This reading of Milton juxtaposes the poet's theology and Freud's account of the Oedipus complex in ways that yield both new understanding of Milton and a model for psychoanalytic interpretation of literature.

The book ranges widely through the art and life of Milton, including extensive discussions of his theological irregularities and the significance, medical and symbolic, he assigned to his blindness. Kerrigan analyzes the oedipal aspect of Milton's religion; examines the nature of the Miltonic godhead; studies Milton's analogies linking human, angelic, and cosmic bodies; and explores Milton's symbolism of home. In a commanding demonstration, Kerrigan delineates how the great epic and the psyche of its author bestow meaning on each other.

Offering a unique historical perspective to the study of medieval English drama, Heather Hill-Vásquez in Sacred Players argues that different treatments of audience and performance in the early drama indicate that the performance life of the drama may have continued well beyond its traditional placement in medieval history and into the Reformation and Renaissance eras.

A long-awaited reevaluation of Chaucer through the lens of sacrifice by a major figure in medieval studies. Historicism and its discontents have long been central to the work of Louise Fradenburg, one of the world's most original and provocative literary medievalists. Sacrifice Your Love brings this interest to bear on Chaucer's writing and his world, rethought in light of a theory of sacrifice and its part in cultural production. Fradenburg writes the "history of the signifier"--a way of reading change in the symbolic order--and its role in making sacrifice enjoyable. Sacrifice Your Love develops the idea that sacrifice is a mode of enjoyment-that our willingness to sacrifice our desire is actually a way of pursuing it. Fradenburg considers the implications of this idea for various problems important in medieval studies today-how to understand the religiosity of cultural forms, particularly chivalry, in the later Middle Ages and how to understand the ethics of Chaucer's famously nondidactic poetry-as well as in other fields of inquiry. A major rethinking of Chaucer, Sacrifice Your Love works in depth as well as across a broad range of topics from medievalism to psychoanalysis, advancing both the theory and practice of a new kind of historicist approach. L. O. Aranye Fradenburg is professor of English, women's studies, and comparative literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

This volume investigates the state of same-sex relations in later medieval England, drawing on a remarkably rich array of primary sources from the period that include legal documents, artworks, theological treatises, and poetry. Tom Linkinen uses those sources to build a framework of medieval condemnations of same-sex intimacy and desire and then shows how same-sex sexuality reflected“and was inflected by“gender hierarchies, approaches to crime, and the conspicuous silence on the matter in the legal systems of the period.

While Scribit Mater highlights different medieval English understandings of the Virgin's sapient eloquence according to class, education, and gender, it demonstrates long-standing and widespread traditions acknowledging and celebrating the Mother's verbal prowess.

    Searching for Jane Austen demolishes with wit and vivacity the often-held view of "Jane," a decorous maiden aunt writing her small drawing-room stories of teas and balls. Emily Auerbach presents a different Jane Austen—a brilliant writer who, despite the obstacles facing women of her time, worked seriously on improving her craft and became one of the world’s greatest novelists, a master of wit, irony, and character development.
    In this beautifully illustrated and lively work, Auerbach surveys two centuries of editing, censoring, and distorting Austen’s life and writings. Auerbach samples Austen’s flamboyant, risqué adolescent works featuring heroines who get drunk, lie, steal, raise armies, and throw rivals out of windows. She demonstrates that Austen constantly tested and improved her skills by setting herself a new challenge in each of her six novels.
    In addition, Auerbach considers Austen’s final irreverent writings, discusses her tragic death at the age of forty-one, and ferrets out ridiculous modern adaptations and illustrations, including ads, cartoons, book jackets, newspaper articles, plays, and films from our own time. An appendix reprints a ground-breaking article that introduced Mark Twain’s "Jane Austen," an unfinished and unforgettable essay in which Twain and Austen enter into mortal combat. 

