BOOK: Leon Battista Alberti, "Biographical and Autobiographical Writings"

Leon Battista Alberti: Biographical and Autobiographical Writings. Translated by Margin McLaughlin. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 96. Harvard University Press, 2023. 9780674292680. xxvii + 346 pp.

We have encountered Alberti in the I Tatti Renaissance Library before — one of the early volumes is his satirical novel, Momus. I (re-)read it a few years ago (see my post about it), but didn't like it very much, mostly because I didn't find its brand of humour particularly funny. The present volume brings us five shorter works by him, and I didn't like these very much either, so I'm starting to conclude that I'm just not the right person to appreciate Alberti's writing. The fact that the works here are shorter at least had the advantage that I was never at any real risk of getting bored by them.

Often I felt that he was more interested in showing off his rhetorical skills and his ability to deploy an endless amount of allusions to classical literature than in saying something interesting, original, entertaining or persuasive. His Advantages and Disadvantages of Literature presents us such a pointlessly exaggerated view of the disadvantages that it's hard to believe that he meant it seriously; his Life of St. Potitus is suffering from the problem that it can't tell us much of a story because so little is known about this highly obscure saint; his Dog is based on a silly gimmick: he writes about his dog using tropes from classical biographies of great men, and in doing so he mostly misses the opportunity to express sincerely his feelings for his recently deceased and much beloved canine companion; in his Autobiography, Alberti writes about himself in such glowing terms that it's hard to take him quite seriously, and at the same time he tells us almost nothing about the actual course of his life; and lastly, his Fly praises this animal in the most exaggerated and undeserving terms, a contrast which is supposed to provide humour but which in practice soon grew just as tiresome as the insect itself.

I don't deny that there is originality and variety here, but there are also so many missed opportunities for a work to be about more than just a gimmick and an exercise in style. Overall I just couldn't feel very excited about any of the works in this volume. Thank goodness that nobody reads this blog any more, so that at least I won't be getting hostile comments for admitting that I didn't enjoy the book :)

On the other hand, I have to praise the translator for the interesting introduction and notes, and especially for making a good effort to translate the occasional puns and word-play (see e.g. p. 93, ¶30).

On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Literature

This is the longest work in this volume, but unfortunately it wasn't much to my liking. The subject, of course, is an old and well-trodden one, and I didn't have the impression that Alberti had anything particularly original to say about it; the whole thing is better thought of as a youthful exercise in rhetoric (he himself speaks of the importance of practicing writing; 1.15), and the editor of the present volume calls it an invective on more than one occasion (pp. ix, 292), though unlike Petrarch's invectives that I read many years ago in one of the early ITRL volumes, Alberti's treatise is not directed against any particular individual. But what he does have in common with Petrarch is that rather than trying to be sober and fair and balanced, they deliberately fight dirty with all sort of exaggerations, biases and rhetorical tricks in the service of their goals. Alberti's gimmick is basically to spend the first and last 5% of the work on the advantages of literature, and the intermediate 90% on its disadvantages, so as to make it seem more impressive that he is nevertheless committed to the study of literature despite its immense disadvantages.

Incidentally, what he means by literature here is very broad, basically any sort of study that revolves largely on reading (preferably in Latin) — he includes even lawyers, notaries and physicians among the students of literature. He deliberately takes an unhealthily extremist attitude towards study, so as to have a good excuse to play up its disadvantages; in his view, a student of literature should pore over his books day and night (2.16–22), smell badly of lamp oil (5.39), be a pale and scrawny nerd that people will shun and almost literally point and laugh at (3.10–13); even the slightest interruption to his studies will cause him to forget so much that he will have to spend many hours catching up again (3.32, 45); nothing short of total non-stop dedication will do. Apart from the great expenditure of time and effort, it will also cost you a lot of money to pay for your studies, buy books etc. (4.16–18, 23). He is also aware of the idea of opportunity costs; as a student of literature, you are spending money when you could be making it.

He then proceeds to spend most of his treatise arguing at great length how all this effort and expense will yield you neither wealth not honours. He purports to justify this by indulging in some very dubious mathematics and statistics (4.88–112) to argue that out of every 1000 people who begin the study of literature, only three will “be able to make money from literature” (4.110). Only lawyers, notaries and physicians have some chance of making good money (4.137), but even of them most don't, especially if they are honest (4.144, 154). Nor can a literary scholar get rich by marriage, since women with a big dowry won't have him (4.184–91).

Not only do literary scholars get no wealth, they also get no respect. Alberti argues that they *deserve* the highest respect (5.4), but nobody actually respects them. Rich people will not be impressed by the literary scholar's rhetoric enough to give him a seat at the table when it comes to political decision-making (5.26–9); in fact they simply won't care about his learning; it means nothing to them (5.31–40). The common people won't respect him either, for the simple fact that he isn't rich (5.54, 65). Alberti is also doubtful about trying to win honour by serving in the public administration, as such jobs will distract you from literary study and “expose you to vanity and envy” (5.82).

It is only at the very end of the treatise that he finally returns to the advantages of the literature; he reasserts his commitment to this field of study; of course, that's why he expounded at such length on it disadvantages — the greater these are, the greater his merit is in nevertheless persisting in his studies. And perhaps he doesn't spend too much time on his advantages because he considers them obvious enough that it suffices to state them plainly: “Let the minds of scholars burn with a desire, not for gold or wealth, but for morals and wisdom, and let them learn from literature, not power and the causes of things, but the form and cult of virtue and glory” etc. (6.16–17). You will be rewarded by “peace of mind, the stability of virtue and the beauty of the arts” (6.26); “such a man [. . .] will believe that all his goods are placed within himself” (6.36).

This is a very charming view of literary scholarship, and of course one wishes to believe it; and yet, you can't help noticing that this is nothing more than argument by vigorous assertion. There used to be a widespread idea that studying ancient Greek and Roman literature somehow made you a better and wiser person; I think it was probably true, but that was back when people were still able to study literature earnestly. There would be no use in trying to revive the study of classical literature now that our entire intellectual class has, for the better part of a century, betrayed the rest of society by going in for modernism, postmodernism and other such corrosive ideologies; they know only how to criticize and deconstruct and play language games, but would react to the idea of holding a sincere opinion, or of searching in literature for truth and beauty, like a vampire to sunlight.

*

Apparently Alberti conducted something of a poll: “I diligently asked many literature scholars” (2.3) and they all wanted to deter other people from studying literature rather than encourage them. You can read similar advice from humanities professors nowadays :)

Amongst the expenses involved in the study of literature he lists “those foolhardy ceremonies they call doctorates” (4.24) :))

When he talks about professions where it is easier to make money than in literature, he suggests soldiering and farming... He had a bizarrely rosy view of these: “no expectation is more certain from any other thing than what is reaped from a well cultivated field [. . .] the countryside offers [. . .] the maximum amount of leisure to enjoy the good life” (4.72). Clearly his idea of a farmer was a big landowner who doesn't actually do any farming himself, probably doesn't even bother running his own estate but has managers for that.

A hilarious quote from 4.180: “women are by nature stupid, arrogant, contentious, bold, insolent and rash” :)))) I don't disagree, but then men are all these things as well; it's just human nature :(

Alberti is commendably self-critical: “We have now reached the stage where [. . .] nobody except the most abject and lazy turns to literary studies. For it is the lame, or the scrofulous, or the distorted and diminished, the stupid, dense, inert people who are unable to incompetent to do any other work who all end up studying literature.” :)) (5.85–6)

The Life of St. Potitus

Alberti wrote this biography at the suggestion of his patron, a prelate named Biagio Molin (p. 293, n. 1); I wonder how he chose this obscure saint. Unsurprisingly, very little is known about Potitus, and as a result Alberti's biography can't help but be rather thin, even though he did his best to pad it out with long speeches and the like.

According to Alberti's biography, Potitus was originally from Serdica (present-day Sofia) and lived during the reign of the emperor Antoninus. The son of a rich pagan father, Potitus adopts christianity as quite a young man; ignoring his father's entreaties and arguments (e.g. that the authorities were persecuting christians pretty badly just then), the young zealot moves away from home. The devil tries to lure him away from his chosen path by appearing in the form of a phantom and then of an ox, but Potitus successfully ignores these manifestations. He successfully cures a senator's wife of leprosy by converting her to christianity.*

[*Alberti writes as if he didn't think very highly about this conversion (¶57): “Since the minds of the sick are credulous, the woman suffering from leprosy was willing to try anything if she thought it would do her good.”]

Soon, word of Potitus' miracle reaches the ears of the emperor, by a rather bizarre mechanism: the devil obsesses Antoninus' daughter and makes her tell him that Potitus is a christian and where he lives. Potitus is summoned before the emperor and, with god's help, easily drives out the devil out of the emperor's daughter. However, his subsequent interview with the emperor goes very badly indeed. Now, I'm the first to agree that zealots can be tiresome and Potitus is no exception, but the way Antoninus reacts here is just plain ridiculous. He goes on an unhinged rant (¶81–100) which levels the most implausible accusations against the christians: “there is no people on earth more abject than those who have decided to live all their life in leisure, rejecting both diligence and hard work. They shun, think little of and even hate military duty, literary study, and any ornamentation of life. You must realize that these same Christians are the most worthless race of men: they are lazy, idle, supine; they pursue no labor nor arts, undergo no civic discipline, but have learned to languish in idleness, solitude and sleep” (¶83–4). Holy shit, is he supposed to be for or against this thing? If christianity was like that, I'd convert in a heartbeat :))) But in actual fact, of course, I don't doubt that most christians in Antoninus' time were pretty normal people leading pretty normal lives; I suppose there may have been a few who tried to avoid participation in society as much as possible to avoid being dragged into its sins — but the idea that all or even most of them were like that, as Antoninus says, is just plain silly.

