Tidewater Trip

"weary with wrongdoing"

I am not quite sure what exactly I anticipated with the word retirement, but it wasn’t the rather breathless activity that leaves me once again facing blog morning with the sole option of a sort of journalistic “Hail, Mary.”  I have to fly off to London later today, and there are various other non-negotiables standing between me and Newark Airport.  Perhaps saying I have to go to England is stretching the truth a bit, since my only goal is a fancy dinner party at my old college in Oxford; but I have arrived at the point of life at which I tend to seize opportunities lest they never appear again.  This means that retirement is not always less busy than my old professional life, but is often more fun.

            Last week Joan and I took a trip to Richmond, and everything about it was fun.  The ostensible purpose of the trip was my engagement to give a lecture to the Tuckahoe Woman’s Club in their baronial clubhouse. My topic was “The Language of History and the History of Language”—or was it vice versa?  Anyway the experience was highly enjoyable at least to the lecturer, though it turned out to be only one of several pleasurable episodes of our three-day visit.  For we had the good fortune to be billeted not in a hotel but with our friends the Moxleys, who seemed determined to prove that southern hospitality, though proverbial, is far more than a proverb.

One high point was a leisurely visit to Williamsburg, which included an excellent lunch at the home of President and Mrs. Reveley on the campus of the College of William and Mary.  As a post-luncheon treat Mrs. Reveley had arranged for us a private tour of the old campus, conducted by a highly knowledgeable graduate student in colonial American history.  At Princeton (founded in 1746) we like to think we’re old, but William and Mary is older.  Furthermore the old stuff there is both more copious and more interesting than what we have here.  Old Virginia was run by fox-hunting Anglicans.  Princeton was the brainchild of chilblained Dissenters.  Such distinctions are not without spiritual consequence.  Of course later on there was a decisive event, called the Civil War, that pretty well flattened--literally or fiscally--every institution of higher learning in the south.  Wars have consequences too.

             I had been to Williamsburg before, and even had lectured at William and Mary, but somehow I was unaware of the Muscarelle Museum of Art.  We spent the hour before lunch visiting the museum, which was hosting a knock-out show entitled “Michaelangelo Sacred and Profane: Masterpiece Drawings from the Casa Buonarroti”.   The visiting treasures will have one more American stop—at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, beginning April 21^st.  See them if you can.  Most of Michaelangelo’s drawings are quite famous, and I had seen many of them before, though only in reproduction.  Seeing the real things, en masse and intelligently mounted, was an unanticipated thrill.

            The “Sacred and Profane” bit is the sort of title you revert to when trying to impose some spurious unity upon a lecture, a show, or an academic course.  It meant that some of the drawings were of religious subjects, and some were not.  There were, for example, a fair number of architectural drawings.  I am an architectural illiterate, but if it’s Michaelangelo you must at least try.  The emphatic place in the exhibition had been reserved for a fine, large Madonna and Child; but I doubt that I am alone in placing the well-known drawing of Cleopatra at the top of my private list.  Shakespeare’s Enobarbus might have been looking at this drawing when he uttered his judgment on the Egyptian Queen:  “Age cannot wither her nor custom stale her infinite variety.”  Swinburne, who did gaze upon the drawing during his Italian tour, said something a little different: “Beautiful always beyond desire and cruel beyond words; fairer than heaven and more terrible than hell; pale with pride and weary with wrongdoing.”  You can almost always count on the Victorians.  Weary with wrongdoing.  What a great idea!

            We now know that Michaelangelo himself probably shared it.  Admirers had oooed and aaahed over this drawing of Cleopatra for more than four centuries when a sharp-eyed expert noticed (in 1988) that there seemed to be something drawn on its backside.  This was by no means easy to discern, as the obverse of the drawing had been backed with reinforcing paper.  Removal of this backing paper, conducted by conservators with the care of a bomb-removal squad, revealed another view of Cleopatra—with staring eyes and anguished, tortured face. The meaning of this reversal, according to the excellent catalogue essay of John T. Spike, “must have been to suggest to the beholder that the opposite face of mortal beauty is the danger of submitting to sensual pleasure and, ultimately, destruction.”  I love it when Renaissance geniuses show their true medieval colors.