Born to merchant-class parents who served in the court of Henry VIII and his queens, Anne Vaughan Lock lived in London and Exeter, spent time in Geneva as a religious exile, belonged to the Cooke sisters’ political-religious circle, maintained friendships with prominent Protestant leaders, and engaged the issues of her day. As a recognized public figure, she took on the roles of reformer, poet, translator, correspondent, spiritual counselor, and political advocate. During her lifetime, she published two books, both of which were reprinted several times.

This volume provides a collection of Lock’s works presented in modern spelling, and it includes additional contemporary materials that place her voice in the larger context of the Tudor period, offering insight into the intertwined complexities of political, social, and religious life in sixteenth-century England.
 

Sense and Sensibility (1811) marked the auspicious debut of a novelist identified only as “A Lady.” Jane Austen’s name has since become as familiar as Shakespeare’s, and her tale of two sisters has lost none of its power to delight. Patricia Meyer Spacks guides readers to a deeper appreciation of the richness of Austen’s delineation of her heroines, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, as they experience love, romance, and heartbreak. On display again in the editor’s running commentary are the wit and light touch that delighted readers of Spacks’s Pride and Prejudice: An Annotated Edition.

In her notes, Spacks elucidates language and allusions that have become obscure (What are Nabobs? When is rent day?), draws comparisons to Austen’s other work and to that of her precursors, and gives an idea of how other critics have seen the novel. In her introduction and annotations, she explores Austen’s sympathy with both Elinor and Marianne, the degree to which the sisters share “sense” and “sensibility,” and how they must learn from each other. Both manage to achieve security and a degree of happiness by the novel’s end. Austen’s romance, however, reveals darker overtones, and Spacks does not leave unexamined the issue of the social and psychological restrictions of women in Austen’s era.

As with other volumes in Harvard’s series of Austen novels, Sense and Sensibility: An Annotated Edition comes handsomely illustrated with numerous color reproductions that vividly recreate Austen’s world. This will be an especially welcome addition to the library of any Janeite.

Sexual blackmail first reached public notice in the late eighteenth century when laws against sodomy were exploited by the unscrupulous to extort money from those they could entrap. Angus McLaren chronicles this parasitic crime, tracing its expansion in England and the United States through the Victorian era and into the first half of the twentieth century. The labeling of certain sexual acts as disreputable, if not actually criminal--abortion, infidelity, prostitution, and homosexuality--armed would-be blackmailers and led to a crescendo of court cases and public scandals in the 1920s and 1930s. As the importance of sexual respectability was inflated, so too was the spectacle of its loss.

Charting the rise and fall of sexual taboos and the shifting tides of shame, McLaren enables us to survey evolving sexual practices and discussions. He has mined the archives to tell his story through a host of fascinating characters and cases, from male bounders to designing women, from badger games to gold diggers, from victimless crimes to homosexual outing. He shows how these stories shocked, educated, entertained, and destroyed the lives of their victims. He also demonstrates how muckraking journalists, con men, and vengeful women determined the boundaries of sexual respectability and damned those considered deviant. Ultimately, the sexual revolution of the 1960s blurred the long-rigid lines of respectability, leading to a rapid decline of blackmail fears. This fascinating view of the impact of regulating sexuality from the late Victorian Age to our own time demonstrates the centrality of blackmail to sexual practices, deviance, and the law.

More than a literary study, this book is an analysis of sexual attitudes and practices in the Romantic period, and a contribution to the history and theory of feminism. Shelley is shown to have anticipated in many ways the work of modern students of human sexual behavior. He was strikingly ahead of his time in his attitude toward women: his ideal of love postulated the equality of the sexes, and his theory of psychosexual identification, like mated to like, extended the feminist ideology of his mother-in-law, Mary Wollstonecraft. Moreover, in his own person and practice he came close to the androgynous ideal of the modern woman's movement.

In exploring the many aspects of his subject, Brown compares Shelley with his contemporaries, particularly Byron, and draws upon extensive research into the laws, ideas, and practices of the period.

