The 10 most-cited articles in Notes and Queries, 2016

Most of Wordsworth’s blank verse was composed for his never completed, lifelong project of writing a great philosophic poem, a project that he called ‘The Recluse’. So most of Wordsworth’s blank verse was never published in his lifetime; indeed, most of Wordsworth’s blank verse was left in multiple versions in never finalized manuscripts whose numerous layers of revision are extremely difficult to date and differentiate from each other. Wordsworth only oversaw the publication of one major part of his ‘Recluse’ project— The Excursion , printed in 1814—and as it went to press his sister Dorothy wrote to Catherine Clarkson: ‘We are all most thankful that William has brought his mind to consent to printing so much of this work; for the MSS. were in such a state that, if it had pleased Heaven to take him from this world, they would have been almost useless’. 1 During Wordsworth’s lifetime, most of the rest of ‘The Recluse’ remained in several such states, including the work that his wife posthumously titled The Prelude .

One of the most evocative accounts of the Dissolution of the Monasteries is Michael Sherbrook’s ‘The Fall of the Religious Houses’. 1 Written 1567–91, it provides a sympathetic portrayal of the English monasteries, including a moving description of the ruination and pillaging of Roche Abbey, a Cistercian house in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Sherbrook 2 was a young child at the time of the Suppression but based his account on first-hand sources. These included conversations with his uncle and father, who, although they thought well of the monks, nevertheless participated in the plundering of Roche and profited from its fall. As this note will demonstrate, hitherto overlooked evidence shows that Michael Sherbrook also subsequently obtained an item surviving from the abbey, a late twelfth-century copy of the Flores psalterii by Lethbert of St Ruf (fl. c . 1100). The manuscript is one of only eight books to survive from Roche and is now Cambridge University Library MS Gg. 3. 33 3 (hereafter Gg. 3.33). A small folio measuring 300 × 215 mm (237–40 × 141–7 mm), it has 163 vellum leaves…

DANIEL DEFOE’s three days in the pillory in June 1703 remain one the most recognizable scenes of the early eighteenth century. It was immortalized in the nineteenth century by Eyre Crowe, whose painting of Defoe in the Pillory (1862) helped perpetuate the myth of Defoe as a Whig martyr. Until recently, though, we had ‘only two contemporaneous images of Defoe in the pillory’. 1 The first of these was a crude woodcut from the title page of The Scribler’s Doom: or, The Pillory in Fashion, Being a New Dialogue Between Two Loop-Hole Sufferers, William Fuller and De Fooe (1703). But this image came from a stock woodblock which had been used in earlier prints. Defoe’s identity is simply specified by a capital ‘D’ added in movable type. The second and more famous portrait appeared on the title page to a 1706 piracy of Jure Divino , ‘Printed by P. Hills in Black-Fryars ’. 2 It has since appeared as the frontispiece to Maximillian E. Novak’s Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions (2001), and features on the title page of Jody Greene’s 2011 monograph, The Trouble with Ownership: Literary Property…

Four references to a full-sized chariot property on the Elizabethan stage have been identified thus far. Explicit stage directions in George Gascoigne and Francis Kinwelmershe’s Gray’s Inn drama Jocasta (1566), Christopher Marlowe’s II Tamburlaine ( c . 1588), Thomas Lodge’s The Wounds of Civil War, or Marius and Scilla ( c . 1587–92), and a property description in Philip Henslowe’s Diary each call for a spectacular prop harnessed to either two or four players. Not to be confused with a litter suspended between poles nor draw-and-quartering punishments, the torture chariot of early English theatre seems to have had a very different historical precedent and may have been a more frequent feature of the Lord Admiral’s Men repertory than hitherto supposed. The ancient Greek historian Siculus Diodorus ( c . 60–30 bce ) refers to the particular use of war chariots closely associated with the rule of early Egyptian king, Sesoösis, in his Bibliotheca historica. The story goes that whenever Sesoösis conquered a new city or paid a visit to a venerable temple: he would remove the horses from…

Bodleian Library, MS Laud misc. 77 is an important sermon manuscript, one of two surviving copies of John Waldeby, Augustinian friar of York’s temporale cycle, the ‘Novum opus dominicale’. This copy appears to have been produced around 1400 from materials reasonably proximate to the author, for it also includes the relevant quire of exemplary material Waldeby had prepared for insertion into the sermons—the contents noted in the texts but not written out there—one of several Waldeby mentions having produced as his notes for various uses. This additional material also, rather unusually, has a dated colophon, indicating Waldeby had compiled his text in 1365. Just as the quire of exempla offers rough amplificatory materials for use in a variety of contexts, Waldeby presumably gathered together as consecutive formal argument similar note-like materials that had been used in earlier oral performances. 1 By my count, the Laud manuscript includes thirty-five verse texts, presented in the appendix below. Although the verses accompany Waldeby’s sermons, they are not likely (as Morrin thought)…

