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Canterbury Tale

Charles Nicholl, 8 December 1988

Christopher Marlowe and Canterbury 
by William Urry, edited by Andrew Butcher.
Faber, 184 pp., £12.95, May 1988, 0 571 14566 3
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John Weever 
by E.A.J. Honigmann.
Manchester, 134 pp., £27.50, April 1987, 0 7190 2217 7
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Rare Sir William Davenant 
by Mary Edmond.
Manchester, 264 pp., £27.50, July 1987, 9780719022869
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... Kennett, who became a Catholic exile and missionary, and died a Benedictine monk in 1612, and Henry Jacob, who later founded one of the first Congregationalist Churches in England. Nearby lived a young Puritan called Robert Cushman, a grocer’s assistant. Many years later he returned from exile in Holland and was the prime mover in the hiring of the ship ...

On the Sixth Day

Charles Nicholl: Petrarch on the Move, 7 February 2019

Petrarch: Everywhere a Wanderer 
by Christopher Celenza.
Reaktion, 224 pp., £15.95, October 2017, 978 1 78023 838 8
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... against Fortune, as well Prosperous, as Adverse’ in the Elizabethan translation by Thomas Twyne); ‘invectives’ such as the anti-Aristotelian De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia (‘On His Own and Many Others’ Ignorance’) and the Contra medicum (‘Against the Doctor’, which identifies his opponent only as ‘a certain man of great ...

Nayled to the wow

Tom Shippey, 7 January 1993

The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer 
by Derek Pearsall.
Blackwell, 365 pp., £19.95, September 1992, 1 55786 205 2
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A Wyf ther was: Essays in Honour of Paule Mertens-Fonck 
edited by Juliette Dor.
University of Liège, 300 pp., June 1992, 2 87233 004 6
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Hochon’s Arrow: The Social Imagination of 14th-Century Texts 
by Paul Strohm.
Princeton, 205 pp., £27.50, November 1992, 0 691 06880 1
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... Merciless Parliament of 1388, from which Chaucer’s former boss Brembre went to the gallows and Thomas Usk, one of the few people in the period who did mention Chaucer as a poet, to the more dreadful fate of hanging, drawing and beheading – he changed sides (to Chaucer’s) too soon and too prominently. The effect of all this on Chaucer’s ...

Lachrymatics

Ferdinand Mount: British Weeping, 17 December 2015

Weeping Britannia: Portrait of a Nation in Tears 
by Thomas Dixon.
Oxford, 438 pp., £25, September 2015, 978 0 19 967605 7
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... is a slippery enterprise. At the end of his immensely readable and often puckish exploration, Thomas Dixon sighs, with reason, that ‘it is impossible to pin tears down.’ Dixon directs the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary University of London. Keats might have thought this rather like a Department for Unweaving the Rainbow. Dixon is ...

Grass Green Stockings

Eleanor Hubbard: A Spinster’s Accounts, 21 March 2013

The Business and Household Accounts of Joyce Jeffreys, Spinster of Hereford, 1638-48 
edited by Judith Spicksley.
Oxford, 413 pp., £90, March 2012, 978 0 19 726432 4
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... She even fell for sensational pamphlets now and then, including one about the extraordinary Henry Welby, 84, who lived for 44 years as a hermit on Grub Street without ever being seen by a soul, subsisting on gruel, salad and weak beer. She may have been intrigued by his unusual longevity. In 1646, perhaps feeling her own years, Jeffreys laid out 14d for ...

Outfoxing Hangman

Thomas Jones: David Mitchell, 11 May 2006

Black Swan Green 
by David Mitchell.
Sceptre, 371 pp., £16.99, May 2006, 0 340 82279 1
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... to bear. ‘Small children have many more perceptions than they have terms to translate them,’ Henry James wrote in his preface to the New York Edition of What Maisie Knew. ‘Their vision is at any moment much richer, their apprehension even constantly stronger, than their prompt, their at all producible, vocabulary.’ This is also true of not so small ...

It’s not the bus: it’s us

Thomas Sugrue: Stars, Stripes and Civil Rights, 20 November 2008

The Soiling of Old Glory: The Story of a Photograph that Shocked America 
by Louis Masur.
Bloomsbury US, 224 pp., $24.95, April 2008, 978 1 59691 364 6
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... rallied around it, but at the turn of the 20th century, the African Methodist Episcopal Bishop Henry McNeal Turner declared that ‘to the Negro the American flag is a dirty and contemptible rag.’ In the 1960s, Civil Rights demonstrators carried it again, as a reminder that they too had the right to be full American citizens. On 4 November more than ...

