’s people, the Mary-worshipers, the harlot of Babylon.

But Heretics of Piedmont would be very edgy, boring, and frankly, a bad novel if I went down that road. I certainly wouldn’t want to read a book like that. Representing the Roman Church with a straw man might seem like the way to travel, but I would be doing my readers a great disservice. I could have used scare quotes around the word church when speaking about Catholics, leaned into conspiracy theories about Jesuits (even though they didn’t exist yet), and resorted to a cheap caricature of what the medieval Catholic Church was.