Anyway, the emperor sees that the people have been rather impressed by Potitus' miracle, and is worried that more of them might convert unless he makes an example of him. He tries to pressure Potitus into making a sacrifice to the pagan gods, and when the youth refuses, he is promptly taken to the amphitheatre, tortured with fire and then consigned to the beasts; but lo, another miracle, the beasts grow meek in his presence and worship him. The emperor sends his minions to finish the job by hacking Potitus to pieces, but a (probably unintentionally) comical scene ensues: “The executioners were seized by such zeal for carrying out his order that while trying to be the first to cut pieces off Potitus, they actually wounded each other, whereas the young man remained untouched” (¶106) :)) After another few similar failures, the emperor falls to the ground in a fit of rage and gets badly injured. His daughter implores Potitus — who is somehow *still* not dead — to save him, and she promptly converts to christianity to secure divine aid (¶110).

Antoninus recovers at once, but alas, his temper has not improved. He sees Potitus holding a sermon to the crowd, orders his tongue to be cut off, but Potitus continues speaking despite the lack of a tongue. Eventually they finally manage to kill him by cutting off his head (¶114). He was not yet fourteen years old (p. 171).

I can't say that I found this hagiography particularly enjoyable, though I'm sure that's not Alberti's fault, it's simply what this genre is like. The characters are shallow and two-dimensional; god and the devil intervene in events all the time; and there is something unpleasantly self-congratulatory about the whole thing. The writer and the reader both know that the saint or martyr will eventually triumph; there is never any doubt about the outcome, the story as a whole is predictable and only the details remain to be filled in.

I suppose the christians looked back at their early martyrs as the plucky underdogs who took on the mighty Roman empire and won, triumphed over all the persecutions and the like. And I suppose that a christian who lived in the 2nd century could justifiably consider himself the underdog; but not so in Alberti's time; someone who writes a hagiography in the 15th century is not a supporter of the plucky underdog, but of the establishment; he is the sore winner who has been absolutely triumphant for more than a thousand years yet still can't stop grinding the face of his long-defeated opponent into the dust.

From my perspective, of course, it is not christianity, but the Greco-Roman paganism that was the underdog; even in the 2nd century its days were numbered, and it was very much the underdog by the 4th. So when I read something like the life of Potitus here, I can't sympathize with the saints and martyrs, because I know that very soon they would win and become the oppressors in turn. Moreover, my sympathies are instinctively with the pagans, and I can never quite understand why people converted from paganism to christianity; my attitude can be summarized by Swinburne's lines: “What ailed us, o gods, to desert you / For creeds that refuse and restrain?” Perhaps the problem is that ancient paganism, being long gone, is not so well known to us; we all see how many pleasures christianity denies its followers, and how many unpleasant duties and restrictions it lays upon them; for all I know, ancient paganism, as actually practiced, may well have had many of the same faults; but I know so much less about it that it is easy to see it in a more sympathetic light. You sometimes hear that the closest thing to a modern survival of the ancient pagan religions is hinduism, and that religion certainly looks like a total mess that doesn't seem to have much more to recommend itself than christianity does. Perhaps ancient Roman paganism would also seem less appealing if it survived into the present day.

*

A funny passage from ¶42: at one point, the devil changed “into the color and shape of an ox; and that with a great mooing sound he struck the young man [i.e. Potitus] down” We're used to Satan appearing as a goat, but apparently even the poor ox is now to be distrusted. What's next, a kitten? :))

A fine passage from Antoninus' anti-christian rant: “My goodness, it is ridiculous the way they exaggerate when they speak. The heavens, all the gods, the world itself seem not to be enough for them to talk about; they actually descend to the underworld with their tales.” (¶92) You can practically see him getting enraged at the tiresome religious zealouts and missionaries who keep knocking at his door, trying to convert him :)

My Dog

This rather bizarre composition is again in some sense an exercise in rhetoric; Alberti says he was inspired by funeral oratory with which the ancients used to praise eminent men after their deaths (¶1–3); he apparently also wanted to prove that he could do such a thing better than a certain lesser orator (p. 211).

Anyway, the chief conceit of this piece, of course, is that it is written not for an eminent man, but for Alberti's dog. This is a neat idea and I liked it, but the execution leaves something to be desired; in principle seeing someone praise a dog in terms usually used of a person could make for very funny reading, but most of the time I didn't find Alberti's piece to be particularly funny. There are a few puns here and there, which mostly didn't make it into the translation (but the notes point them out); and at times you can have fun figuring out what certain features and character traits, described as if about a person, actually mean when applied to a dog; but most of the time you can't find any meaningful connection between his oration and a dog's life, and the effect is mostly just odd. As the translator's notes point out, Alberti often uses nearly the same phrases here which he would later reuse in his own autobiography (e.g. see notes 36, 38–9 on p. 306).

By way of illustration, here are a few of the stranger passages from this canine biography. The dog's “mother was distinguished for her piety” (¶9); his ancestors included practically every dog mentioned by any ancient author, and Alberti is tireless in rifling through the works of Pliny, Plutarch, Cicero and countless others for anecdotes in praise of dogs; “some were endowed with such courage and bravery” that they would fight “even an elephant [. . .] no matter how fierce and violent” (¶11). Alberti's dog combined the virtues of “the most renowned commanders” — Fabius Cunctator, the Scipios, Caesar, Alexander, etc. (¶30–1). He “mastered in just a few days all the liberal arts that are worthy of a wellborn dog” (¶44); “before he was three he could understand Greek and Latin as much as Tuscan” (¶46; I guess the joke is that he of course didn't understand any human language; there is some wit there, but you are hardly going to laugh out loud). Such was his dedication to the arts that he “would sometimes sing to the moon in various musical modes which he drew from the harmony of the spheres” (¶58). And he lacked the faults of many great men, e.g. he was not “ambitious like Cicero, who when he was almost exhausted from praising himself, in one of his letters then asked other people to write a book in his praise” ¶69). :))

My favourite part of this oration comes at the very end, when Alberti finally, for a brief while, drops the conceit and writes plainly and honestly about how much he loved his dog and how much he misses him (¶73–6). That brief moment of genuine feeling is worth more than the rest of the treatise combined.

My Life

This short autobiography of Alberti wasn't much to my liking either. First of all, the translator's notes at the end of the book point out so many parallels to various classical authors that I can't help wondering how much this is meant to be taken seriously as an autobiography at all, as opposed to being merely yet another exercise in rhetoric. Alberti writes about himself in the third person and doesn't hold back in attributing to himself all sorts of excellent qualities, abilities, talents and personality traits (even the power of divination :)) ¶77). If you can believe him, he really was the very archetype of the Renaissance man, constantly busy studying and working in a wide range of fields.

Meanwhile this autobiography is actually very bad if you expected any clear account of his actual life, rather than merely 20 pages of saying what a great guy he was. He tells us about his various literary works and briefly discusses each of them, which is nice, but other than that there's almost none of the things I would expect in an autobiography: nothing about his ancestors and family; where and how he grew up; his studies, his travels (I saw from passing mentions in the translator's notes that Alberti studied in Bologna, but he never mentions this in his autobiography here); his employments, if he had any (the impression one gets from the lack of this information in his autobiography is that he was simply an independently wealthy man who spent his time tinkering and writing, and who by dint of sheer grit and talent managed to become an important and influential humanist intellectual; but I wonder whether he really was wealthy, since we read at in the translator's notes that Alberti was an illegitimate child, who therefore couldn't take public office (p. 292, n. 24), and moreover that when his father died and left some money in his will to Alberti, the other family members refused to hand this money over).

An interesting feature of this autobiography is a longish list of his supposed witty sayings, which he was apparently able to come up with on the spur of the moment and in considerable abundance (¶40–107). I didn't actually find most of them to be all that witty, but then I already knew that humour is one of those things that doesn't travel well across centuries and cultural boundaries. Nevertheless here's one anecdote that I liked: when a foreigner in his city asked him the way to the palace of justice, Alberti said he didn't know; upbraided by some passers-by who pointed out that the courthouse was right there, he replied: “I had no recollection of justice ever having been in those premises” :)) (¶43).

He was in the “habit of dictating the first draft of his works”, which “accounts for the oral dimension of early drafts and the complex philology behind his texts” (translator's note 20, p. 313).

At the age of 20, he wrote a comedy, the Philodoxeos, which “circulated for ten years as though it had been written by a little-known ancient writer Lepidus”, until Alberti finally admitted his authorship (translator's note 8, p. 311). I like this idea; it proves that his Latin must have been really good, and moreover people might be less likely to criticize small defects if they believed the work was by a genuine ancient author.

I greatly liked his opinion about art: “He used to ask young boys whether they recognized whose likeness he was painting, and he used to deny that anything could be said to have been painted artistically that could not instantly be recognized by children.” (¶34.) How far we have fallen from this ideal after more than a century of degenerate art!

The Fly

Most of us would agree that the fly is an annoying and worthless creature, but in this short piece Alberti turns this on its head and spends the whole time praising the fly in the highest terms. Much as in the case of My Dog, I agree that this in principle a neat and humorous idea, but in practice I didn't find The Fly particularly funny.

