Not Thomas Traherne, whose beautiful mysticism demands a high price of entry, or Andrew Marvell, a chameleon whose politics are now so distant. Not Ben Jonson, who is so clearly of the Renaissance, or sublime George Herbert, enmeshed in the theology of his day. In her exquisitely written, perceptive, and moving Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne (FSG, 2022), the British scholar Katherine Rundell argues that Donne’s “writing is itself a kind of alchemy: a mix of unlikely ingredients which spark into gold.” No 17th-century poet still reads quite as shockingly new as Donne does. Paul’s Cathedral-the most transcendent devotional poet and the greatest erotic poet the English language ever produced, not in spite of those qualities but because of them. Jack records being taken to witness other scaffolds graced with the Church’s saints and recalls how Protestants jeered and Catholics would “pray to him whose body lay there dead as if he had more respect, and better access to heaven.” When he wrote those words, he was no longer young Jack but rather Dr.
However, Jack wouldn’t see Jasper beheaded the queen was lenient and exiled the priest instead. This wasn’t hyperbole Jack’s brother died of the plague in Newgate Prison in 1593, punished for harboring a priest. While preparing for his own execution, Jasper was visited by his sister and young nephew Jack, who decades later wrote, “I have been ever kept awake in a meditation of martyrdom … as, I believe, no family… hath endured and suffered more in their persons and fortunes, for obeying the teachers of the Roman doctrine, than it hath done.” Elizabeth’s brothers, both of whom became Jesuit priests, divided the divine dentistry between them, with Jasper Heywood clinging to that relic when he was later imprisoned in the Tower of London under suspicion of helping to organize a Catholic rebellion. His daughter bribed the executioner for her father’s head, which she pickled in wine and spices her cousins, the Heywoods, were gifted only a molar, and even that was split down the root. The former Lord High Chancellor of England and author of Utopia, More was convicted of treason and executed in 1535. Gossips maintained that Elizabeth Heywood, the well-bred matron of a recusant family, carried within a pouch the head of her illustrious granduncle Thomas More, though this was not the case.
0 kommentar(er)