The Dorian-Graying of Cleopatra

Philological Trench

Richard Trench, poet

This week I am faced with the challenge of posting a blog at virtually the same moment that I am delivering a lecture in Richmond, Virginia.  From the technological point out view it should be managed easily enough, but under the circumstances my subject cannot be a topical one that comes to mind on Tuesday night.  So let me instead introduce you to a great book: Richard Chevenix Trench’s On the Study of Words (1851).

            Friends who view my library sometimes comment on the high proportion of old books to new, or note that even most of the “new” books I have, such as my growing collection of the Library of America, are the works of “old” authors.  Guilty as charged, but the library is not a monument to a medievalist’s scorn for modernity.  Some of my best friends were born in the twentieth century!  Four of my best grandchildren were born in the twenty-first!  But shelf-space is limited, and one’s lifetime short.  One has to prioritize.

            Inertia is the default tendency to stay put physically.  Parochialism is the default tendency to stay put culturally.  We all need a home base, and I am as inert and parochial as most people, and more so than many.  Yet I am bemused that so many friends who would not be content to limit their geographical, musical or culinary horizons to their native county so seldom read “old” books.

            I am not referring here to “the classics”, broadly understood.  Homer, Boethius, Dante, Shakespeare, Fielding, Tolstoy, James—such writers as these, along with their natural peers and the happy few who will join them in every generation, will I hope remain indispensable reading forever.  But for that very reason their books will continue to be available and easy of access in a profusion of editions, often cheap, not to mention free on-line and in general libraries.  In fact developments in printing technology and the growth of the electronic library have already rendered the truly unavailable out-of-print book a rarity; in the future it will be virtually non-existent. 

            The “old” books I have in mind are of a different sort.  If you are looking for a good pizza, you may find one three blocks away.  But you must know that the chances are good that there is a better one somewhere else in the state, and probably one better than that somewhere in the fifty states.  With today’s gas prices you cannot drive to Seattle for a pizza, but you can apply the principle to books.  On almost any subject you want to read about—or at least that I want to read about—the best books are more likely to have been written in the last two centuries than in the last two weeks.  In fact there are few categories to which the nice phrase golden oldie is more relevant than that of books.

Richard Chevenix Trench, prelate; he took on a little weight and an extra name

    
         Trench was an Anglican clergyman of the mid-nineteenth century.  He eventually became the Archbishop of Dublin in the Church of Ireland.  That was his day job, and his wonderful book On the Study of Words had its origins in lectures given to seminarians.  Trench believed that words were “the guardians of thoughts,” and that the English lexicon, properly understood from an historical perspective, was in itself a nearly complete syllabus of truths human and divine.  Some of his individual lectures were entitled “On the Poetry in Words,” “On the Morality in Words,” and “On the History in Words.”  No reader can stick a thumb into this philological pie without coming up with a succulent plumb.  Words that one has used all one's life—such as cheat, guinea, pagan, sham, tawdry, along with a thousand more—gain a new vivacity in Trench’s offhand remarks.  Who knew that ringleader was once a term of respect and a genuine compliment?   

            Trench was a pretty good poet.  He is sometimes called “a second-rate imitator of Wordsworth”, which is unfair, since he was a first-rate imitator.  (Indeed the words first-rate and second-rate deserve an essay by Trench.  Are silver medals admired only in Olympic competition?)  He wrote other fine books, and compiled a delightful Select glossary of English words used formerly in senses different from their present.  He was also a linguistic activist, and it is in this role that he should gain the everlasting admiration of every native speaker of the English language.

A lean, mean lexicographical machine 

           

For Trench was one of the movers and shakers behind the greatest lexicographical enterprise of the nineteenth century, the fabulous New English Dictionary (usually called the Oxford English Dictionary or simply the OED).  One of the historians of this enterprise is my friend and colleague Hans Aarsleff, whose great Study of Language in England, 1780-1860, having been published before most of my readers were born, is now approaching golden oldie status itself.

            Trench was too busy with his important ecclesiastical duties to serve as a principal editor of the dictionary he helped inspire.  That work was undertaken in successive generations principally by James Murray, Henry Bradley, and William Craigie, and continues today with electronic bells and whistles.  But when they start doing baseball cards for philologists, an early cardboard portrait of Archbishop Trench should be worth a pretty penny.  If you can’t account for the use of the word pretty there, look it up!

