Things I Have Read

Written in Italian, published in 1532, meant to be a rallying cry for Italy to overcome its former oppressors, a political treatise on how t...

Wow. So this is the book on Chastity, ostensibly focusing on Britomart, who is held up as one of the two (after Gloriana) examples of Eliz...

This one was a doozie. Let's see. Canto 7 - Guyon goes with Mammon into the underworld, where he's tempted by three temptations (av...

I have less to say about Guyon, the knight of Temperance. He travels with a Palmer dressed in black (and who is called, sometimes, the black...

Today I read the conclusion of the first book. Crazy. Crazy good. Again, the sense of it is sometimes, or even often, adopted from medieval...

There are times when the stretch towards allegory seems sincere. There are the two Cantos (4 and 5) that are focused on Pride. Pride is a pa...

I was reading some Richard Lovelace today. A Royalist during the English Civil War, he ended up getting imprisoned in 1642 and again in 1648...