Notes and Queries articles from December 1996

Notes and Queries archives from December 1996

The place-name Thursley.
December 1, 1996... In the most recent and authoritative survey of place-names referring to sites of pagan religious worship in Anglo-Saxon England, Gelling identified a corpus of some forty-three names, of which eleven are derived from Thunor, the god of...

Two Latin excerpts (Sacramentarium Gregorianum, and Isidore, Sententiae) with Old English translation.
December 1, 1996... Cambridge University Library MS Ii. 1.33,(1) written in the second half of the twelfth century, possibly at Ely,(2) is an important witness for the continuing interest in Old English religious prose one century after the Norman Conquest. Its...

The provenance of the Rushworth Mercian gloss.
December 1, 1996... 'The mere fact that we cannot prove Rushworth Mercian to be East or West, from West Yorkshire or from Herefordshire, shows how ignorant we are of Old English dialectology.'(1) Despite the scepticism of this remark, there yet seem grounds on...

The Stockholm 'Golden Gospels' in seventeenth-century Spain.
December 1, 1996... Stockholm, Kungliga Bibliotek, MS A. 135 is the famous 'Codex Aureus', an eighth-century gospel book from Christ Church, Canterbury.(1) It has had an eventful history. Looted by Vikings in the ninth century, it was bought back by ealdorman...

A little-known member of the royal family of crusader Jerusalem in William of Malmesbury 'Gesta Regum Anglorum.'
December 1, 1996... In Book III of his Gesta Regum Anglorum William of Malmesbury includes a fairly extensive section dealing with the First Crusade and its aftermath. Grabois has shown that this section can be regarded as consisting of four separate parts,...

Peintunge and Schadewe in 'Ancrene Wisse' Part 4.
December 1, 1996... In Part 4 of Ancrene Wisse, the author departs at one point from the main line of his argument to give some additional advice on meditation on the Four Last Things: Efter ower sunnen, hwen-se ghe thenchedh of belle wa ant of heoueriches...

Three early Tudor verse texts.
December 1, 1996... Robert Barnes: birth of a Protestant martyr ROBERT BARNES (1495-1540) was one of the leaders of the Protestant Reformation in England, and his public execution in 1540 cemented his fame as a proponent of Lutheran ideals. Barnes had a very...

A contemporary's view of Jane Austen.
December 1, 1996... Missing from David Gilson's magnificent A Bibliography of Jane Austen (Oxford, 1982) are appreciative comments by Sarah Harriet Burney (1772-1844), the youngest daughter of Dr Charles Burney, musicologist, and half-sister to the more famous...

Wordsworth and the 'Westmorland Advertiser.' (William Wordsworth)
December 1, 1996... Although Wordsworth's dealings with such national newspapers as the Morning Post and the Courier have been the subject of scholarly investigation for some time, it is remarkable that no attention has been paid to his relations with his local...

'Some Uncertain Notice': the hermit of 'Tintern Abbey.'
December 1, 1996... The hermit of 'Tintern Abbey' is something of an incongruous presence. He is part of an imaginative surmise which reads the ... wreaths of smoke Sent up in silence from among the trees... as giving ... some uncertain notice, as might...

Lord Byron - unrecorded autograph poems.
December 1, 1996... This note draws attention to five unrecorded autograph poems by Lord Byron discovered in the Jersey Papers held in the Greater London Record Office. Four of the poems are in a commonplace book kept by Sarah Sophia Fane, Fifth Countess of...

Ruskin's 'Fors Clavigera' of October 1873: an unpublished letter from Carlyle to Tyndall. (John Tyndall)
December 1, 1996... Ruskin's dislike of John Tyndall, a disagreement most extensively expressed in the pages of Deucalion (1875-83), has received some attention elsewhere.(1) But a manuscript letter from the Tyndall papers in the Royal Institution of Great Britain...

A previously unpublished letter of Jane Morris.
December 1, 1996... The following is a hitherto unpublished letter by Jane Morris (1839-1914), wife of William Morris (1834-96) March 3: [1882] KELMSCOTT HOUSE, UPPER MALL, HAMMERSMITH. London(1) My dear Mrs Macdonald(2) Rather more than a week ago a...

