In Nomini... Book One: Bretagne is the first installment in a four-book series. In the Prologia, our story begins in the fourth quarter of the fifteenth century, when a young priest, Sebastiano, is roused from his slumber to hear the confession of an old hermit, Giovanni, in the mountains east of Rome. The hermit is near death, but finds it difficult to confess a life that he feels is justified in the eyes of God. Through the intercession of Anna Maria, a young goatherd of the region, a compromise is worked out between the two that allows the confession to take place. Thus the story of Giovanni begins to unfold almost a century earlier on the coast of northern France.

In the late-fourteenth century, in a small village in Bretagne (Brittany) in France, a monster was born to a peat-digger's wife. Two babies connected at the back of the shoulder, a sign of sin and extra-marital liaison. The mother dies in childbirth from severe hemorrhaging and the father is left to make atonement and sacrifice for his wife's sin. On a night in which the elements kept all indoors, he took the babies, crying from hunger and neglect, to the cliffs on the channel to the north. Once there, wielding an axe, he separated the two, kicking one into the savage surf of the channel far below, and returning with the other to raise as his own, if, of course, it survived.

He survived, with the help of heaven, and a young nursemaid of eleven, Jeanne, who had lost her own child to stillbirth. Jacq becomes the protagonist in a sweeping epic encompassing a turbulent time of schism, plague, and heresy. This is his story.