The Purchas’d Wave

Bernard Rudden: The history of London’s water supply, 22 July 2004

London's New River 
by Robert Ward.
Historical Publications, 248 pp., £17.95, October 2003, 0 948667 84 2
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... marches, music and a roll-call of the various craftsmen involved, written in bad verse by the poet Thomas Middleton. The reservoir was soon enlarged, and others built nearby. These served three purposes: by providing a large area of still water they allowed many impurities to settle to the bottom; they helped smooth out fluctuation in supply and demand; and ...

Diary

Ruth Padel: Singing Madrigals, 29 November 2007

... but were divided over which English one to choose. We sight-read a massive six-voice piece by Thomas Weelkes, ‘Thule, the Period of Cosmographie’, with its second part, ‘The Andalusian Merchant’. But it was too difficult; we rehearsed another by Weelkes instead. I wondered why ‘Thule’ was so hard. I sang it with the piano. I bought a CD. Most ...

What mattered to Erasmus

James McConica, 2 March 1989

Erasmus’s Annotations on the New Testament. The Gospels: Facsimile of the final Latin text with all earlier variants 
edited by Anne Reeve.
Duckworth, 284 pp., £35, March 1986, 9780715619902
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Erasmus’s Annotations on the New Testament: From Philologist to Theologian 
by Erika Rummel.
Toronto, 234 pp., £24.50, January 1987, 0 8020 5683 0
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A New Rabelais Bibliography: Editions of Rabelais before 1626 
by Stephen Rawles and M.A. Screech.
Droz, 691 pp.
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The Library of Robert Burton 
by Nicholas Kiessling.
Oxford Bibliographic Society, 433 pp., £25, May 1988, 0 901420 42 5
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... in particular make it possible to identify Burton’s circle of scholarly friends, among whom Thomas Hobbes was the most famous. Many others were famous in the history of early Oxford science: Henry Briggs, Thomas Lydyat, John Napier, Edmund Gunter. Almost three quarters of his ...

Family Fortunes

Helen Cooper: The upwardly mobile Pastons, 4 August 2005

Blood and Roses: The Paston Family in the 15th Century 
by Helen Castor.
Faber, 347 pp., £8.99, June 2005, 0 571 21671 4
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... with equal ruthlessness but more subtlety. One of the Pastons’ less attractive acquaintances, Thomas Daniel, got his foothold in Norfolk by promising his sister in marriage to the head of a local family and persuading him to sign over his land in trust in preparation for the marriage settlement, only to reveal that the girl was already married. Daniel ...

Forget that I exist

Susan Eilenberg: Mary Wollstonecraft, 30 November 2000

Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life 
by Janet Todd.
Weidenfeld, 516 pp., £25, April 2000, 0 297 84299 4
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... Blood) or refused to make room for her as a Platonic third within a passionate marriage (Henry Fuseli) or abandoned her with an out-of-wedlock child (Gilbert Imlay) or otherwise failed to value her with the intensity, constancy and perseverance she required. These disappointments made her bitterly unhappy. They did not stop her from carrying on with ...

Closing Time

Thomas Laqueur, 18 August 1994

How We Die 
by Sherwin Nuland.
Chatto, 278 pp., £15.99, May 1994, 0 7011 6169 8
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... of us, he insists, is a ‘messy business’. Contrary to what Sir William Osler or Dr Lewis Thomas might lead us to believe, death is ‘glutted with mental suffering and physical distress’. There was, he claims, ‘a nice Victorian reticence in denying the probability of a miserable prelude to mortality’ and he will disabuse us of our ...

Tush Ye Shall Not Die

John Bossy, 23 February 1995

William Tyndale: A Biography 
by David Daniell.
Yale, 429 pp., £19.95, September 1994, 0 300 06132 3
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The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice and Subjectivity 
by Debora Kuller Shuger.
California, 297 pp., £32, December 1994, 0 520 08480 2
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... his translations smuggled into England. He had an in-and-out relationship with the government of Henry VIII, and a controversy in print with Thomas More. In May 1535, when the government of the Emperor Charles V was persecuting Protestants in the Netherlands, he was betrayed to the authorities and, despite an attempt by ...

Street-Wise

Richard Altick, 29 October 1987

George Scharf’s London: Sketches and Watercolours of a Changing City, 1820-50 
by Peter Jackson.
Murray, 154 pp., £14.95, June 1987, 0 7195 4379 7
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... of the late Regency and early Victorian London that Scharf knew were left by artists, notably Thomas Hosmer Shepherd and Thomas Shotter Boys, whose eyes were fixed on the city’s architectural splendours, old and new. As with Canaletto’s paintings, one has the feeling that Shepherd and Boys ignored the people ...

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