THE second Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary , edited by Robert Burchfield between 1957 and 1986, more than doubled the number of literary eponyms in the dictionary, to 167. 1 The first edition of 1933 ( OED1 ), including the first Supplement, had Aristophanic (first attested 1827) and Sophoclean (1649) but not Æschylean (1844) or Euripidean (1821); Ossianesque (1874) but not Omaresque (1892); Coleridgean (1834) but not Southeyan (1817); and so on. In addition to these missing nineteenth-century terms, the second Supplement — and subsequently the integrated second edition of 1989 ( OED2 )—also added a number of newer ones, such as Joycean (1927), Poundian (1939), Woolfian (1936), and Yeatsian (1928). 2 However, although there are headwords in OED2 as recent as Durellian , Gravesian , and Greeneian (all 1961), and as expendable, arguably, as Lylian , Runyonesque , and Pinerotic , there is no Eliotian , Eliotesque , or Eliotic to be found in any edition—including, as of early 2016, the current OED Online ( OED3 ), which is in the midst of a complete revision. This despite…

THAT scholastic philosophers engaged in speculations about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin has long been exposed as a myth invented in the seventeenth century. William Chillingworth is usually identified as the originator of this canard on account of his claim, in The Religion of Protestants (1638), that medieval Catholic theologians routinely occupied themselves with such trivial issues as ‘Whether a Million of Angels may not sit upon a needles point?’ 1 However, there is a hitherto unnoticed seventeenth-century reference to angels and points of needles that is significant not only because it is earlier than Chillingworth’s, but also because it adds a new dimension to this old chestnut, offering a key insight into why the specific image of the point of a needle became part of this popular way of caricaturing scholastic disputations. Previous detective work on this question, much of it helpfully summarized by George MacDonald Ross and Edith Sylla, has failed to uncover a single medieval source that spoke about angels dancing on the head of a pin (or the point of a…

RIDDLE 4 is one of the most enigmatic texts in the Exeter Book Riddle collection and continues to be a subject of speculation for scholars of Old English. Solutions have ranged from ‘bell’, ‘millstone’, ‘flail’, and ‘lock’, to ‘hand-mill’, ‘pen’, and ‘necromancer’.1 None of the solutions are fully satisfying and their drawbacks have been well-noted by Craig Williamson in his 1977 edition of the riddles.2 Two more recent solutions, ‘plough team’ and ‘Devil’ also have their shortcomings.3 I propose the new solution ‘sword’ and believe that this solution adequately accounts for all of the diverse enigmatic clues, from the multitude of rings to the warm limb and foolish master. Two other Exeter Book riddles, 20 and 71, have also been solved as ‘sword’ (Hilda Ellis Davidson’s suggestion that Riddle 80 is also ‘sword’ is relatively sound),4 and Riddle 4 clearly draws on some of their motifs. Here is Riddle 4 in full, followed by my own translation:

I was inspired by a recent episode of In Our Time1 to examine Micrographia2 again, because Baron Bragg mentioned crystals from urinal waste water magnified by Robert Hooke (1635–1703) which were remarkable enough to include in a book devoted to attractive and interesting micrographs. Most of Hooke’s subjects were novel but immediately understandable objects, such as fleas, lice, or wood, highly magnified and presented as his own engravings of high and artistic quality, where it is easy to see how they were stylized3 to some degree, especially when they are viewed next to modern photomicrographs. His images of urinal crystals are an exception to this subject matter and were completely unfamiliar to his contemporaries and additionally from an almost unmentionable source. His readers would not have been able to make them correspond to any of their own experiences and might not have wanted to try. However, even though the shapes of Hooke’s crystals were shown in a stylized engraving, I propose an identity for them because their shape corresponds to the experience of a modern…

EVER since John Manningham wrote his diary note on a performance of Twelfth Night that he attended in February 1602 (o.s. 1601), the main source for Shakespeare’s play has been ultimately traced back to the play Gli Ingannati , by the Sienese Accademia degli Intronati (performed in 1532; first published in 1537 and then reprinted several times down to the 1611 collected edition of the Commedie degli Accademici Intronati ). 1 We also know that Shakespeare took additional elements from various versions of this plot available at the time, either in Italian or in French translation. He must also have consulted the English version, entitled ‘Of Apolonius and Silla’, included in Barnabe Riche’s Farewell to Military Profession (1581). Riche’s collection of short stories additionally contains a tale (‘Of Two Brethren and Their Wives’) that seems to have furnished Shakespeare with elements of the Malvolio plot. The main source of the latter, however, has recently been identified as the punishment of a character called ‘Bonifacio’ in Giordano Bruno’s only play, Candelaio , printed in Paris in…