 James Murray at OEDHQ, early 20th century (the Honus Wagner card)

I [Doubt It], Claudius

Every now and then one is prodded to think hard about something one has previously thought about hardly at all.  This can be a somewhat disconcerting experience.  I find myself in the throes of thinking about autobiography.  Don’t worry.  I have no intention of writing one.  Even were I so inclined I would shrink before the menacing fact that it turns out that I don’t know what autobiography is.  Nor is it particularly comforting that very few other people seem to know either.

            A friend seeking a favor called me up a few weeks ago.  She is a heading a project, now in an advanced stage, to bring out a Cambridge Companion to Autobiography.  You may know the “Cambridge Companions,” which are collections of essays offering for the general reader an introduction to an author, field, or topic.  There are so many of them by now that we need A Cambridge Companion to Cambridge Companions.  I have contributed to one of them myself: the companion to C. S. Lewis.  As I chose to receive the miserable guerdon for my task in books rather than money—I think the option was £100 cash or £200 worth of books--I now own among others the companions to Ovid, Rabelais, Cervantes, and Tolstoy.  So I know, too, that the quality of the essays is variable.

            Well, as the copy deadline for Autobiography approached, the person (identity to me unknown) who had agreed to write an essay on “European Autobiography before 1600” or some such title had found it necessary to withdraw.  Could I, on an emergency basis, help out an old pal by whipping up pronto six thousand words on “Early European Autobiography”.  A piece of cake, I thought, I mean how hard can it be?  You have Augustine, you have Guibert of Nogent and Peter Abelard in the twelfth century, you’ve got Dante and Petrarch in the fourteenth.  By then you’re home free.  After all I know the female mystical autobiographers from Julian of Norwich to Teresa of Avila like the back of my hand, if you will forgive the indelicacy.  So I said yes.

            But then my personal motto is “Sin in haste, repent at leisure”.  The first downer was that Augustine was already dealt with.  He is so important that he already has a chapter on his own—written by somebody else.  Medieval autobiography without Augustine is sort of like King Lear minus Cordelia and the Fool, but I soldiered on.  I started reading theories of autobiography.  Yes, there are such things, beaucoup thereof, mainly by Frenchmen, of course.  In one of them (The Autobiographical Pact, by Philippe Lejeune) I find the following comprehensive definition.  An autobiography is “a retrospective narrative in prose which a real person creates of his life, placing the emphasis on his individual lived experience, and particularly on the history of his personality.”  In another, I find the emphasis put on a “contract” between autobiographer and reader, a contract demanding “unambiguous veracity” and “full disclosure in essential matters.”  
          

 Spiritual finger-pointing

            That made me feel better about losing Augustine’s Confessions, since by these definitions it cannot be an autobiography.  Augustine had no word for “personality” in the modern sense, because the thing it means had not yet made its public appearance in the European consciousness.  As my late, great teacher D. W. Robertson used to say,“you cannot play hopscotch until the rules for hopscotch have been invented.”  And as for the “complete disclosure” part, do you really believe, as literal truth, the last two paragraphs of the eighth book  in which Augustine for no particular reason sits down beneath a fig tree with a copy of Paul’s epistles on his lap, hears sing-song infantile voices instructing him to “pick it up and read it”, and opens the book at random to find before him the service reading for the first Sunday in Advent, the “New Year’s Day” of the Christian calendar?  If so, you will have no trouble crediting the literal autobiographical truth of pp. 316-319 of Petrarch’s celebrated “Letter on the Ascent of Mont Ventoux”, in which the flabby poet, having huffed and puffed his way to the top of the highest mountain in Provence, whips out his handy pocket edition of Augustine’s Confessions, opens it at random, and, well, you know…?

 Francis Petrarch: a man with a big pocket, though not a deep one

Not a single one of the early writers I am dealing with abides by the “autobiographical pact”.  They all subscribe to a canon of strict veracity, but one founded in the useful paradox that fiction is often truer than “what really happened”.  If you can throw in a bit of what we would be inclined to call plagiarism, it only stiffens the truth.  More modern writers who have tried this have come up with mixed appraisals.  Most people, including me, think that Gertrude Stein was rather brilliant in calling her memoirs The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas—her lifelong companion.  But as I pointed out in The Anti-Communist Manifestos, fictive autobiography in the contemporary period is likely to be judged on political grounds.  Rigoberta Menchú, an indigenous Guatemalan activist, winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize for Peace, was easily forgiven for making up various important details of her autobiography I, Rigoberta Menchú.  On the other hand James Frey, author of a memoir entitled A Million Little Pieces, was effectively rendered an un-person by Oprah in a scathing interrogation on live TV; she was irate at having promoted his somewhat fictional autobiography unawares on an earlier program.