What is ambition, and what are its consequences, in Shakespearean drama? This compelling interpretation of eight major plays reveals a Shakespeare who understands ambition as a doomed but necessary struggle against the limitations of the inherited self. Through vivid new readings of such crucial moments as Henry V's rejection of Falstaff, Macbeth's defeat by the advancing Birnam Wood, and Coriolanus' crisis at the gates of Rome, Robert Watson delineates a pattern of poetic justice whereby characters who disdain their places in nature's system forfeit the benefits that nature normally offers. Watson also amends the insights of psychoanalytic critics by demonstrating that Shakespeare uses Oedipal impulses and unnatural births as metaphors for the forbidden act of remaking the self: conceiving a new identity entails a symbolically incestuous defiance of the father's authority.

By tracing the evolution of this Shakespearean myth of ambition and exploring its analogues in many less familiar Renaissance texts, Watson illuminates the ethical perspective of the playwright and provides a bold new approach to the sexual symbolism of the plays. The persistence of the mythic pattern across different types of play (history, tragedy, and romance) and different modes of aspiration (political, martial, and spiritual) indicates that Shakespeare perceives ambition as a moral and dramatic problem in its own right, with its own special properties and its own weighty ambiguities.

Upon the death of his father Morris at age 82, Lennard Davis found among his effects a trove of letters, kept in careful chronological order, that dated from 1936. The letters ended in 1938, when Eva Weintrobe came to America to marry Morris, and they provide the core of Shall I Say A Kiss?, their courtship by correspondence. In his framing comments, Davis speculates that his parents met perhaps four or five times before they wed, a fact that heightens the importance of these letters to their fate. Davis illustrates vast contrasts between Morris and Eva, both to each other (Morris was 38; Eva was 26), and to themselves in later life as witnessed by their son. Where Davis saw his father brimming with confidence and a sense of superior intellect while his mother acted as the reserved, dutiful wife, he was startled to learn through their letters that she could be the shrewd questioning correspondent even as his father wrote as an unsure, imploring suitor.

       Shall I Say A Kiss? opens a window into the lives of two working-class, Jewish, British, Deaf people in the 1930s. This striking book reveals a consistent, journal-like account of the “lived” experience of Deaf people during the tumultuous times just prior to World War II. Because the correspondence is mainly composed of Eva’s letters, the focus sharpens even further as a record of the life and opinions of a young, working-class, Deaf woman about to embark upon marriage and life in a new country. The challenges she faced, including de facto racial barriers for both deaf and Jewish immigrants, and the prospect of uniting with a man she knew mostly through his letters alone, make for a compelling and emotional trip through her life. Shall I Say A Kiss? serves as a singular social document and also as an engaging and often moving narrative that will win audiences among academics and romantics alike.

On Black Bartholomew’s Day—August 24, 1662—nearly two thousand ministers denied the authority of the Church of England and were subsequently removed from their posts. Mary Franklin was the wife of Presbyterian minister Robert Franklin, one of the dissenting ministers ejected from their pulpits and their livings on that day. She recorded the experience of her persecution in the unused pages of her husband’s sermon notebook. In 1782—some hundred years after the composition of her grandmother’s narrative— Mary’s granddaughter, Hannah Burton, took up this same notebook to chronicle her experience as an impoverished widow, barely surviving the economic revolutions of eighteenth-century London.
           
Collected for the first time, this volume of the Franklin Family Papers offers rare insight into the personal lives of three generations of dissenting women.
 

The history of modern-day old clothes recycling begins with a thing called shoddy. Starting in the early 1800s, shoddy was the name given to a new material made from reclaimed wool, and to one of the earliest forms of industrial recycling. Old rags and leftover fabric clippings were ground to bits by a machine known as “the devil” and then re-used. Usually undisclosed, shoddy–also known as reworked wool–became suit jackets, army blankets, mattress stuffing, and much more. Shoddy is the afterlife of rags. And Shoddy, the book, reveals hidden worlds of textile intrigue.
 