The author pretends to uphold the flies as altogether nobler animals than “the bees, those unworthy favorites of the poets” (¶20; see also ¶4). They are descended from the Centaurs (¶4), a proud warrior race (which we can tell because swarms of flies always accompany human armies, ¶8, and because they always wear “a breastplate with varied colors of gold and bronze”, ¶12) which yet never commits atrocities like human armies do (¶15–16); honourable and sociable creatures, they do everything together and in the open (¶17, 19); they are scientists and philosophers (¶42), “endowed by nature with such enormous eyes that they can easily discover what lies hidden beyond the heavens” (¶25);* a true stoic, the fly “always shows itself to be of the same demeanor” (¶31); the fly “is never idle” and “energetically encourages the lazy to action” (¶39); etc. “We wrote the above laughing, and you too should laugh”, Alberti says at the end; but alas, I almost never did laugh. I don't disagree that there is wit in Alberti's praise of the fly; but it takes more than that to make one laugh.

[*The fly “even knows what blemishes Helen of Troy has on her bottom, has fondled all of Ganymede's hidden parts, and knows by constantly landing on them how bitter is the taste of Andromache's ancient, sagging breasts.” (¶26.) One of the few passages that actually made me laugh :)) ]

Miscellaneous

Apparently another of Alberti's works, the Intercenales or Dinner Pieces, “is forthcoming in this I Tatti Renaissance Library series” (p. xxvi, n. 23). Let's hope I will enjoy it better than the two Alberti volumes I've read so far :)

I was interested to learn (translator's note 36, p. 327) that the names of the musical notes come from “the first syllables in the lines of a famous medieval hymn to St. John the Baptist by Paulus Diaconus: Ut queant laxis resonare fibris, mira gestorum famuli tuorum, solve polluti labii reatum”. From this we also see why so is sometimes called sol. The wikipedia says that ut was replaced by the now usual do in the 17th century, to make it an open syllable.

In his autobiography, Alberti mentions some of his works which he wrote in Italian rather than Latin; the thing I found interesting is that, where the translation says “in the vernacular” and “Tuscan” (p. 219, ¶13), the corresponding word in the original was “etruscos” both times. Of course, in one way it makes sense — the words ‘Tuscan’ and ‘Etruscan’ are related — but on the other hand it sounds a little as if he had written those works in the ancient Etruscan language, and that is a very intriguing alternative-historical idea :)

BOOK: Paolo Giovio, "Portraits of Learned Men"

Paolo Giovio: Portraits of Learned Men. Edited and translated by Kenneth Gouwens. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 95. Harvard University Press, 2023. 9780674290150. xviii + 667 pp.

We have already encountered Giovio in the I Tatti Renaissance Library a few years ago — vol. 56 is his dialogue Notable Men and Women of Our Time, consisting mostly of short biographies of notable military commanders, poets, and noblewomen (see my post about it). The present volume, Portraits of Learned Men, has a few things in common with that previous one: it, too, consists of short biographies, though only of men of letters; and both volumes have the same editor and translator, Kenneth Gouwens. (Incidentally, an earlier English translation of this work, by Florence Alden Gragg (1935), is available online. Gouwens mentions a few downsides of this translation in the notes here on pp. 454–5.)

Giovio's Portraits of Learned Men is based on an interesting concept: he was trying to set up a kind of museum,* a villa (open to the public) on the shores of Lago di Como that would house portraits of notable men of letters of the last few generations, roughly from 1300 to his own time (he lived in the early 16th century); and next to each portrait there would be a sheet of parchment with a short biography of the individual in question (p. xi). Unfortunately he didn't manage to gather all the portraits he had hoped to obtain, and it seems that nobody bothered to continue the project after his death; the villa was demolished in the early 17th century.

[*In his time the word still meant simply a place dedicated to the Muses, but I guess efforts like his helped shift it towards our modern sense of a building containing educational exhibits.]

The biographies he wrote for his museum, however, are still extant and are gathered in the present work. There are 106 longer ones (about two pages long on average, which is rather longer than than the amount of time Giovio spends on each person in Notable Men and Women), of people whose portraits he managed to obtain; and then there are about 50 short ones, just one paragraph long or so, of people whose portraits he lacked. He concludes the work with a ‘peroration’, really an appeal to potential supporters of his project in other countries, asking them to donate portraits of eminent men of letters to his museum.

I liked this book a good deal; because the individual biographies are short, it's easy to read them in small doses and thus avoid getting bored. One downside, however, is that he doesn't really have the space to tell you much about each individual and he certainly can't go into any details of either the subject's life or his work. A peculiar obsession of his seem to have been epitaphs: he concludes each biography with one or several epitaphs, short poems commemorating the subject of the biography, sometimes by that subject himself but more often by various minor poets. Perhaps someone who understands Latin (unlike me) can enjoy these epitaphs for their poetical qualities, but from my point of view they didn't really contribute anything of biographical value to the work. Another good feature of this book are the translator's endnotes, which are very extensive; for every person mentioned by Giovio, we get a list of references to further literature; for every work mentioned by Giovio, we get the bibliographical details of its original publication; for every epitaph, we are told what metre it's in; the notes also point out parallels to Giovio's Notable Men and Women (which mention some of the same people are the present work) and contain a wealth of other background information.

Giovio's biographies are arranged in more or less chronological order (he points out that this conveniently avoids any disputes about the order of precedence; p. 25); the first few are actually medieval scholastics: Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus; but then we reach Dante and continue with the usual panoply of Renaissance authors. A good few of them were already slightly familiar to me because we've had some of their works in the I Tatti Renaissance Library, but many others were of course also completely new to me. As one might expect, Giovio's subjects are mostly Italians, but they don't predominate by as much as I thought they would. In the early parts of the book, there are about ten or so Greeks, people who had fled from the declining Byzantine Empire and helped restart the study of ancient Greek language and literature in Italy; to my surprise, there were also several Englishmen (Thomas Linacre, Thomas More, John Fisher), some of whom even spent part of their career in Italy. Later in the book there are more and more northern authors — Dutch, French, Germans, etc., about twenty in total; and Giovio admits on more than one occasion that in his time the study of ancient Greek and Latin was flourishing more in those countries than in Italy. Unsurprisingly, however, he had a harder time getting the portraits of these northerners, so their biographies are mostly among the shorter ones at the end of the book. But he was aware of this deficiency and, as I already mentioned, his peroration at the end of the book contains appeals for potraits from all sorts of countries.* Often enough, western Europeans' idea of Europe used to end at the eastern borders of Germany, and I was pleasantly surprised to see here that this was not the case for Giovio: his world stretches as far as learning is done in Latin, and he extends his appeal for portraits and support as far as Poland (which he calls “Sarmatia” :)), Hungary (“Pannonia”), Transylvania and Dalmatia (pp. 437–9).

[*And clearly his appeals had at least some success; he mentions that the bishop of Arras “is having portraids made for me” (p. 439) and that another Frenchman, Danès,** “even now is sending a portrait ofhis teacher Budé” (p. 443).]

[**This is how it's spelt in the book; but the French wikipedia spells it “Danes” and adds in a note: “And not Danès, although the e is open.” :))]

Miscellaneous

“Pomponio [Leto]'s early morning lectures were so popular that students would arrive at midnight to be sure of getting a seat.” (From the translator's introduction, p. xiii.) Clearly those were very different times :))

Giovio on Duns Scotus: “he seems to have made sport of Christian doctrines: for, hesitating here and there on a question that had been raised, he obscured faith in religious matters with a dense fog of jargon. In this manner he sowed the seeds of interminable quarrels” (III.2). That may well be true, but surely you can say the same of any other theologians. They have been causing disputes and heresies from the first centuries of christianity onwards.

Apparently Scotus was mistakenly buried alive after having an apoplexy; when he “regained consciousness, it was too late: as the poor fellow was shouting, vainly seeking help, and after he had long been beating his head against the sarcophagus, at last he bashed it in and died.” (III.3) Eeek :S But on the other hand, how did Giovio know this? Did someone dig him up later, just in case, and open the sarcophagus?

Giovio points out how mistaken Petrarch was when he thought that he would become famous for his Latin rather than his Italian works: “Fortune, mocking the judgment of so great a man, deceived him grievously when he spurned these works, which would enjoy a life of everlasting favor, in order to pursue surer and nobler glory from his Latin poem Africa” (V.2). The same happened to Boccaccio: “with a fate not unlike Petrarch's, Boccaccio himself was deceived by his opinion of his literary efforts”, but his Latin books “are forgotten and indeed barely retain a breath of life” (VI.2).

There is a biography of Antonio Beccadelli (Panormita) which, to my surprise, contains no mention at all of his infamously, gloriously obscene poems which we saw in the ITRL a few years ago (see my post from back then). Even the translator's notes say that “It is remarkable that Giovio does not mention” them (p. 481, n. 60). I wonder how many other interesting things are missing from other biographies in this book, without me being in a position to notice them...

A bizarre anecdote about how Cardinal Bessarion almost became a pope: “when three of the most powerful cardinals had approached him in his cell at the conclave in order that they might hail him as pope, they were not let in by the doorkeeper” who “said that Bessarion had to be left alone to his studies”; annoyed, they cast their votes for a rival candidate, who thus won the election (XXIV.4). However, judging by the wikipedia page about that conclave, it doesn't seem that Bessarion was quite that close to being elected pope after all.

From the biography of John Argyropoulos: “in the last act of his life, when he made his will, as a joke he made his richer friends heirs to his debt. [. . .] by eating too much watermelon he brought on an autumnal fever, and thus died in his seventieth year.” (XXVII.3.) What a way to go :))

Demetrius Chalcondyles “surpassed the morals of the Greeks, inasmuch as no deceit or artifice was observed in him” (XXIX.1) Wahahaha :))) Judging by my experiences with the Greek tourist industry, Giovio may have been on to something.