            I’ll leave you to ponder that one.  I’m too busy pondering the eleventh-century monk Otloh of Saint Emmeram, who relates in full autobiographical frankness numerous encounters with the corporeal devil.

Shaggy Blog Story

            I once had a teacher who was inordinately fond of a small repertory of witticisms.  About once a week she would survey the classroom in simulated consternation and say: “Hummmn.  Not everybody is here today.  There are some people missing.  Who are they, I wonder?...If you are absent, please raise your hand.”  This was supposed to be amusing, and for the first two or three dozen times it was, sort of.  We soon enough learned to fight corn with corn by all raising our hands.

            Yet this harmless little farce exemplified a recurrent and perplexing problem that does from time to time appear in life: by what means does one communicate with the incommunicado?  I have had a certain number of email communications from occasional readers of the blog in which the sender tells me that he or she is encountering technical difficulty in summoning the weekly posts from outer cyberspace to the actual computer screen.  All that appears is the post’s title.  This news has presented me with a dilemma.  I am reluctant to admit that in fact the title is usually the best part, after which it is usually all downhill, so that they are not really missing all that much. 

            The Berkeleyan philosophical problem is of course engaging.  If you write the Great American Novel, show it to no one, and upon your demise leave it abandoned in a trunk in the attic of a house later razed to enlarge the municipal parking lot, is it still the Great American Novel?  This is a fascinating poser, but in and of itself perhaps insufficient to make the mare go.  So at the practical level I must now offer this advice to all those who are not here today.  It might be a browser problem.  My tired old Firefox has begun to balk at all sorts of things.  Blogger, being googlish, seems to respond more robustly to Google Chrome.  A cathartic flush of the old cache—nasty as it may sound--will also, I hope, prove helpful.

            I myself have taken counsel of my website guru, which brings me at last to the ostensible topic of this post: namely, my resurrected website, johnvfleming.com redivivus.  In the later stages of the production of my book The Anti-Communist Manifestos, which appeared in 2009, I launched this site at the behest of the marketing mavens of W. W. Norton and Co.  The website was, in effect, a gimmick for hawking the book.   Since the book itself was about Commies without the dot, there was a certain mystical symmetry to the enterprise.  The launching of the website was but one feature of a wide-bore commercial campaign.  My publishers also sought my aid in placing a review in what their little form called “your home-town newspaper”.  I was, however, unsuccessful in my attempt to solicit the cooperation of the Baxter Bulletin of Mountain Home, Arkansas.

            As you know, history repeats itself.   That is one of comparatively few reassuring things about history.  I shall fairly soon (July) have another Norton book appearing—The Dark Side of the Enlightenment.  The marketing mavens, a migratory species, have reappeared.  Hence my web guru, Beth Morgan, has re-animated johnvfleming.com, mounting thereon some new information about the new book.  Though the pictorial matter has the same old author, there is a new book jacket.  Limited progress is preferable to no progress at all.  The new posting includes some rash promises made by me.  I there declare it as my intention to add a few mini-essays about the subject matter of The Dark Side of the Enlightenment, and about the process of book publishing generally, in the foreseeable future.  What I don’t say is that the execution of my good intentions will depend upon my ability to remaster Dreamweaver, the web-design software that allows the ignorant and the amateur to create an illusion of knowledge and professionalism.  It’s been so long since I last used it that I can no longer remember even the first steps.  Maybe it will turn out to be like riding a bicycle—supposedly you never forget how to ride a bicycle—but I somehow doubt it.