In Shoddy: From Devil’s Dust to the Renaissance of Rags, Hanna Rose Shell takes readers on a journey to discover shoddy, from Haiti to the “shoddy towns” of West Yorkshire in England, to the United States, back in time to the British cholera epidemics and the American Civil War, and into agricultural fields, textile labs, and rag-shredding factories. Shell’s narrative is both literary and historical, drawing on an extraordinary range of sources, from court cases to military uniforms, mattress labels to medical textbooks, political cartoons to high art. Shoddy moves between genres, bringing richly drawn characters and unexpected objects to life. Along the way, shoddy becomes equally an evocative object and a portal into another world.
 
Almost since the time it first appeared, shoddy was both ubiquitous and controversial. In part because it was often so hard to detect, it was inherently suspicious. Public health experts worried about sanitation and disease—how could old clothes be disinfected? As well, the idea of wearing someone else’s old clothes so close to your own skin was discomforting in and of itself. Could you sleep peacefully knowing that your mattress was very likely to be stuffed with dead soldiers’ overcoats? The use of the term “virgin” wool, the idea of virginity in relation to clothes, in fact emerged as an effort by the wool industry to counter shoddy’s appeal: to make shoddy seem shoddy. Over time, shoddy would capture a host of personal, ethical, commercial, and societal failings. And yet, there was always, within shoddy, the alluring concept of regeneration, of what we today think of as conscious clothing, eco-fashion, sustainable textiles.
 
Shell exposes an interwoven tale of industrial espionage, political infighting, scientific inquiry, ethnic prejudices, and war profiteering. Discarded clothes may make many journeys over the course of several lifetimes. Not only in your garments, but under your rug, in your mattress pads, piano blankets, in the peculiar confetti-like stuffing in your mailing envelopes, even in the insulation in your walls. Though it began with wool, over the past century the shredding “devil” has turned to synthetics from nylon stockings to Kevlar. Shoddy is likely connected to something you are wearing right now. After reading, you will never use the word shoddy or think about your clothes, the environment, sustainability, or the intermingled world around you the same way again.
 

A berserk elephant gunned down in the heart of London, a machine for composing Latin hexameters, and the original rock band (1841)—these are but three of the sights that London curiosity–seekers from every walk of life paid to see from the Elizabethan era to the mid–Victorian period. Examining hundreds of the wonderfully varied exhibitions that culminated in the Crystal Palace of 1851, this generously illustrated book sheds light on a vast and colorful expanse of English social history that has thus far remained wholly unsurveyed.

Drawing on a wealth of never-before-used information, Mr. Altick traces London exhibitions as they evolved from the display of relics in pre-Reformation churches, through the collections of eighteenth-century virtuosi, to the first science museums and public art galleries. He also narrates for the first time the history of the panorama and diorama as an influential genre of nineteenth-century popular art. At every point, the London shows are linked to the prevailing intellectual atmosphere and to trends in public taste.

The material is fresh and fascinating; the range--from freaks to popular science, from the funeral effigies at Westminster Abbey to Madame Tussaud's waxworks--impressive. Like the exhibitions that best served the Victorian ideal of mass culture, The Shows of London is both entertaining and informative.

Charles Wheatstone began his life-long involvement with electrical engineering in the days when it was still at the stage of 'philosophical toys', yet he had a vision of telecommunications that could deliver printed messages around the world. With W.E. Cooke he developed the first practical electric telegraph. The problems of operating telegraphs over long distances led him into the field of electrical measurements.

That Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792) became the most fashionable painter of his time was not simply due to his artistic gifts or good fortune. The art of pleasing, Richard Wendorf contends, was as much a part of Reynolds’s success—in his life and in his work—as the art of painting. The author’s examination of Reynolds’s life and career illuminates the nature of eighteenth-century English society in relation to the enterprise of portrait-painting. Conceived as an experiment in cultural criticism, written along the fault lines that separate (but also link) art history and literary studies, Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Painter in Society explores the ways in which portrait-painting is embedded in the social fabric of a given culture as well as in the social and professional transaction between the artist and his or her subject. In addition to providing a new view of Reynolds, Wendorf’s book develops a thoroughly new way of interpreting portraiture.

