J.W. Binns

I can't cite any other work in English quite like James W. Binns' Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: The Latin Writings of the Age (1990) ; Francis Cairns, Ltd. (Leeds, U.K.)

Binns' work here is a general survey of the place, importance and typical forms of practice in English culture of latin writing from approximately 1530 to 1640. The book is a mine of fascinating information about this period and a picture of the habits and the concerns of the most highly literate people of the time. It's hard to think of any aspect of Elizabethan and Jacobean historical interest which could not be enriched and rewarded by a reading of Binns.

The organization of the work affords the reader a choice of reading it as a narrative account or using it as a handbook and guide to which he may turn directly to the various topics treated without having read prior chapters. There's a “Who's Who” of medieval and renaissance writers of latin and lists of their published works given in appendices; there's a bibliography of modern scholarship and a general index to the text. The work is brimming with references to endnotes citations, often in either Latin, or an English translation of Latin or both of these elaborate the main text's arguments,

This book is brilliant, a treasure, and, for those who are studying the period of the work of Edward Oxford under his pen-name. “William Shakespeare,” it is window on the intellectual world of that time and its antecedents,… (mais)