            

Foul Papers

There are certain necessary and recurrent tasks that are so onerous and unpleasant that they can be accomplished only by the application of external physical duress or the nearly supernatural engagement of will power.  In general, at least in my life, these have to do with cleaning up messes of one kind or another.  I absolutely hate tidying my study, for example.  My view is that if a house must look lived in to be livable, a workplace must look worked in to be workable. This theory, which aims to elevate slovenliness to the rank of the virtues, is unfortunately effective only to a limited degree.  All too soon the books and papers on the desk become so many and so miscellaneous as to form a kind of haystack in which one’s actual “work” of the moment plays the inglorious role of needle.

            Gutter-cleaning is another periodic purgatory.  Though nearly a third of our trees have been blown down by the huge winds of recent years, you would think we lived in the heart of a deciduous forest from the state of the drainpipes.  Over the years I have bought every patented “gutter-guard” device on the market.  They always work perfectly in the ads, but they somehow fail miserably on the actual gutters.  The only solution, painful and slow, is a bloguiste on a ladder, moving very slowly around the periphery of the whole house with incrementally scraped knuckles.

            Yet gutter-cleaning is less awful than desk-tidying in one important regard.  I am not personally responsible for creating the gutter mess.  To be forced to face the results of one’s own iniquity always has a special awfulnessness about it.  What all this is building up to is this: I have just completed a fortnight of torment reading and correcting the proof sheets of a four hundred page book in the process of publication. 

            As we look back on printing history we are inclined to regard Gutenberg’s great advances in creating movable type in terms of an increased capacity for production and distribution.  It took a long time to copy out a book in handwriting.  It took a bit longer to set one up in type, but once that was done you could then print off a hundred of them, or a thousand, in the time it would take to make a second manuscript.  But the early printers rarely talked about that huge and obvious advantage.  What they tended to brag about was that it was now possible to guarantee the integrity of a text because it had been read and corrected in proof by the author or editor.  Every book, in theory, had the authority of a holograph.

            But what was a great relief for a publisher might be an equally great anxiety for an author.  The “printer’s error” is, after all, a great convenience for a writer, as its invocation might plausibly shield him from the consequences of his own folly.  That is why for a long time editors actually made authors sign the corrected sheets.  I haven’t experienced that intimidating ritual in a while.  That’s probably because most printing these days involves an electronic technology in which a computer file is transformed directly into print.  Under these circumstances there are no more “printer’s errors”.  There are only author’s or editor’s errors.  And the number of them that you can rack up in four hundred pages is pretty discouraging.

            There is a technical bibliographic term beloved of graduate students in English: foul papers.   The term says it all.  Foul papers are the really messed up, crossed out, and scribbled over bundles of verbal protoplasm that were the germs of some of Shaespeare’s plays.  Once, in what I must regard as the good old days, I received from a Belgian printing house the proof sheets of a fairly long article in which the word the appeared as thq two hundred and twelve times.  Circling every one of those suckers with a red pencil gave me a considerable feeling of accomplishment.  There is no such cheap grace in finding twenty-six tabulated pages or errors in a book set directly from the computer disk submitted!

Foul Papers

            The English word proof has now wandered a fair distance from its original meaning, which still exists is some proverbial expressions often used but seldom understood, such as “The exception proves the rule” or “The proof of the pudding is in the eating.”  The main challenge of proof-reading, apart from the constant danger of sudden death by terminal boredom, is that the human eye struggles to see not what is there, but what it knows ought to be there.  And if in the first place you wrote the text being eyeballed, you are fatally certain of what ought to be there.  Your eyes tend to approve some platonic version of what you think you wrote rather than what you actually wrote.  That’s why you missed it the first time.

            The only thing that allows my blog posts even a spurious façade of typographical accuracy is Joan’s eagle eye.  She has just earned yet another oak leaf cluster on her heavily laden marital Croix de Guerre by proofing the equivalent of a hundred and twenty-five blog posts back-to-back.  A masochistic friend, Eli Schwartz, likewise read the whole “first-pass” book.  The slightly scary thing is that several glaring errors appeared uniquely in each of the three catalogues of error.  Eli alone noted a passage in which I have Louis XIV, who died in 1715, presiding over certain events of the 1730s!.  But then, in the immortal words of some typographical aphorist of Renaissance, “No book is completed until Error hath crept in and affixed his sly Imprimatur”.