The bizarre end of Callimachus, an Italian (his real name was Filippo Buonaccorsi) who spent much of his career in the service of the King of Poland: “he became an exile of sorts, hidden away in the Polish villa of an old friend. His death there was kept secret and he lacked funeral obsequies; once his body had been dried in an oven, it was stored in a chest”; the king later had it buried in a church in Cracow (XLI.2). But according to the translator's note 298 on p. 298, these things “appear to be more fabrications of Paolo Giovio than fact”.

Galeotto Marzio “had such a great belly that he used to ride in a carriage, since even massive pack animals would break down under the tremendous weight of his obese body; and when he was an old man he finally died at Montagnana, near Este, smothered under his own lard” (XLIV.4). You can't accuse Giovio of idealizing his subjects :))

Interesting: “clade Sonciaca” is translated as “the defeat at the Soča River” (XLVIII.2) — I was pleasantly surprised by this, as the ITRL translators tend to use Italian names of such geographical features when available. On the other hand, in chap. CXI “Iustinopoli in Histria” is translated as “Capodistria”.

Syphilis was “called la maladie italienne by the French, and la maladia francese by the Italians” (translator's note 363 on p. 521). Ah, nothing like a bit of neighbourly love <3

Bartolomeo Cocles was a fortune-teller who came to a sad end: he was murdered by a certain Coponi, who “gave no excuse for committing this crime, other than Cocles's having made known to him that he was soon to become a foul murderer.” (LIII.5.) Amazing — this is almost like Wilde's Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, but in real life :))

A certain physician named Zerbi “lured by a large sum, had traveled to Bosnia to cure from dropsy the pasha Skander Bey [. . .] Zerbi did not make good on what he had extravagantly promised the dying man, and was butchered by Skander's barbarian servants in order that they might yield him up to the spirit of their lord as a sacrificial victim.&rdquo, (LIX.2) Translator's note 436 (p. 531) adds that “in the summer of 1499 Skander Bey led troops from Sarajevo into Friuli and Carinthia and subsequently ‘ravaged the country around the Isonzo River in September [. . .]’ ”.

The poet Pietro Gravina “died in his seventy-fourth year [. . .] when a chestnut burr very lightly punctured his calf as he was taking a siesta in the shade: for by casually scratching it, he opened a sore, bringing upon himself a deadly infection.” (LXXIV.7) I'm starting to sense something of a pattern here — many of Giovio's subjects ended their lives in gruesome ways :]

I was interested to learn that Baldassare Castiglione, who is of course famous as the author of The Courtier, a sort of early etiquette-book, also wrote “a long epic, Cleopatra” (LXXVII.1). This sounds intriguing, but apparently the poem is actually about “an ancient statue of Ariadne purchased by Julius II that was thought to have been of the Egyptian queen” (n. 563 on p. 553).

Giovio's biography of Ludovico Ariosto mentions that “he distinctly surpassed Boiardo and Pulci himself” (LXXXIV.4), which made me realize that these two other epic poets don't have biographies in Giovio's book — a very rare case of two Italian renaissance authors who are famous enough that even I know about them but didn't get biographies here.

Interesting: Machiavelli had “no Latin, or at least a mediocre knowledge of it” (LXXXVII.1); Giovio is amazed that someone with this deficiency was able to become such a good writer. Later he adds: “It's a fact (as he himself used to tell me) that the Greek and Latin he slipped into his writings had come from Marcello Virgilio, whom he served as secretary an assistant when he was working for the government” (LXXXVII.4). So it seems that Machiavelli got his own boss to help him write his books — you've got to admit that that's pretty damn Machiavellian :)

Albert Pigge, “from the Dutch town of Kampen” had a “grotesquely harsh and throaty voice, and his resonant snorts pretty much disfigured the whole appeal of his wisdom.” (CV.1) Sounds like your average Dutch speaker :))) I also liked the mention of snorts, which go well with his porcine surname, but this must be just a coincidence in the translation, since the original is in Latin and I don't think there's any Latin word for a pig that would sound similar to Pighius.

There's also a biography of Giovio's older brother, Benedetto Giovio (CVI). This seems a bit nepotistic but Giovio describes his brother in such affectionate terms that I can't blame him for including this biography in his book.

Pietro Alcionio “was such a shameless slave to gluttony that often, within the space of a day, he cadged meals at two or three different people's tables. [. . .] when at last he was home,he relievedhimself of the burden of excessive drink by throwing up at the very edge of his bed.” (CXXIII.1) A Spaniard named Sepúlveda published a book so critical of Alcionio that the latter “was compelled to go to great expense to buy up his Spanish enemy's books in all the shops to burn them.” (CXXIII.2) Poor Alcionio — I think I'd prefer not to have my portrait in a museum than to have it appear next to such a biography :))

From the short biography of Hector Boece, a Scottish historian: “we marvel greatly that there can be found a written tradition of over a thousand years concerning the islands of the Hebrides and Orkney, so remote from our region; whereas in Italy, that nursemaid of genius, writers were entirely lacking for so many centuries after the expulsion of the Goths.” (CXXXIV)

Near the end of the book Giovio writes that he has “completed the first volume, which contains portraits of the deceased” and that he intends to write a second, which “will treat of the living” (p. 431). I don't know if he ever completed this second volume, however. Perhaps he was distracted by a different project: the translator's introduction says that six years after the present work, Giovio published a similar volume “surveying prominent military and political figures” (p. ix).

The poet Baptista of Mantua was rewarded after death with “a marble likeness of him crowned with laurel [. . .] alongside that of Vergil” (LXI.3), which Giovio thinks ridiculous since Baptista was such a mediocre poet. But what's even funnier is the following from the translator's note (n. 455 on p. 536): “Within months after its completion in 1514, a notice bearing the marquis of Gonzaga's official seal was posted on it forbiding its defacement — and soon thereafter, someone hurled feces at the notice itself” :)))

A poet named Guido Postumo, whom I haven't heard of before, “composed the elegies, for which he is best known today, which describe the pope's court and include a detailed account of a hunting expedition in Palo” (n. 512 on p. 546). Sounds interesting — too bad we don't have that work in the ITRL :)

Cardinal Egidio of Viterbo wrote a Book on Hebrew Letters; this work, “written in hopes of persuading Leo X to reform the Roman alphabet, drew extensively upon the Kabbalah and analyzed what he believed to be the sexual anatomy of Hebrew letters.” (Note 634 on p. 563.) ROFL :)) I think if you're starting to write about the sexual anatomy of the alphabet, it's high time you've put the pen away and had a wank...

BOOK: Evelyn Waugh, "Edmund Campion"

The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh. Volume 17: Edmund Campion. Ed. by Gerard Kiloy with the assistance of Thomas M. McCoog. Oxford University Press, 2023. 9780198817529. cxiii + 407 pp.

One nice thing about deciding to read some author's complete works — as in the case of me reading Waugh here — is that it causes you to encounter books that you would never seek out otherwise, and so to find new and interesting things that you'd otherwise miss. I had never even heard of Edmund Campion before reading Waugh's book, and it would never have occurred to me to deliberately go and look for a biography of him; having how read Waugh's Campion I feel that I have learnt a few new things and got a glimpse at a period of history about which I otherwise know very little.

Most of Waugh's books that I've read so far seem to have been inspired in some way or another by something he had experienced in his life, and this one is no exception. Waugh converted to Catholicism in 1930 under the guidance of one Father D'Arcy, who subsequently became the master of Campion Hall (a sort of college for Catholic students) at Oxford University (pp. xxix–xxx, xxiv). In 1934, they were trying to construct a new building for the hall, and to help pay for the costs, Waugh offered to write a biography of Campion, the 16th-century martyr after whom the hall was named (p. xxx, xli). Moreover, D'Arcy introduced Waugh to a new circle of more or less intellectual Catholic friends,* and Waugh hoped that the new book would establish him as a Catholic intellectual and impress the woman he was then courting, Laura Herbert, and her family (she and Waugh got married in 1937 — incidentally, she was a cousin of his first wife; p. xxxviii).

[*The editors suggest that D'Arcy's “intervention quite possibly saved Waugh from a life of despondent decadence: affairs with married women [. . .] and distasteful encounters with ‘little Arab girls’.” (P. xxxix.) Incidentally, earlier on the same page we read about a “fifteen-year-old Moroccan girl he had wished to take ‘for his exclusive use’ from a brothel in Fez” :))) Perhaps I am naive, but I would imagine that a recently converted Catholic would be a little more keen on avoiding such obviously sinful activities as sleeping with underaged prostitutes...]

Of course, Waugh was no academic historian, and as he himself says in a note at the start of the book (p. cxiii), he “merely attempted to put into a single, readable narrative the most significant of the facts that are scattered in a dozen or so standard books” and in various other sources. (His main source was Edmund Campion: A Biography by Richard Simpson, first published in 1867. See p. 387.) He originally included a few endnotes and a bibliography, but later thought them so poor that he dropped them in subsequent editions (“I have long been greatly ashamed of the Notes to Campion”, p. lx. The editors of the present edition agree with his decision in the most uncharitable manner: “There is no doubt that the book is greatly improved by the omission of these two disappointing features”, p. liv. Ouch!) The book was “reviewed principally in religious and literary magazines, but largely ignored by historical journals” (p. xc).