Conrad items in the Dent Archive in North Carolina. (Joseph Conrad)
December 1, 1996... When the London publishing house of J. M. Dent and Sons was sold by the Dent family in the late 1970s, the family retained possession of the company's archives. These were searched for letters by famous authors like Joseph Conrad, Virginia...

A fictional source for the falling tower in John Meade Falkner's 'The Nebuly Coat.'
December 1, 1996... Though John Meade Falkner in The Nebuly Coat (1903) drew on accounts of the collapse in 1861 of Chichester Cathedral's central tower and spire in his description of the fateful and climactic collapse of the tower of St Sepulchre's at the...

T.E. Hulme's quotations from Milton and Ireton. (John Milton; Henry Ireton)
December 1, 1996... Between 11 November 1915 and 2 March 1916, T. E. Hulme contributed a series of 'War Notes' to the New Age, in which he considered recent events and topical questions of political theory. Hulme's writings have been collected and annotated by...

From 'Shenandoah': overlooked reviews of and poems by Eliot, Faulkner, Stevens, Hemingway, Graves, Spender, and others. (T.S. Eliot; William Faulkner; Wallace Stevens; Ernest Hemingway; Robert Graves; Stephen Spender)
December 1, 1996... The story of the rise to prominence of Shenandoah, the Washington and Lee University Review, published in Lexington, Virginia, is told in Andrew J. Kappel's article, 'Ezra Pound, Thomas Carter, and the Making of an American Literary Magazine',...

Stylometry.
December 1, 1996... With the availability of smaller, cheaper, and more powerful computers together with more sophisticated statistical and computing techniques, stylometry as a method of deducing the authorship of disputed works has increasingly attracted the...

Wisdom, Authority and Grammar in the Seventh Century: Decoding Virgilius Maro Grammaticus.
December 1, 1996... 'A message concealed by a parody wrapped up in a grammar.' That is Dr Law's Churchillian verdict on the Epitomae and Epistolae of Virgilius Maro Grammaticus. She is at her best on the parodic elements; no one has ever failed to see them, but...

Images of Sanctity in Eddius Stephanus' Life of Bishop Wilfrid, An Early English Saint's Life.
December 1, 1996... This study is an attempt to uncover Stephanus' agenda and aims in his Life of Wilfrid and to reconcile them with what can be inferred of the saint's own set of goals and ideals. It is thus a parallel investigation of internal and external...

The Editing of Old English: Papers from the 1990 Manchester Conference.
December 1, 1996... Two books with the title The Editing of Old English were published in 1994, this one and a collection of essays by me (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). Neither the editors of this volume nor I had any idea we were duplicating titles, and I regret any...

The 'Laterculus Malalianus' and the School of Archbishop Theodore.
December 1, 1996... The distinguished school of insular Latin centred on Cambridge has been much concerned recently with seventh-century Canterbury, at which Theodore of Tarsus arrived as archbishop in 669. The main fruit of this interest has been Michael...

The Making of Textual Culture: 'Grammatica' and Literary Theory, 350-1100.
December 1, 1996... The last ten or so years have seen a very welcome expansion of interest in two hitherto largely neglected areas of medieval studies: linguistic theory, principally in the form of grammar or grammatica, the bedrock of the seven liberal arts, and...

The Primordial Metaphor.
December 1, 1996... This is an impressive and moving book. Written in the eighties, it was the culminating credo of a series of studies by the historian of philosophy, Ernesto Grassi. Though Grassi is served well by his publishers, the Medieval and Renaissance...

A Second Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Food and Drink: Production and Distribution.
December 1, 1996... This book is a complement to Hagen's first volume on Anglo-Saxon food, A Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Food: Processing and Consumption, published in 1992. As is evident from the title, the book has two main sections: section one deals with the...

Anglo-Norman Medicine, vol. 1, Roger Frugard's Chirurgia and the Practica brevis of Platearius.
December 1, 1996... Medieval England produced vast amounts of medical writings in both English and Anglo-Norman and yet there is no doubt that scholarly interest is squarely and disproportionately focused on writings in English. Hunt has already done more than...

Vox Mystica: Essays on Medieval Mysticism in Honor of Professor Valerie M. Lagorio.
December 1, 1996... Valerie Lagorio is perhaps best known as the founder and editor of the Fourteenth-Century English Mystics Newsletter, now Mystics Quarterly (much wider in its scope but unfortunately minus its very useful bibliography). Her later...

