When Justin escapes the comfortable medieval estate where his overbearing father has kept him sheltered his whole life, hot in pursuit of the servant girl he has fallen in love with, he finds himself caught up in a social order torn between extremes of wealth and poverty, feudal hierarchy and peasant revolts, ecclesiastical corruption and monastic piety, gross injustices and boundless mercy. The mid-fourteenth century was a time not only of burgeoning towns, majestic cathedrals, and nascent universities, but also of debauchery and violence, the Black Death and Inquisition, torture and ordeals. In his encounters with noblemen and peasants, alchemists and hermits, monks and heretics, knights and revolutionaries, prostitutes and miscreants from the medieval underworld, Justin comes to realize that he is entirely on his own as he confronts his personal moral failings and struggles to find faith in a world where God no longer seems to exist.