Bad historical novelists assume that people always live at the spearhead of their age. Good ones, like Francesca Kay in her fourth book, know that even when the world spins ‘faster than a weathervane in a gale’, most hearts and minds will tarry in the past, behind events. The Book of Days unfolds in a village north of Oxford in 1546 and 1547, as the unnamed old king dies and the accession of his child heir brings another round of ‘newfanglery’ in faith. The ‘commotion time’ returns with all its frightening convulsions: now, ‘what was truth one year is heresy the next’.

It would be tempting to treat this book as a Catholic pushback against Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy

Despite the distant thunder of Protestant Reformation (neither word appears here), our narrator – like her kinsfolk – still inhabits a late-medieval domain. Here, ritual and custom measure out ‘the heartbeat of our lives’. In English churches you often find that the loveliest Gothic carving dates from the early 16th century – on the eve of its extinction. Wisely and beautifully, Kay commemorates this twilight flowering and the feelings that fed it.

In previous novels, she has written sumptuously about art (An Equal Stillness) and belief (The Translation of the Bones). Those realms join in this account by her protagonist Alice – the second wife of the stiff, secretive local squire – of the year that sees her lord die and the gusting ‘crosswinds’ of religious strife aggravate domestic rifts. Alice knows that ‘the world will not stay still’. Yet she loves the old ways, as church rites and feasts track nature’s ‘ever-turning wheel’ and the passage of the seasons. Those ceremonies keep the dead alive in requiem prayers – lost ones, such as her infant daughter, Catherine: ‘For as long as there is somebody to call you by your name, you are not forgotten.’ Grief, mourning and remembrance, for tiny Catherine above all, anchor her narrative. In the church, meanwhile, ‘authority comes from centuries of practice, not from changing fashions’.

It would be tempting, if glib, to treat The Book of Days as a Catholic pushback against the Reform-friendly tilt of Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy. (Richard, Alice’s ailing husband, glancingly remarks of Cromwell that ‘the greediest of the wolves is dead’.) Certainly the radical interloper Henry Martyn – a brash young Lincoln’s Inn lawyer who snares the affections of Agnes, Richard’s daughter by his first wife – strikes Alice as a devious opportunist. The book’s noblest folk, such as the kindly veteran priest Joselin, stand up eloquently for simple people, ‘whose trust lies in things immemorial’ – images, prayers and pilgrimages. But Richard has been no saint. He scares his household into chilly obedience, spends lavishly on a fancy tomb to perpetuate his glory and fences off common land for a deer park. We grasp why the seeds of change take root.

Alice’s faith, however, rests on aesthetics rather than theology. Kay lends her a sensuous gift for evoking ecclesiastical art, from fan-vaulting that ‘flows like honey or like skeins of silk’ to the newly installed glass whose biblical scenes transform windows into sunlit ‘walls of floating colour’. Then there’s the monumental family tomb, which depicts not just peaceful effigies but bony, writhing cadavers, ‘like sticks piled up for kindling’. Ekphrasis is the term for this literary alchemy of image into word and Kay practises it with flamboyant relish. Nature, too, draws Alice’s delighted eye, as the countryside turns frigid then torrid, soaked then parched. For her, ‘the reason I can bear the years ahead is that the seasons change’.

Sooner or later people change too. Widowed, Alice grows close to the musically talented chantry priest, William Clare. Bitter, orphaned Agnes scapegoats her stepmother and falls for the sinister Martyn. ‘A new tide of righteousness’ flows through the village and its people’s hearts, with dire results. Iconoclasts aim their rocks at England’s visual culture: ‘Words shall be our coinage now, in place of pictures.’ At least that post-Reformation sovereignty of the word still yields novels as richly imagined and skilfully crafted as this.