Thus this book is a work of popular history, and succeeds quite well at its goals; I found it readable and informative, and the style is not without literary qualities. I also liked the fact that Waugh often puts the story on hold for a moment to give you some useful bit of background information, e.g. about everyday life at Oxford in Campion's time (p. 12), or the history and nature of the Jesuit order (pp. 41–2), or the antagonism between English and Welsh seminarians in Rome (pp. 47–8). (Interestingly, one reviewer said that “Waugh wrote well on Campion himself; he was less successful when he ventured into the history of the period” (p. lxxxii); another similarly complained that “the lack of a real historical knowledge of the period means an absence of background” (p. lxxxi). But those were opinions of professional historians; to a reader as ignorant as me, Waugh's ventures into background material are informative enough.)

Waugh does not try to hide the fact that he is siding with the Catholics, but to my pleasant surprise, that never bothered me even though I am a rabid atheist myself; in fact this may be the first time ever that I felt sorry for some Catholics. Moreover, I never got the impression that the book would be really biased in a problematic way; after all, in England of Campion's time, it really was the Protestants that were oppressing the Catholics and not the other way around, so if Waugh wanted to make the Catholics look good and the Protestants look bad, he didn't have to do anything more than tell the truth. (Of course, my sympathies for the Catholics while reading this book were moderated by the fact that they had happily persecuted the Protestants in the same way when they had had the upper hand a few decades earlier. Almost any religious group is tolerably nice while it is small and oppressed, and almost each of them turns ugly if it gains control of the state and its power. I wonder why I never felt sympathetic to the early Christians when reading about their being persecuted by the Romans in the first few centuries AD; perhaps because I knew that in the end the Christians would win and become oppressors in turn.)

*

One curious omission in the book is the lack of anything regarding Campion's youth and antecedents. Perhaps Waugh didn't think these things important, or perhaps he found nothing about them in the sources available to him. At the start of the book, Campion is already in his mid-twenties, a promising scholar at the University of Oxford, and his oratory impressed Queen Elizabeth and her court when they came to visit the University in 1566 (p. 6). The state needed new clergymen for its emerging Protestant Church, and it could be the start of a successful career for someone like Campion (pp. 10–11),* but his Catholic sympathies were too strong, and getting stronger: he couldn't believe “that the truth, hidden from the world for fifteen centuries, had suddenly been revealed in the last few years to a group of important Englishmen” (p. 15).**

[*Waugh remarked elsewhere that in Campion's time “the English church, at the top, was run almost exclusively by arrivistes” (p. lxx). He gives an example of a colleague of Campion's who made a great career as a Protestant prelate, and concludes with this glorious remark: “Tobie Matthew died full of honours in 1628. There, but for the Grace of God, went Edmund Campion.” (P. 12.)]

[**On a related note, there's a fine passage from the speech Campion made at the end of his trial, pointing out how preposterous the Protestants' effort to make a break with the past was: “In condemning us you condemn all your own ancestors—all the ancient priests, bishops and kings—all that was once the glory of England, the island of saints, and the most devoted child of the See of Peter./ For what have we taught, however you may qualify it with the odious name of treason, that they did not uniformly teach?” (P. 122. But see also the editors' note on p. 233, according to which there is some doubt as to the authenticity of this passage.)]

Throughout this book we see how the suppression of Catholicism was gradually growing stricter and stricter; new laws were being passed, and existing laws enforced more firmly. For the English Government it was not only a matter of religion but of politics as well: they increasingly thought it somewhat treasonous for an Englishman to be a Catholic. When the Pope excommunicated Elizabeth (pp. 24, 52), would a Catholic be loyal to the Pope or to the Queen? If a Spanish army were to invade England (something which they seemed to be constantly paranoid about), would the Catholics help defend the country or would they side with their fellow Catholics invading it?

By 1569, Campion came under pressure to openly profess Protestantism, and resigned from the University rather than do that (p. 19). He moved to Dublin at the invitation of the father of a former student, and spent some time working on plans for the establishment of a new university there and writing a History of Ireland. In 1571, he had to flee to the Continent to avoid getting arrested in the wake of yet another Spanish invasion scare (p. 26).

Campion studied theology for some time in Douay, France, where English Catholics had established a college (p. 36); he committed fully to Catholicism, moved to Rome and became a Jesuit (p. 41). Apparently that order had a habit of sending its members to wherever it thought they were needed, and Campion spent the next six years as a professor in a Jesuit college in Prague. (Waugh covers this period of Campion's life relatively briefly; according to the editors' introduction, more is known about Campion's life in Bohemia from sources probably not available to Waugh, and several manuscript works by Campion were recently discovered in Prague; pp. xlix–l.)

In Rome there was a seminary to train English Catholic priests, but it was troubled by poor leadership (the rector was a Welshman who blatantly favourized Welsh students, thereby antagonizing the English ones*). Eventually it was entrusted to Jesuits, but with the understanding that English Jesuits should thenceforth work in England (p. 49). Campion, too, was summoned to Rome to take part in this mission, along with another English Jesuit named Robert Persons** and about a dozen other people, mostly priests but also a few laymen (p. 52). Their task was not to proselytize or to dispute against the Protestants, but simply to support the Catholics who still lived in England, by secretly holding masses, hearing confession, giving sacraments etc. (p. 51).

[*But we know that Waugh was a bit anti-Welsh himself, so perhaps we should take these things with a grain of salt :) The editors say that Waugh “could not resist the chance to make fun of the Welsh” (p. 174), and I remember instances of that from several of his other books.]

[**Interestingly, the editors say that “[u]nlike Persons, Campion displayed little enthusiasm for a mission to England” (p. 176). Somewhat ironically, it was Persons, rather than Campion, that managed to evade arrest, return safe to the Continent and die of old age.]

This was in 1580; the missionaries spent some two months walking across Italy, Switzerland and France, where they split into smaller groups and crossed to England in disguise, from various ports, to avoid detection (the English government had spies in Rome and elsewhere, and was well informed that the missionaries were coming; p. 57).

Waugh has an interesting couple of pages describing how far the oppression of Catholics in England had progressed by then. An interminable series of laws had been passed, imposing heavy fines and prison sentences for performing or attending Catholic masses* and the like (p. 66). And even if you kept these things secret, there was also a fine of £20 per month for not attending Protestant church services;** soon, “none but the wealthiest had any choice between submission and destitution” (p. 67; the editors add: “By the end of Elizabeth's reign, only sixteen Catholic families could still afford to pay the fines”, p. 189). English Catholics lived in constant fear of spies and informers, facing the prospect of arbitrary imprisonment at any time. Englishmen were also prohibited from studying at Catholic seminaries abroad, with fines threatened against their families in case of non-compliance (p. 84). The government hoped that Catholicism would gradually expire in England under all this pressure; the existing “Marian priests” (from the days of Queen Mary, Elizabeth's predecessor) were getting older and would soon die off, and no new ones would be allowed to appear (pp. 33, 36).

[*An interesting minor detail that was new to me: apparently Protestants don't have masses. They have something which to my naive eyes looks much like mass, but they call it a “service” and are very proud of this apparently important distinction. Here in this book we see them referring to Catholic priests as “massing priests” (e.g. p. 84) to distinguish them from Protestant ones.]

[**You might imagine that it would be easy to avoid this fine by simply attending the Protestant services despite being a Catholic, but the Catholic Church was very strongly against that. Persons, Campion's fellow missionary, called it “the highest iniquity that can be committed” (p. 71).]

After spending some time in London, Campion and the other missionaries spent several months travelling across the English countryside in disguise, staying as guests in large households and holding secret Catholic services. Their efforts were still remembered by the locals nearly a century later (p. 204). “Sometimes they stayed in houses where only a few were Catholic. There was constant coming and going in the vast, ramshackle households of the day [. . .] It was natural enough that any respectable wayfarer should put up there for the night, whether or no he had any acquaintance with his host.” (Pp. 79–80.) Campion also wrote a book, Rationes Decem (Ten Reasons), arguing in favour of Catholicism; his associates managed, with great difficulty, to print it secretly in London (pp. 86–8). Later it was widely reprinted across Europe and “was still being used by a Dominican provincial prior in Krakow [. . .] to teach theology and rhetoric in the Jagiellonian University in the early nineteenth century” (p. 209).

There was always a risk that one of the supposed Catholics attending your secret Catholic mass would prove to be a government informer. Several of Campion's associates were arrested in this way, and eventually Campion's luck ran out as well. When the authorities came to arrest him, Campion and two other priests almost managed to escape detection in a secret room of the house where they were staying. The local authorities didn't actually seem terribly keen to find them, but thanks to the fanatical zealousness of the government's spy who had betrayed them, one George Eliot, they were eventually found and arrested (pp. 94–5).

Campion was taken to London and imprisoned in the Tower. Early on he was taken to see Queen Elizabeth and several of her chief advisors; “satisfied that he had no treasonable designs”, they offered him preferment if he converted to Protestantism, but he refused (p. 104). During the following four months or so, he was tortured on the rack several times (three times according to Waugh, five according to the editors, p. 220), but they got no admissions of treason out of him, and very little in the way of names of people he had been associating with (p. 105). The rack left him permanently crippled, unable to lift his arm (p. 115).

What is even more bizarre is that the government organized four “Conferences”, public disputations between Campion and various Protestant clergymen, on terms ludicrously biased in favour of the Protestants (pp. 109–13). Given the unfavourable conditions, Campion acquitted himself pretty well and the government found the propaganda value of the conferences so doubtful that they discontinued them.