           

            

Resigned to the Resignation

 

 Papal refuseniks: Benedict XVI checks out the tomb of Celestin V

As a long-time friend and admirer of the great dantista Robert Hollander, and a sometime apprentice in the fabulous summer seminars he has conducted in a thirteenth-century Tuscan castle, I have learned to sing along with the chorus of Dantolators for whom the poet can do no wrong—and I mean none at all.  Even Homer may nod, and for all his greatness my guy, Geoffrey Chaucer, published some fairly dubious stuff, such as the following account of the failure of medicine to save the dying Arcite:

                        Hym gayneth neither, for to gete his lif,

                        Vomyt upward, ne downward laxatif.

But I am required to believe that Dante never errs, that every line is spun gold, and every idea platinum.

            But as Milton’s Satan says, “The mind is its own place.”  And I have to tell you from that undisclosed location that I think there is some—not much, but some--pretty dumb stuff in the Divine Comedy.  There!  I said it!  Dante and his guide Virgil are barely through the famous gate of Hell before we get a real lollapalooza.  There in Hell’s waiting room, so to speak, are the Trimmers, the morally inert, the lukewarms, the neither fish nor fowl, the spiritual Thyatyrans of the ages. These folk are being stung by wasps and hornets.  Their mingled blood and tears drip down to attract stinking worms around their feet.  Not nice.  Dante gives us only one representative human member of these tormented sadsacks.  He recognizes “the shade of him who, through cowardice, made the great refusal [gran rifiuto].”

            Learned annotators explain that this has to be the shade of Pope Celestin V, the emaciated old man who resigned the papacy in 1294 less than a year after accepting it.  Yesterday I saw strings of interviews with people, mainly distraught, lamenting  the announced retirement of the current pope.  Two of them actually brought up Celestin V, whose name I had never before heard mentioned in half a century of loyal viewing.  I am sure these people got it from Dante, also the attitude.  Both of them were steaming mad at the pope.

            Well, not me.  I admire him.  But then I also admire Celestin V.  Celestin V was anything but a coward.  He was an octogenarian holy hermit, and it didn’t take him long to conclude that the chair of Peter was, in that age, no place for a religious person.  The cardinals agreed; they didn’t elect another one for quite a while.

            I am not a Roman Catholic, but I have had a special reason—I’ll come to it in a minute—to follow the career of Benedict XVI.  Hence I am aware that he has often been criticized as a hide-bound traditionalist trapped in yesterday’s moral theology.  Well, he has just struck a powerful blow for modernity.  The idea that the pope is a spiritual monarch who must hold up his orb in his palsied hand until dementia or prostate cancer finally carries him off lacks theological warrant, common sense, or simple Christian charity.

            Recently, when the Archbishop of Canterbury resigned and went on to become the head of a Cambridge college, I regarded it as an episode in an upward trajectory.  But of course I am a college professor, which is what the pope also was so many years ago.  That’s why I knew him before many of you did.  I knew him as Professor Joseph Ratzinger, the author of a brilliant book* about St. Bonaventure’s theology of history.  This is one of those books that—granting a preliminary interest in its admittedly arcane subject matter—simply knocks you off your feet.  There are only a few books the reading of which actually changes the direction of a scholar’s work.  For me, this was such a book.  Without it I hardly would have stuck my toe into the subject of Franciscan studies.

            I had no idea who Ratzinger was, of course.  I didn’t particularly want to know.  One of the joys of academic study is encountering the disembodied minds of other people a thousand miles or a thousand years away, completely independent of personal or biographical speculation.  He had been pope for two or three years before I tumbled to the fact it was the same guy.

 Dante checks out the tomb of Boniface VIII

          Dante didn’t really know squat about Celestin V.  He was simply furious that Boniface VIII, who he thought was a really bad guy, was able to leap into the breach.  So I’ll forgive his little poetical hissy-fit.  But whatever else resigning the papacy might be, it can hardly be an emblem of “cowardice” [viltade].  I wish Professor Ratzinger even longer life and good health, and I shall hope, selfishly, for another dynamite book.

*Geschichtstheologie des heiligen Bonaventura (1959); English translation The Theology of History in Saint Bonaventure (1971)

           

"A Bloody Tyrant and a Homicide"

            KING RICHARD III

 Before

After

The latest news in medieval history appears on the front pages of our daily newspapers so infrequently that I can hardly let pass without comment this week’s truly sensational bulletin that a team of medieval archaeologists at the University of Leicester in England have convincingly identified the skeletal remains of King Richard III buried beneath a municipal parking lot.  This is an extraordinary historical discovery, and a stunning illustration of the powers of modern scholarly methods to achieve results beyond the reach of earlier generations.  So, let’s hear it for the Leicester medievalists!

