The Inquisitor’s Tale

Use this activity to engage all types of learners, while requiring that they refer to and incorporate details from the text over the course of the activity.

“Illuminated Pages”

In this activity, students will demonstrate their understanding of theme in The Inquisitor’s Tale by creating an illuminated-manuscript-style illustration of a scene that conveys theme.

Many illustrations in The Inquisitor’s Tale are in a style common in books in the Middle Ages. These books were called “illuminated manuscripts.” In this project, you will make a page of illuminated manuscript, using text from the novel and illustrations that you create yourself to convey an important thematic idea from the book.

1. Learn About Illuminated Manuscripts: Do some online research into what illuminated manuscripts are and what they look like. Here are two excellent sources:

• This online exhibition from the Fitzwilliam Museum
• This visual introduction from The Collector

2. Choose a Theme: Decide which thematic idea from The Inquisitor’s Tale your pages will convey. You can choose a theme from this list, or you can come up with a theme idea of your own:

• The Power of Difference: Differences among humans make us stronger and should be appreciated, not feared.
• Storytelling as Unity: One of the important functions of telling stories is to create shared experiences and understandings that bring us together.
• Reckoning with Complexity: The world and its people are complex mixtures of good and evil, and our lives are richer when we can embrace this complexity.

3. Choose a Scene: Choose a scene from the story that supports your chosen theme. There will be several good scenes to choose from, but you are looking for one where the narrative action you will illustrate—not just the dialogue or exposition—conveys theme.

4. Create Your Page: Create a page of illuminated manuscript that meets the following criteria:

• Contains text from The Inquisitor’s Tale: Your page should use just enough of the original text to convey what is happening in the scene. Be sure to copy the original text accurately!
• Contains illustrations in the style of a Medieval illustrated manuscript. This may be one large illustration or several smaller illustrations. These visual elements should convey the action of the scene you have chosen.

Teaching Suggestion: Students will need access to computers for the online research in step 1 of this project unless you can make time in class to present these resources. As students will be creating images themselves and borrowing text from the novel, access to computers for the other steps of this project is completely optional. Students might do the work entirely by hand or use software to draw illustrations and assemble their pages if they have computer access. You might ask them to post their work to a class website or display it in class, as exposure to their classmates’ work will enhance their understanding of both the book’s themes and the variety of evidence that can be used to support the theme.

Differentiation Suggestion: Although most of the steps in this project can be completed quickly, students with attentional and executive function learning differences may be intimidated by the number of steps. You might consider presenting these students with the steps one at a time and only revealing the next step as each previous step is accomplished.

English learners, students with dyslexia, and those with learning differences may struggle to efficiently sort through text to find relevant scenes (step 3). A reasonable accommodation in this situation might be allowing these students to work on step 3 with a partner or in a small group. Students with visual impairments may be unable to complete the assignment as written: An alternative assignment might be to choose a theme and then describe two or three scenes in the novel that support this theme.

Paired Text Extension:

As both The Beatryce Prophecy and The Mad Wolf’s Daughter take place in the Middle Ages, this activity can be completed with either or both texts.

Teaching Suggestion: If you choose to have students complete this activity for both The Inquisitor’s Tale and another text, you might consider asking that they choose the same theme for both texts and create side-by-side pages as a way to demonstrate how the events of very different stories can support similar themes. In the case of The Mad Wolf’s Daughter, the selection of potential themes will need to be limited to Reckoning with Complexity.