The Privy Council was determined to have Campion executed, for political reasons that had little to do with him* (they wanted to bolster Elizabeth's popularity with the Protestant part of the population, who had been getting upset over the plans for Elizabeth to marry a Catholic, the Duke of Anjou). In principle Campion's being a Catholic priest was enough to find him guilty of treason, though they hoped he would confess to being part of some conspiracy more concrete than that (p. 114). In the end they proceeded to trial despite the absence of such a confession, or of any other solid evidence. Campion did a good job of defending himself, but it was plainly a cangaroo court and his position was hopeless.** He and most of the other 15 or so defendants were sentenced to death, except for one who had an alibi (he “could prove that he was [. . .] in London when he was supposed to be at Rheims” conspiring against the Queen, p. 123).

[*And in fact in general, the impression I got from this book was that Elizabeth and her advisors weren't really particularly fanatical about Protestantism as a religious thing; their decision to support Protestantism and suppress Catholicism seems to have been mostly about politics, questions of loyalty and concerns over treason and so on. Waugh contrasts this with people like Campion, who genuinely believed that his side was right. Elizabeth et al. “had been used to the spectacle of men who would risk their lives for power, but to die deliberately, without hope of release, for an idea, was something beyond their comprehension.” (P. 104.) During the preceding reign, of the (Catholic) Mary I, “Elizabeth and Cecil and Dudley had quietly conformed to the prevailing fashion; they had told their beads and eaten fish on Fridays, confessed and taken communion. Faith [. . .] was unknown to them [. . ]. What correspondence, even in their charity, could they have with Campion?” (Ib.)]

[**Another historian, A. .F. Pollard, “agreed that Campion's trial was grossly unfair but no more than every state trial in England at this time.” (P. lxxxii.) Cold comfort :S]

Campion rejected another offer of pardon if he converted (p. 123); his friends made an appeal to the Duke of Anjou to intercede for him, but the Duke ignored them (p. 124). Campion, with two others, was hanged on December 1, 1581; he was supposed to be cut down while still alive and then disembowelled, but fortunately they did in fact wait until he was dead and then butchered his corpse instead (p. 235; this seems to have been thanks to the efforts of a courtier named Charles Howard, p. 369).

Miscellaneous

Waugh joking, in a letter, about his progress on the book: “I'm pegging away at Campion. Hope to arrest him this afternoon and rack him before I leave. Then I will hang, draw & quarter him at Mells.” :)) (P. xli.)

In 1949, Waugh edited a book of sermons by Ronald Knox, a priest he was acquainted with. The editors of the present volume note that “the type rises to 5 mm” (p. lxi, n. 92). How very odd to measure type in millimetres! Why not in points like any normal person? 5 mm = approx. 14.2 pt, which is indeed rather large.

Regarding his conversion, Waugh wrote that “the first ten years of his adult life as an atheist had proved to him that life was unintelligible and unendurable without God” (p. lxx). That may well be true, but it doesn't therefore follow that God really exists and that you should become religious... He's practically admitting that the whole thing is based on nothing more than wishful thinking :(

Edmund Campion won the 1936 Hawthornden Prize for a “work of imaginative literature” (p. lxxxiv) — perhaps not quite what you want to hear about a work of history :)) But it's not an unheard-of thing, of course; I remember occasionally seeing popular history books (mis)placed in the historical fiction or romance sections of bookshops.

A Jesuit named Clement Tigar wrote to Waugh in 1949: “I know at least four persons who became Catholics as a result of reading your book.” (P. xci; a few more such converts are mentioned later on the same page.)

After the WW2, Waugh was much moved by the persecution of Catholics in countries that recently became communist, and alluded to it in a new preface to the American edition of Campion (in 1946; p. 399). “His long and passionate denunciation of Communism, ‘Church and State in Liberated Croatia’, presented to Anthony Eden in March 1945, was quietly filed away by the Foreign Office” (p. xciv; according to n. 259 on the same page, this essay was reprinted in 1992, but the note does not mention if we'll get it in the present edition of Waugh's collected works eventually).

Tragic scenes when the Protestants descended on the libraries of Oxford earlier in the 16th century: “the illuminated office books in Magdalen choir were hacked up with choppers, and from every College cartloads of books were removed to be burned or sold as waste paper; a coloured initial was enough to convict the contents of Popery; a mathematical diagram of magic.” (Pp. 9–10.)

Pope Gregory XIII “did not continue the more severe, puritanical measures of his predecessor [i.e. Pius V] under whom a wealthy layman had been publicly flogged for adultery and a drove of harlots turned loose on the campagna to be massacred by bandits.” (P. 39.) :)))

Interestingly, Waugh writes “Middle-Europe” on p. 42 where one might expect “Central Europe”. One is tempted to wonder if this is a result of German influence (Mitteleuropa), but I didn't get the impression from this book that Waugh had studied anything much in German while working on Campion.

Interesting: “Ireland, however, was, in feudal law, unquestionably a Papal fief, and had always been recognized as such by the English monarchy; moreover, it had never been effectively conquered or administered; outside the Pale English control had been negligible.” (P. 57. See also the note on p. 183: “The English Pope Adrian IV (c. 1100–1159) granted Ireland as a papal fief to King Henry II (1133–1189) in 1155”.)

A dubious claim from p. 64: “In accordance with his stern moral code Philip forbade his American colonists from enslaving the native Indians and from importing negroes.” The editors note that “It is not clear what evidence EW had for this claim. [. . .] the Asiento de negros legitimizing slavery remained in place until 1750” (p. 186).

“There were numerous disturbing portents recorded on the eve of the Jesuits' arrival. [. . ] A woman named Alice Perin, at the age of eighty years, gave birth to a prodigy with a head like a helmet, a face like a man, a mouth like a mouse, a human body, eight legs, all different, and a tail half a yard long” etc. (pp. 64–65). :S

Richard Topcliffe, one of the informers employed by the Government to hunt out Catholics, “was accorded the privilege unique in the law of England, or, perhaps, of any country, of maintaining a private rack in his own house for the more convenient examination of prisoners.” (P. 67.)

On pp. 72–3 Waugh describes the curious case of one Father Bosgrave, an English Jesuit who spent 16 years in Poland, “far out of touch with the course of events in England”, until he was sent back to England by his superiors “by a singular irony, for the good of his health” (p. 72). The Protestants arrested him and got him to attend their church; he apparently had no idea that, in England at least, a Catholic was not supposed to attend a Protestant church. “The Catholics all shunned him, and Father Bosgrave, who retained only an imperfect knowledge of English, wandered about lonely and bewildered.” (Ib.) Eventually the matter was explained to him; he denounced Protestantism, was duly arrested and found guilty of treason, but was fortunately only banished rather than executed. “He then returned to Poland and resumed his duties there, having benefited less by his prolonged stay in England than his superiors had hoped.” (P. 73.) :))) All's well that ends well, I guess!

Nowadays in English, when you want to combine the passive voice with the progressive aspect, you use constructions of the form: ‘The house is being built.’ I was interested to learn some time ago that this construction only became widespread in the late 18th century, and was frequently objected to by usage guides throughout the 19th. The older way of expressing the same thing was to use the verb to be and the present participle: ‘The house is building.’ This older construction actually has a nice advantage over the newer one: if you want to add the perfect aspect, you can say elegantly enough that ‘the house has been building’; but in the newer construction you'd have to say ‘the house has been being built’, and nobody in their right mind would say that because the combination ‘been being’ sounds too ridiculous. Anyway, I got the impression that the older construction was still in use relatively often in the mid-19th century (I remember seeing it often enough in Dickens), but became rare by the late 19th century. Since then I have always been on the lookout for late occurrences of this older construction, and so it was interesting to find one here in Waugh, in a book written in 1935: “the great houses of the new ruling class were building” (p. 79).

There are some interesting remarks in the editors' introduction about Catholicism in Britain in Waugh's time; “there was a split [. . .] between ‘a small rather consciously English upper-class elite and the urban working class [. . .] with its strong Irish connections [. . .]’ ” (Adrian Hastings, quoted on p. lxvii). Waugh obviously was part of the former group, many of whom, like him, were recent converts. This trend of conversions later declined: “An oddity of the polemic of some Catholics against pre-Vatican II Catholicism is their failure to address the issue of why it was so attractive to converts of the highest culture; and why after the 1960s it ceased to be so” (Sheridan Gilley, quoted on p. lxviii, n. 122).

Glorious beginnings of English protestantism: “Henry [VIII] remained committed to all other features of the Catholic faith, and on one day he hanged three priests for denying the royal supremacy, and burnt three others for heretical views on the Eucharist” (editors' note on p. 147). :))

One of the houses where Campion stayed while in Ireland “survived until 1987, when it was pulled down to give way to a lurid golf club, now itself derelict” (editors' note on p. 159). I'm extremely curious what a lurid golf club looks like :]

Interesting: “James VI of Scotland wrote an epic poem celebrating the victory, His Maiesties Lepanto, in 1591, a poem widely read and translated on the Continent” (editors' note on p. 168).

Decent people hate this one weird trick: “Torture was illegal under common law. [. . .] The government circumvented the prohibition by issuing warrants that exempted the practitioners from common law charges of assault.” (Editors' note on p. 203.)

One Dr. Nicholas Sander organized, “with papal funds”, “an ill-fated invasion force” which landed some 500 men in Ireland about a year before Campion's mission. It was brutally surpressed by the English, but made them extra paranoid: “Sander's intervention put every county in England on invasion alert, and completely undermined Campion's spiritual claims for the mission.” (P. 384.)