The Devil's Rights and the Redemption in the Literature of Medieval England.
December 1, 1996... In order to appreciate this book it is necessary to get one's head around four ideas, which the author habitually refers to in shorthand: (1) the devil's rights (alias 'the abuse-of-power' theory); (2) the 'ransom' theory; (3) the deception of...

Kindly Similitude: Marriage and Family in Piers Plowman.
December 1, 1996... For all that the last piece of advice that his Dreamer receives is 'Lerne to love', Langland is not usually thought of as a poet of love and marriage. Apart from a few earthy comments about Malkin's maidenhead, Mede's wantonness and those who...

The Tale of Alerion.
December 1, 1996... Machaut's Dit de l'alerion now joins most of his other major poems in a Modern English translation, which will doubtless contribute to the current reassessment of this important and influential figure in later medieval French literature. The...

Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition.
December 1, 1996... The title and subtitle of this book locate it within the two main strands of scholarship to which it subscribes. The title goes for a slightly vague-sounding version of the popular New Historical triplet. The subtitle states what the book is...

The Summoner's Tale.
December 1, 1996... The Variorum Chaucer is among important Middle English editorial projects now in progress, and the appearance of each volume is welcome. J. F. Plummer's notes are full, as is appropriate for a variorum edition. In the words of Mr Grosvenor's [?...

Women, The Book and the Godly: Selected Proceedings of the St. Hilda's Conference, 1993, vol. 1.
December 1, 1996... This volume is the first of three selections of papers from the 1993 Oxford conference on Women and the Book in the Middle Ages (the other two cover secular literature and art). The fifteen short papers it includes have a broadly feminist...

Matrons and Marginal Women in Medieval Society.
December 1, 1996... This collection of essays, the outcome of a conference held at The Pennsylvania State University in 1991, focuses on the integration of women into medieval society, aiming to address both matrons, women fulfilling authorized roles and upheld as...

Counting and Recounting: Measuring Inner and Outer Space in the Renaissance.
December 1, 1996... Drawing attention to the importance of sight, size, perspective, and measurement in John Webster's plays, Eloisa Paganelli quotes Flamineo's comment in The White Devil that 'so perfect shall be thy happinesse, that as men at Sea thinke land and...

Interpretation and Theology in Spenser.
December 1, 1996... Rather than offering a uniform and ultimately triumphant interpretation of the potency of English Protestantism, the successive narrative engagements of The Faerie Queene invite the reader to consider how its religious implications are to be...

The Elizabethan Theatre XIII. Papers Given at the International Conference on Elizabethan Theatre Held at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, in July 1989.
December 1, 1996... The publication of proceedings of a conference are always a very mixed bag of things. This volume, the proceedings of the thirteenth international conference on Elizabethan theatre at the University of Waterloo, is no exception. Volumes like...

Shakespeare the Historian.
December 1, 1996... Paola Pugliatti's book is a scholarly, well-researched, and wide-ranging account of Shakespeare's practice as a writer of histories and its relation to wider Tudor theories and principles of historiography. The book has a slightly unpromising...

Shakespeare's Garter Plays: Edward III to Merry Wives of Windsor.
December 1, 1996... This short but lively book offers the intriguing theory that a single dramatic continuum may be created by considering together Richard II, 1 and 2 Henry IV, Henry V, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and the anonymous Reign of King Edward the Third,...

The Play of Paradox: Stage and Sermon in Renaissance England.
December 1, 1996... 'Once again it seems possible to talk of religious belief as a primary mode of intent', Crockett states militantly, not as the 'encoded language of political subjection'. He gives an invigorating account of how paradox is fore-grounded in late...

A George Herbert Companion.
December 1, 1996... The Preface to this volume optimistically suggests that it will be useful to a wide readership: undergraduate students, postgraduate students, and generalist teachers. It begins promisingly with a brief but informative biography of Herbert....

Mary, Lady Chudleigh: The Poems and Prose of Mary, Lady Chudleigh.
December 1, 1996... 'Wife and Servant are the same' wrote Mary, Lady Chudleigh in her poem 'To the Ladies', first printed in 1703 and often anthologized since. But Chudleigh was less interested in attacking the institution of marriage than in exploring how to...

The Illustration of Robinson Crusoe: 1719-1920.
December 1, 1996... 'None ever wished it longer,' said Johnson of Paradise Lost, but that is just what one wishes of Professor Blewett's account of the illustrations to Robinson Crusoe over two centuries. Even the terminal date is a matter for regret. What about...