Wendorf takes us into Reynolds’s studio to show us the artist deploying his considerable social and theatrical skills in staging his sittings as carefully orchestrated performances. The painter’s difficult relationship with his sister Frances (also an artist and writer), his complicated maneuvering with patrons, the manner in which he set himself up as an artist and businessman, his highly politicized career as the first president of the Royal Academy of Arts: as each of these aspects of Reynolds’s practice comes under Wendorf’s scrutiny, a new picture of the painter emerges—more sharply defined and fully fleshed than the Reynolds of past portraits, and clearly delineating his capacity for provoking ambivalence among friends and colleagues, and among viewers and readers today.

In 1853, Eyre Crowe, a young British artist, visited a slave auction in Richmond, Virginia. Harrowed by what he witnessed, he captured the scene in sketches that he would later develop into a series of illustrations and paintings, including the culminating painting, Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia.

Each generation finds in Chaucer’s works the concerns and themes of its own era. But what of Chaucer’s contemporaries? For whom was he writing? With what expectations would his original audience have approached his works? In what terms did he and his audience understand their society, and how does his poetry embody a view of society?

These are some of the questions Paul Strohm addresses in this innovative look at the historical Chaucer. Fourteenth-century English society was, he reminds us, in a state of accelerating transition: feudalism was yielding to capitalism, and traditional ways of understanding one’s place in society were contending with new social paradigms. Those like Chaucer who lived on the fringe of gentility were particularly sensitive to these changes. Their social position opened the way to attractive possibilities, even as it exposed them to special perils.

Strohm draws on seldom-considered documents to describe Chaucer’s social circle and its experiences, and he relates this circle to implied and fictional audiences in the texts. Moving between major works like the Canterbury Tales and less frequently discussed works like Complaint of Mars, he suggests that Chaucer’s poetry not only reproduces social tensions of the time but also proposes conciliatory alternatives. His analysis yields a fuller understanding of Chaucer’s world and new insight into the social implications of literary forms and styles.

The Ancrene Wisse is a spiritual guide for female recluses, written at the request of three young anchoresses who were voluntarily enclosed for life within small cells. With rare sensitivity and discernment, Linda Georgianna analyzes this complex and skillfully composed treatise and examines its detailed portrayal of the rich, sometimes rewarding and sometimes frustrating inner life of the solitary. Georgianna sees in the author’s practical and spiritual counsel, ranging from advice on owning a cat to the confession of sin, an assumption that exterior and interior realities are inextricably bound in the solitary life, which becomes a highly self-conscious journey through human experience.

The Solitary Self offers both a reading of this linguistically difficult text and a study of those contemporary intellectual and cultural concerns—particularly the widespread interest in the psychology of sin, confession, and repentance—which help to explain the Ancrene Wisse author’s insistence upon self-awareness and individuality in the solitary life.

In October 1656 James Nayler, a prominent Quaker leader--second only to George Fox in the nascent movement--rode into Bristol surrounded by followers singing hosannas in deliberate imitation of Jesus' entry into Jerusalem. In Leo Damrosch's trenchant reading this incident and the extraordinary outrage it ignited shed new light on Cromwell's England and on religious thought and spirituality in a turbulent period.

Damrosch gives a clear picture of the origins and early development of the Quaker movement, elucidating the intellectual foundations of Quaker theology. A number of central issues come into sharp relief, including gender symbolism and the role of women, belief in miraculous cures, and--particularly in relation to the meaning of the entry into Bristol--"signs of the in-dwelling spirit." Damrosch's account of the trial and savage punishment of Nayler for blasphemy exposes the politics of the Puritan response, the limits to Cromwellian religious liberalism.

The Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus is at once a study of antinomian religious thought, of an exemplary individualist movement that suddenly found itself obliged to impose order, and of the ways in which religious and political ideas become intertwined in a period of crisis. It is also a vivid portrait of a fascinating man.

Sound Authorities shows how experiences of music and sound played a crucial role in nineteenth-century scientific inquiry in Britain.

In Sound Authorities, Edward J. Gillin focuses on hearing and aurality in Victorian Britain, claiming that the development of the natural sciences in this era cannot be understood without attending to the study of sound and music.

During this time, scientific practitioners attempted to fashion themselves as authorities on sonorous phenomena, coming into conflict with traditional musical elites as well as religious bodies. Gillin pays attention to sound in both musical and nonmusical contexts, specifically the cacophony of British industrialization. Sound Authorities begins with the place of acoustics in early nineteenth-century London, examining scientific exhibitions, lectures, spectacles, workshops, laboratories, and showrooms. He goes on to explore how mathematicians mobilized sound in their understanding of natural laws and their vision of a harmonious ordered universe. In closing, Gillin delves into the era’s religious and metaphysical debates over the place of music (and humanity) in nature, the relationship between music and the divine, and the tensions between spiritualist understandings of sound and scientific ones.

“This is the book we have been waiting for… a permanent enrichment of our understanding of the Oxford Movement” proclaimed The Downside Review upon the publication of Christopher Dawson’s masterwork in 1933, exactly 100 years after John Keble’s sermon "National Apostasy" stirred a nation. Dawson himself regarded the book as one of his two greatest intellectual accomplishments. Dawson and John Henry Newman were Oxonians and both were converts to Catholicism; both stood against progressive and liberal movements within society. In both ideologies, Dawson saw a pathway that had once led to the French Revolution. Newman, for Dawson, was a kindred spirit. In The Spirit of the Oxford Movement, Dawson goes beyond a mere retelling of the events of 1833 - 1845. He shows us the prime movers who sought a deeper understanding of the Anglican tradition: the quixotic Hurrell Froude, for instance, who "had none of the English genius for compromise or the Anglican faculty of shutting the eyes to unpleasant facts." It was Froude who brought Newman and Keble together and who helped them understand each other. In many ways, Dawson sees these three as the true embodiment of the Tractarian ethos. Dawson probes deeply, though, to provide a richer, clearer understanding of the intellectual underpinnings of the Oxford Movement, revealing its spiritual raison d’être. We meet a group of gifted like-minded thinkers, albeit with sharp disagreements, who mock outsiders and each other, who pepper their letters with Latin, and forever urge each other on. Newman came to believe, as did Dawson, that the only intellectually coherent bastion against secular culture was religion, and the “on” to which they were urged was the Catholic church. The Spirit of the Oxford Movement provides insights into why Newman, and Dawson, came to this understanding.

This sparkling account of the great age of Whiggery during the reigns of George I and II is distinguished by its attention to social history. The author deftly explains how the political transformation which brought an end to the “rage of party” under Queen Anne and ushered in the “strife of faction” under the Hanoverians was related to social and economic conditions. This major political change brought stability to England and—by important, though incremental shifts in mobility, religion, agriculture, industry, and literacy—slowly transformed English society.

W. A. Speck argues that in 1714 England was ruled by rival elites called Tory and Whig and that by 1760 they had fused to form a ruling class. This union became possible as divisive issues faded and economic and political interests were shared. Whiggery itself, however, split apart for lesser reasons. “Country” Whigs were restorationists on moral and religious grounds while “Court” Whigs—neither Saints, nor Spartans, nor Reformers—created the mechanisms to realize the promise of the Glorious Revolution of 1689: mixed monarchy, property and liberty, and Protestantism.

Stability and Strife is the most up-to-date book in English eighteenth-century history in its methods—the use of social science data and literary sources—and in its sophisticated topical and narrative approaches to this fascinating era.

A comprehensive historical study into the birth of the law and legal courts in early modern Britain.
 