*

The book includes a nearly-60-page appendix of “Biographical Notes” covering seemingly absolutely every person mentioned anywhere in the book, whether by Waugh or by the editors. This, together with the strict alphabetical order, results in a curious assembly where seventeenth-century clergymen, Elizabethan courtiers and Spanish ambassadors mingle easily with Waugh's friends, literary agents, critics, fellow Catholic writers and so on. This was interesting enough to read in moderate doses, but tended to get boring after a while.

A “radical Calvinist” named William Charke got “in trouble with more moderate Protestants for claiming [. . .] that Satan had invented bishops” :)) (p. 350).

On the execution of another Catholic martyr, John Felton, in 1570: “He was cut down very early, and he is said to have uttered the name of Jesus as the executioner held his heart in his hand.” :))) (P. 359.)

Anthony Munday, included here as the author of one of the early pamphlets about Campion's capture, also wrote “The English Romayne Life (1582), a lurid proto-Gothic tale of Catholic conspiracy and self-flagellation” (p. 376), inspired by his time working as an English government spy in Rome. Another thing for the ToRead list :]

Rage, glorious rage

So overall this was a very fine and interesting book and the editors have clearly done a tremendous amount of background research for it; but there's one thing where I disagree with them vehemently: normally Waugh's works in the present series are reprinted without changes from their first British edition; but the present volume makes emendations “where EW's spelling of names departs from received norms, or belongs to vanished empires, to aid the reader's recognition” (p. 240). A long list of these emendations then follows: the Duke of Alva becomes Alba (p. 153), Claudio Aquaviva becomes Acquaviva (p. 163), Tredake in Ireland becomes Drogheda (p. 269), Brunn becomes Brno (p. 170), Leipsic becomes Leipzig (p. 170), and so on.

I don't know how to say how enraged these emendations make me. This is a book written, in 1935, by a man who was born in 1903 and hated everything new that had occurred during his lifetime. Of course his names belong to vanished empires — so, after all, does much of his mentality. (And that's just why we like him!) Of course someone like Waugh couldn't give a damn about some silly Czechs suddenly pretending to have a country of their own and calling their dinky little town by some ghastly name like Brno or whatever — of course it would remain Brunn to him for the rest of his days. Of course he wouldn't care about the Irish spelling of Drogheda; it sounded like Tredake to English ears, so Tredake was how he was going to spell it. And of course seeing as Leipsic had been good enough for English writers in 1850, it was damn well going to be good enough for Waugh in 1930 and he would see no reason whatsoever to adopt a different spelling merely because the silly Germans spell it differently.

In short, the spellings he adopts are obviously an integral part of who Waugh was and of his style. How dare you modern editors of his work interfere with that, for an edition like the present one? If you have the temerity to modernize his place-names, what's preventing you from modernizing the countless other little details where his language differs from how someone would have expressed the same thing in 2020? What's preventing you from updating his facts with things discovered about Campion's life since 1935?

Obviously the correct thing to do would have been to mention the modern equivalents of his spellings in the editorial notes, not to meddle with the text itself...

P.S. And as always, the punishment for trying to correct someone else's text is that you make errors of your own in doing so. They may have updated Brunn to Brno, but nearby Olmütz (p. 44) has not become Olomouc :] (though they do mention the Czech name in parentheses in an editorial note on p. 171).

Errors

Considering how well researched and annotated this volume is, and what a large amount of work must have no doubt gone into it, it's a pity that the publisher didn't bother to have it proofread thoroughly. I noticed a bunch of little errors:

• P. xxv lists the History of the University of Oxford as having been published in 1584–2000, but that might be a bit extreme even by their standards :) Actually the first volume appeared in 1984.

• A similar error on p. 146: the year of publication of a Robert McNulty's edition of John Harington's 16th-century translation of Orlando Furioso is given as 1572, but it should be 1972.

• On p. lxx we find: “Waugh ‘later explained [. . .] was ‘unintelligible and unendurable without God’.” That first opening quotation mark has no marching closing mark.

• “Sibonik” (p. xciv) should be “Sibenik” or, better yet, “Šibenik”.

• “Four year later” (p. xcv) should be “years”.

• P. 149, near the bottom, says “see Appendix A”, but this is already in Appendix A; no doubt they mean “see Appendix B” (namely p. 255).

• “forty-fout” (p. 174).

• “Directory ]” (p. 178) has a redundant space.

• “Givevra Crosignani” (p. 179) is of course Ginevra.

• “Montsarrat” (p. 191) should surely be “Montserrat”.

• On p. 192 we find ‘Mr Edmunds’ in single quotes followed immediately by “Mr Edmunds” in double quotes; only the second one should be kept.

• The comma in “Hanmer, was reluctant” (p. 202) should be removed.

• On p. 294, “bibliopola” is glossed as “stationer/publisher”, but surely it is a bookseller. The second part of the word is the same as in ‘monopolist’ = the sole seller.

• On p. 365 we learn that “Harrington, William (1566–1593)” was “executed on 18 February 1594 with spectacular brutality”, which evidently went so far as to interfere even with the calendar :]

• “He became a trusted adviser [. . .] of Elizabeth, with whom she often stayed” (p. 396) should clearly end with “he often stayed”.

BOOK: Evelyn Waugh, "Rossetti: His Life and Works"

The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh. Volume 16: Rossetti: His Life and Works. Ed. by Michael G. Brennan. Oxford University Press, 2017. 9780199683574. lxxxii + 284 pp.

Waugh is chiefly remembered as a novelist, but he also wrote a few biographies; the present volume is the first of these that I've read so far, and in fact it is Waugh's first book altogether — it appeared in 1928 (on the centennary of Rossetti's birth), a few months before his first novel, Decline and Fall. It wasn't his first foray into the subject, however, as he had published An Essay on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood two years earlier (this essay in fact induced a publisher to invite Waugh to write the biography of Rossetti; p. xxxv). [You would think that this essay would make for a nice appendix to the present volume, but unfortunately it hasn't been included in it; instead, it appeared in vol. 26 of the OUP Collected Works of Waugh.]

I was interested to learn, from the editor's introduction, that Waugh “showed considerable promise as a graphic artist” (p. xxvi), and designed some book jackets for Chapman & Hall, the publishing house where his father was a director (p. xxviii); for a time Waugh actually “hoped to avoid a literary career and establish himself as an artist-craftman” (p. xxxi), though that didn't work out. Several of his relatives had also been keen artists, and three cousins of his grandfather had been married to some of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, William Holman Hunt and Thomas Woolner (p. xxvii). (On an unrelated note, another curious family connection: Waugh's wife's aunt was the sister-in-law of Gerald Duckworth, the publisher of Waugh's nonfiction books, including Rossetti; p. xxv, n. 1.)

You might say that the Aesthetic Movement consisted of two phases: the earlier one — the Pre-Raphaelites, Rossetti, Morris, Burne-Jones and the like — and the later one, with Wilde and Beardsley and the rest of the Decadents. I am in principle interested in the Aesthetic Movement, but really mostly in its second phase, and so didn't find a book about the life of Rossetti as interesting as I perhaps might have hoped.

Moreover, I had thought of Rossetti almost more of as a poet than as a painter — I bought a copy of the 1911 edition of his poetical works years ago, though I didn't get around to reading it yet; and though I may be poorly equipped to appreciate poetry, I'm still more poorly equipped to appreciate painting (though I do enjoy Rossetti's distinctive style; his women all look the same,* and quite unlike any women I've seen painted anywhere else). And yet, of course, in hindsight, it was foolish of me to think of him that way; he was a painter first and foremost, and this shows in Waugh's biography as well, which spends only a tiny fraction of its time on Rossetti's poetry, while discussing his painting at great length, dedicating at least a paragraph (and sometimes more like a page) to seemingly every painting and sketch he ever made, and sometimes going into far more technical detail than I had any hope of following (clearly Waugh put his early efforts at learning the graphic arts to good use here).

[*Incidentally, this seems to be because they are all based on three or four women who did most of the modelling for him. “They are of two main types [. . .] fair and voluptuous or dark and pensive according to whether Fanny Schott or Janey Morris was uppermost in his thoughts.” :)) (P. 97; see also pp. 141–2.)]

All this, in short, is a long-winded way of saying that I didn't really enjoy this book all that much, but that this is in no way Waugh's fault. He writes well, is often witty, keeps the story moving along at all times, and strikes a good balance: it is true he spends a lot of time appreciating Rossetti's paintings, but he also doesn't neglect his poetry, his personal life or — something I found quite interesting — the business aspects of his art.

Indeed for someone like me, who am still often inclined to imagine artists romantically as people working on the basis of divine inspiration, it was somewhat surprising and almost shocking to see how... workmanlike Rossetti was in his approach to his art. He painted for money, and not small amounts of it either; he often had a buyer lined up, and sometimes a down payment too, before he even started working on a painting; he often made several copies of a painting if he found people willing to buy them (pp. 100, 255–6, 263); and on a few occasions when he couldn't bring himself to finish a painting, he ended up cutting out some useful part of it and finishing that as a smaller painting. The general public didn't necessarily appreciate his work all that much in his lifetime, except towards the end; but he had a circle of friends and patrons who valued him, and he was content to paint for them (pp. 63, 154). In fact Waugh himself seems to have had doubts about the ultimate artistic value of Rossetti's work; he does praise a number of his paintings, but he concludes his biography with a chapter on “What is Wrong with Rossetti?” (p. 167).

His father was originally from the then Kingdom of Naples, from which he was exiled after the failed revolution of 1820–21 (p. 4); he ended up working as a professor of Italian in London (but his career suffered a couple decades later when “Italian was beginning to give place to German in English education”; p. 6). Another interesting relative of Rossetti's was his maternal uncle, Dr. John Polidori (p. 5), famous as the friend of Byron and the author of The Vampyre, a pioneering short story in the vampire genre.

