In the Blue Pike

The Blue Pike, a crowded inn at the turn of the sixteenth century, on an evening when Nuremberg patricians with an escort of mercenaries, Dominican monks and a band of strolling players all arrive at once — among the players Kuni, a pale young girl with a crippled leg, whose story it becomes, from that evening through the months that follow. Ebers found the medical papyrus that bears his name and dug in Egypt for years; here he leaves Egypt for Germany on the eve of the Reformation, and the inn is a cross-section of a world about to break. Forty-nine plates, from Dürer and Cranach to Munch, gather the era's roads, inns and ill-matched couples, the visual world of the Reformation that Ebers sets his tale within.