Star Chamber Matters details some of the fascinating, tragic, and startling cases brought before the Star Chamber, an English court that sat at the Royal Palace of Westminster from the late fifteenth century to the mid-seventeenth century. Through close examination of the breadth and depth of cases brought before the court in its day, readers will experience the trials and tribulations of life, love, and death in Tudor Britain. These cases touch on changing gender roles, shifting religious views, and more. Star Chamber Matters witnesses the birth of English common and civil law as we know it today.

Welcoming 800,000 visitors each year, Stonehenge is the most famous prehistoric monument in all of Europe. It has inspired modern replicas throughout the world, including one constructed entirely of discarded refrigerators. This curious structure is the subject of cult worship, is a source of pride for Britons, and offers an intellectual challenge for academics. It has captured the imagination and the attention of thousands of people for thousands of years.

Over the centuries, “experts” have tried to discover the meaning behind Stonehenge. While each new theory contradicts earlier speculation, every new proposal attributes a purpose to the site. From bards of the twelfth century to Black Sabbath, from William Blake to archaeologists of the twenty-first century, Stonehenge has embodied a wealth of intention. Was it designed for winter solstice, for goddess worship, or as a funerary temple? While all have been suggested, even “proven,” the mystery continues.

Through the eyes of its most eloquent apologists, Rosemary Hill guides the reader on a tour of Stonehenge in all its cultural contexts, as a monument to many things—to Renaissance Humanism, Romantic despair, Victorian enterprise, and English Radicalism. In the end, the stones remain compelling because they remain mysterious—apparently simple yet incomprehensible—that is the wonder, the enchantment, of Stonehenge.

Lavishly illustrated with full-color geological maps, tables of strata, geological cross-sections, photographs, and fossil illustrations from the archives of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, the Geological Society, the London Natural History Museum, and others, Strata provides the first complete presentation of the revolutionary work of nineteenth-century geologist William Smith, the so-called father of English geology. It illustrates the story of his career, from apprentice to surveyor for hire and fossil collector, from his 1799 geological map of Bath and table of strata to his groundbreaking 1815 geological strata map, and from his imprisonment for debt to his detailed stratigraphical county maps.
 
This sumptuous volume begins with an introduction by Douglas Palmer that places Smith’s work in the context of earlier, concurrent, and subsequent ideas regarding the structure and natural processes of the earth, geographical mapping, and biostratigraphical theories. The book is then organized into four parts, each beginning with four sheets from Smith’s hand-colored, 1815 strata map, accompanied by related geological cross-sections and county maps, and followed by fossil illustrations by Smith contemporary James Sowerby, all organized by strata. Essays between each section explore the aims of Smith’s work and its application in the fields of mining, agriculture, cartography and hydrology. Strata concludes with reflections on Smith’s later years as an itinerant geologist and surveyor, plagiarism by a rival, receipt of the first Wollaston Medal in recognition of his achievements, and the influence of his geological mapping and biostratigraphical theories on the sciences—all of which culminated in the establishment of the modern geological timescale.
 
Featuring a foreword by Robert Macfarlane, Strata is a glorious testament to the lasting geological and illustrative genius of William Smith, a collection as colossal and awe-inspiring as the layers of the Earth themselves.

In 1967 the world of Milton studies was divided into two armed camps: one proclaiming (in the tradition of Blake and Shelley) that Milton was of the devil's party with or without knowing it, the other proclaiming (in the tradition of Addison and C. S. Lewis) that the poet's sympathies are obviously with God and the angels loyal to him.

The achievement of Stanley Fish's Surprised by Sin was to reconcile the two camps by subsuming their claims in a single overarching thesis: Paradise Lost is a poem about how its readers came to be the way they are--that is, fallen--and the poem's lesson is proven on a reader's impulse every time he or she finds a devilish action attractive or a godly action dismaying.

Fish's argument reshaped the face of Milton studies; thirty years later the issues raised in Surprised by Sin continue to set the agenda and drive debate.