I knew really very little about the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood so far, and was interested to learn that although Rossetti was later sometimes thought of as its main founder (p. 63), the initial impetus came from two other artists, Holman Hunt and Millais (p. 16), while Rossetti was still very much a beginner and something of a disciple of Hunt (p. 18). But Waugh suggests that Rossetti must have had a prominent role in setting up the PRB from the start: “to Rossetti, reared among secret societies, lured to the guilds and apprenticeships of the Middle Ages, some such organization seemed the natural embodiment of an artistic impulse” (pp. 19–20). In 1849 the members exhibited paintings in their new style, with “P.R.B.” after their names (p. 23), and at first even deliberately refrained from explaining this acronym to the public! (until Rossetti gave it away; p. 26). The public was duly shocked by this “conspiracy”, but later began to view the Pre-Raphaelites more favourably once they got the support from Ruskin, then already a very influential critic (pp. 39–41).

“He [i.e. Rossetti] was always ready to praise artistic achievement of the most trifling merit with exaggerated respect; but that and physical beauty in woman were the only things he thought worthy of reverence.” (P. 46.) “‘If any man has poetry in him,’ he used to say, ‘he should paint, for it has all been said and written, and they have scarcely begun to paint it.’ ” (P. 58.) But Waugh suggests that this is because his poems dealt with “all the common emotions ornamentally expressed—no wonder that he should think it had all been done before. But for these very reasons they are poems that have given, and always will give, genuine pleasure” (p. 118).

In his best years he was making more than £3000 per year, but he was careless in spending his money (p. 84). “He collected almost anything that attracted his attention, particularly china, furniture, and animals. [. . .] His china collection was one of the first of its kind in England.” (P. 86. See also pp. 88–91 for an amusing anecdote where Rossetti played a practical joke on a fellow collector by filching a particularly fine china dish from him, but the victim subsequently got his revenge in like fashion.)

From the age of 40 or so, he started suffering from various health problems (p. 111), melancholy and insomnia, for which he resorted to drinking and later to taking chloral (p. 128; he took pride in the large doses he was taking, but his friends conspired behind his back to dilute them :))). Fearing that he was going blind and would no longer be able to paint, he took a renewed interest in his poetry (p. 113); but alas, he had buried the manuscript of his poems together with the body of his wife, Elizabeth Siddal, some seven years before. Fortunately he was able to get official permission to open the grave and retrieve the manuscript (pp. 114–15).

He soon had the poems published as a book (Poems by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1870), which his friends made sure to praise in all the magazines (pp. 115–16), but it was also the subject of a vicious attack by a critic named Robert Buchanan (“a common and prudish lowland Scot”, p. 126), who denounced Rossetti, Swinburne and other Pre-Raphaelite poets in an essay titled The Fleshly School of Poetry (1871). Judging by the quotations included here on p. 125, it must have been full of deliciously overblown rhetoric: “these abnormal types of diseased lust and lustful disease” :))

Sadly, this new-found notoriety exacerbated Rossetti's existing mental problems into a full-blown paranoia, and he even made a suicide attempt in 1872 (pp. 132, 134). With the help of his friends, he made something of a recovery and kept on painting for another five years or so; then his health got worse, and he died in 1882, a little less than 54 years old.

*

In my opinion a biographer ought to have enough sympathy for his subject to refrain from finishing his biography with a chapter on ‘what is wrong with him’, but clearly Waugh didn't see it that way. In the last chapter, “What is Wrong with Rossetti?”, he looks at Rossetti from the perspective of “the modern critical attitude” (p. 167), according to which “the ‘real’ artist fundamentally is someone interested in the form underlying the appearance of things. [. . .] Artistic perception begins with an appreciation of the reality of form, and becomes creative as it begins to associate forms with each other in necessary, and therefore agreeable, relationships; [. . .] Approached from this standpoint, Rossetti, with all his ‘temperament’ and ‘inspiration,’ is nothing but a melancholy old fraud. [. . .] The last thing he wished to do was to express the necessary relations of forms.” (P. 168.) To which all I can say is: to hell with the modern critical attitude then! How did they dare — how did critics living in the 1920s or 30s, a time when art was already deeply degenerate, and had been for some decades, dare — how did they have the sheer unmitigated temerity to pass judgement on someone like Rossetti, who had spent his life making beautiful things? Who the hell cares about the “reality of form” and the “necessary relations of forms”, and indeed what, if anything, do these phrases even mean?

“ ‘Pure’ painting, according to reputable standards, should concern itself solely with beauty and not with anecdote, but, more than this, it must be with its own beauty and not with the beauty of the thing represented; [. . .] Such a restriction was essentially foreign to Rossetti's habit of thought. [. . .] he knew no valid distinction between beauty of picture and beauty of subject.” (P. 170.) Again this seems to me to be something that discredits the so-called “reputable standards” rather than Rossetti's painting. The modernists wouldn't know beauty if it bit them on the butt. Or if they did know it, they would drive it away deliberately.

Lastly, Waugh criticizes Rossetti on moral grounds: “To the muddled Victorian mind it seemed vaguely suitable that the artist should be melancholy, morbid, uncontrolled, and generally slightly deranged. [. . .] This mischievous misconception found its fulfilment in the ’nineties when, in London and Paris, at any rate, most of the considerable artistic figures were in fact consumptive or perverted or epileptic” (P. 171.) In Waugh's view, Rossetti was a mild case of this as well: “there was fatally lacking in him that essential rectitude that underlies the serenity of all really great art. [. . .] There is a spiritual inadequacy, a sense of ill-organisation about all he did.” (P. 171.)

I guess I shouldn't be surprised to find that I am on the completely opposite side from Waugh on all this. I will never lose the conviction that a true artist should die of poverty and consumption at an age not much above twenty, and my sympathies will always be with the uncontrolled, the slightly deranged, and the perverted. Living a well-ordered and temperate life, and dying of old age in your seventies or eighties, strikes me as a clear proof of an anything but artistic temperament. And frankly, I have no idea what exactly Waugh means by “essential rectitude” and “spiritual inadequacy”, but they sound like something that is at best orthogonal to artistic ability, and at worst actively contrary to it, and clearly Waugh is just projecting his own conservative values onto Rossetti.

Miscellaneous

The introduction mentions Waugh's “small but fluent handwriting, which posed few problems for his typist” (p. xliv), which surprised me since in earlier volumes in this series we often heard how illegible Waugh's handwriting was. Perhaps it got worse later in his career?

Since Waugh wasn't yet well known at the time this book was first published, some reviewers were unsure about his sex; one referred to him as “Miss Waugh” and another wondered “Mr (or is it Miss?) Waugh” (p. xlviii); “Waugh disliked his androynous name” (p. lxi) and wrote an angry letter pointing out that the reviewer should have looked at the dust jacket of the book, which refers to him as “Mr.” several times (p. lxii). :))

Rossetti's grandfather “was a blacksmith at Vasto, in the Abruzzi (or, as one of Rossetti's biographers prefers, ‘connected with the iron trade of that city’)” :)) (p. 4).

When William Morris went to Oxford: “Like many wise people before and after him, he found the life there pitiably disappointing.” (P. 54.) :]

Waugh on Rossetti's poem The Nuptial Sleep: “It is just the sort of poem, both in sentiment and sibilants, that schoolboys write in abundance, and the editors of school magazines have some doubts about accepting. As an example of Rosseti's art it is well left in obscurity.” (P. 126.) :))

William Morris lived in a rather small and crowded house although he was well-off; which Waugh comments on thus: “Perhaps it was his Welsh blood, prompting him to the native cosiness of caves and hovels.” (P. 138.) Wahahaha :))) The editor suggests that Waugh's “comic slurs against the Welsh” may have been prompted by his time working as a teacher in Wales (p. 192).

Waugh spends a lot of time analyzing the composition of Rossetti's paintings, the poses of the characters on them, etc. You can't help admiring his dedication: “I spent an exceedingly ungraceful half-hour before the looking-glass attempting to get into the same position.” (P. 157.)

While working on this book, Waugh met Hall Caine, a writer who had been a friend of Rossetti in his last years (p. 233).

It appears that Waugh remained interested in Rossetti until the very end of his life: amongst Waugh's books now in the Harry Ransom Center in Texas there is a copy of Rosalie Glynn Grylls' Portrait of Rossetti (1964) “with his MS annotations” (p. 274).

Errors

Fortunately for the OUP, it has no reputation left to lose when it comes to errors and misprints. Here are a few that I've noticed:

• When an apostrophe appears at the start of a word, it is often printed as ‘ instead of ’ — again someone has been searching and replacing too naively :) Thus we have “ ‘nineties” (p. xxx; but it's “ ’nineties” correctly on p. 171), “ ‘em” (p. 132), “ ‘fifties” (p. 117).
• “Quin dynasty” (p. 188) should surely be “Qin”.
• “Alexander Dumas” (p. 190) should surely be “Alexandre”.
• A closing ’ is missing after “inpugned” (p. 204; note that the word itself is not an error here, it just reports a misprint in the first edition of the biography).
• A closing ) is missing after “ ‘The Kraken’ ” (p. 242).
• “Prosperine” (p. 263) is obviously Proserpine's richer if less famous cousin :]
• “Dōppelgānger” (p. 62) is an impressively bizarre misprint of “Doppelgänger” — firstly because they used macrons instead of umlauts, and secondly because the o isn't supposed to have an umlaut either...
• “speciman” (p. 88), in a long quote from a book (the original spells it correctly).