            From this medievalist what you will hear is his usual eccentric meditation, which involves the vagaries of history and literature.  In the first place I am deeply gratified, as an historian of Franciscan culture, that the bones were found in conjunction with the rediscovery of the actual foundations of the long obliterated Minorite friary in Leicester.  The neighborhood was called “Gray Friars” from time immemorial, but nobody knew exactly where the buildings had been.   Nothing can have been much more politically unpopular than the mutilated body of a deposed monarch; but ever faithful in their exercise of the “corporal works of mercy” (the last of which is the burial of the dead) the friars at Leicester did not shrink from the task.  So the Order of Friars Minor, too, deserves its “shout out,” as the latest vulgarity puts it.

            The literary history of King Richard III is yet more fascinating.  Richard died in the bloody finale of the Wars of the Roses, the Battle of Bosworth Field on August 22, 1485.  He was the last of the Plantagenet monarchs of England.  Henry Tudor, who defeated him and who ascended to the throne as King Henry VII, though he had cobbled together a wobbly dynastic claim, was actually a usurper.  But history is generally written by the winners, and the winners did a real number on poor old Richard III.  Some of the main outlines of the Black Legend of King Richard had been sketched by his enemies even in his lifetime.  A physical abnormality (curvature of the spine, or scoliosis), which left him with the unflattering nickname “Crookback”, is glaringly evident in the skeletal remains.  But it was his supposed moral degeneracy that William Shakespeare has made forever vivid.

            Since the Immortal Bard is, well, the Immortal Bard, it may seem churlish of me to point out that he was also a Tudor propagandist.   I say this without suggestion of censure.  If you were not a Tudor propagandist in the reign of the Virgin Queen, you would have been most foolhardy to write a play on an English historical subject.  Still, one of the most salient features of Shakespeare’s Tragedy of King Richard III is the gusto with which it incorporates the Tudor libels about the unfortunate king.  Shakespeare has them all, and then adds a couple of his own invention.  From the popular point of view Richard’s crowning crime was arranging the murder of his two juvenile nephews, aged nine and twelve, in the tower of London.  Famous actors have loved playing this role.  In addition to getting to utter an immortal line (“A horse!  A horse!  My kingdom for a horse!”) they have been able to vie one with another in what might be called an Ugliness Pageant.  Ordinarily making fun of cripples has been regarded as poor form, but Shakespeare’s treatment of the infanticide Crookback has given a plenary license to the make-up artists to do their direst thing.

 An authorized anthology of grotesques

           

 Thing is, Richard didn’t do it.  That is the argument of a still insufficiently known masterpiece of modern fiction, Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time (1951).  This wonderful book has been called “the greatest mystery story of all time”,  and not by me but by the Crime Writers’ Association gathered in solemn conclave in 1990.  Josephine Tey was the pseudonym of a very proper and unassuming Scottish lady named Elizabeth Mackintosh.  She took her title from one of the pithier sayings of old Francis Bacon: “Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.”  I would say that you can take my word for it, but it seems inappropriate to do so.

            Like many great detective writers Josephine Tey has a master detective who moves from book to book: one Inspector Grant.  But true artistic genius usually combines honored tradition with striking invention.  Part of the brilliance of The Daughter of Time is its bold upending of the conventions of the detective novel.  The classic detective novel ingeniously reveals the guilt of a perpetrator who began the book enjoying the reader’s natural assumption of innocence.  The Daughter of Time ingeniously reveals the innocence of a man universally loathed as one of history’s moral monsters.  The great detective must be a man of daring, whose bold initiatives in pursuing his investigation land him in life-threatening scrapes—a minimum of three scrapes per caper--in abandoned tunnels, spooky warehouses, and elevator shafts.  Inspector Grant cracks the case of Richard III while laid up in a hospital with a broken leg.  The greatest physical danger faced by his right hand man (an American graduate student!) is the risk of dropping a heavy folio volume on his foot.  Ms. Tey’s book carries no such dangers, and if you haven’t read it, you should read it soon.