Setting

The setting for Year of Wonders is an English village situated on the edge of the great White Peak in the Derbyshire Peak District, an area of rolling hills and sheer limestone cliffs found in central England. It is a small, seventeenth-century rural English village of cottages, farms, grazing fields, a mill, a church and rectory, and Bradford Hall, the home of the town’s wealthy family. The villagers, most of who have never ventured beyond the confines of the village boundaries, are simple uneducated people who make their living as miners, shepherds, cobblers, and weavers.

The religious life of the villagers’ centers around the church, they attend services every Sunday and follow the lead of their minister, but the religious climate in the village is shifting. The current rector in 1665, Michael Mompellion, is a minister with the Church of England but prior to the arrival of Mompellion, the village minister was a Puritan and many of the Puritan attitudes remain in place.