Brother Cadfael is the fictional main character in a series of historical murder mysteries written by the linguist-scholar Edith Pargeter under the name "Ellis Peters". The character of Cadfael himself is a Welsh Benedictine monk living at Shrewsbury Abbey, in western England, at the end of the 12th century.
As a character, Cadfael is an unusual monk, having spent half of his life on the Crusades; this experience gives him an array of talents and...
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Brother Cadfael is the fictional main character in a series of historical murder mysteries written by the linguist-scholar Edith Pargeter under the name "Ellis Peters". The character of Cadfael himself is a Welsh Benedictine monk living at Shrewsbury Abbey, in western England, at the end of the 12th century.
As a character, Cadfael is an unusual monk, having spent half of his life on the Crusades; this experience gives him an array of talents and skills useful in monastic life. He is a skillful observer of human nature, a talented herbalist, which he learned in the Holy Lands and while a prisoner of the Muslims. He is also inquisitive by nature, energetic, and has an innate, although modern, sense of justice and fair-play. Abbots call upon him as a medical examiner, detective, doctor, and diplomat. His worldly knowledge, although useful, gets him in trouble with the more doctrinaire characters of the series, and the seeming contradiction between the secular and the spiritual worlds...
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