To Settle the Succession of the State: Literature and Politics, 1678-1750.
December 1, 1996... Studies of literature and history, in late-Stuart and early-Hanoverian England abound, many of them distinguished, and some genuinely accessible to undergraduates and the general reader. Professor Downie is thus far from having the field to...

Oliver Goldsmith Revisited.
December 1, 1996... In the eighteenth century Goldsmith is an unavoidable figure, whether your interest is the essay, the novel, the drama, or late Augustan poetry. Professor Dixon also puts him on the map as a biographer. Oliver Goldsmith Revisited will prove a...

The New Bath Guide.
December 1, 1996... Christopher Anstey's New Bath Guide was first published late in 1766, and immediately delighted Horace Walpole, who thought it combined the 'easiest wit, the most genuine humour, the most inoffensive satire, the happiest parodies, the most...

The Life of Harriot Stuart, Written by Herself.
December 1, 1996... Susan Howard's copious introduction to The Life of Harriot Stuart creates a number of expectations that the text then fails to fulfil. This is hardly the editor's fault, but one is left with the distinct impression that other aspects of...

The Prison Diary of John Horne Tooke.
December 1, 1996... In the summer and autumn of 1794, John Horne Tooke, clergyman, Etonian, and radical, was imprisoned in the Tower of London for just over twenty-seven weeks. Along with a number of other men, some known to him and some not, Tooke was eventually...

Wordsworth's Pope: A Study in Literary Historiography.
December 1, 1996... This is neither a study of Wordsworth's use of Popean diction nor a history of Romanticism. Robert J. Griffin's central preoccupation is with the widely accepted 'narrative of literary history' by which Romanticism emerged in reaction to Pope -...

The Letters of George Henry Lewes, 2 vols.
December 1, 1996... 'I am delighted with what you write about my husband's books. Imagine a man as objectively absorbed as it is possible to be in the work he is doing for its own sake, quite free from oblique glances at minor results, knowing nothing of jealousy,...

Victorian Women Poets: Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti.
December 1, 1996... Joseph Bristow's collection usefully makes available a selection from the large amount of fine recent criticism of the Victorian women poets. Unlike other New Casebooks, this one does not supersede or complement an earlier Casebook: until their...

Victorian Identities: Social and Cultural Formations in Nineteenth-Century Literature.
December 1, 1996... This is a mixed bag of papers delivered at the University of Luton. The names of Adorno, Althusser, Benjamin, Cixous, Derrida, Eagleton, Foucault, Hill, Hobsbawm, Irigaray, Lukacs are invoked and papers predictably demonstrate a Victorian...

Tales of the Wars of Montrose.
December 1, 1996... Momentum is now gathering for a reappraisal of one of the key figures of the literary circles of Edinburgh during the age of Scott: buffoon, 'Ettrick Shepherd', 'Mountain Bard', Hogg was these (and many more) to those contemporaries who knew...

Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest: The First Production.
December 1, 1996... The difficulty with this book is its regal design. Open, it is almost two feet across and very heavy; holding it in one hand causes acute pain from finger-tip to elbow. Its opulently clear print, thick pages, and profuse illustrations can be...

E.M. Forster.
December 1, 1996... E. M. Forster does not fit easily into a series which is organized round a central concern with modern critical theory and its effect on current critical practice. His work, as the editor observes, has generated only a limited amount of new...

'Talking Proper': The Rise of Accent as Social Symbol.
December 1, 1996... Before the standardization of written and, then, spoken English, accent was a neutral designator of one's regional origins. Even in the mid-eighteenth century, while written English was being standardized, pronunciation and accent remained, in...

A Language Suppressed: The Pronunciation of the Scots Language in the 18th Century.
December 1, 1996... A language suppressed is the first comprehensive and detailed description of the pronunciation of English in eighteenth-century Scotland. Drawing on contemporary sources reflecting a range of attitudes to Scots English and a range of abilities...

AN ARCHAISM IN JOHN KEATS'S 'ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE'.(Brief Article)
December 1, 1996... NEAR the end of the 'Ode to a Nightingale', lines 73-4 read: Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf. Here, if 'deceiving' means 'cheating,' the turn of thought is impossible: in one line, the...