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New Money
Lauren Kane
New Money
In the new economy of the late Middle Ages, an emergent merchant class was forced into both a social and spiritual reckoning.
Katie Trumpener
A Eulogy of Failed Remembrance
Alexander Kluge’s account of the Allied air raid on his hometown in Germany, while suffering memory lapses of its own, examines the city’s amnesia as a defense against terror.
Anahid Nersessian
Transmissions from Another World
The first collections of Annelyse Gelman and Elisa Gonzalez are haunted by grief and confront the question of whether lyric poetry still offers something no other medium can.
Song of the Disgraced Person
As a fire axe waits in its little shop window
As a tongue returns raw to the lozenge
It’s not your fault you’re like this, but you are
As consternation at the departure gate
As drinking water to find it creamy
As the linseed head of an ant might contain
a social code in play…
Free from the Archives
Four hundred and sixty-six years ago today, French forces recaptured the city of Calais, which had been under English control since 1347. One of the final agents of the English Crown to rule the Pale of Calais was Arthur Plantagenet, Lord Lisle, an illegitimate son of Edward IV who, alongside his wife, Honor Grenville, was the writer and recipient of the Lisle Letters, a set of some 3,000 pieces of correspondence that is one of the most detailed surviving records of the life and politics of Tudor England.
In the Review’s June 11, 1981, issue, the Oxford historian Christopher Hill examined the letters upon the publication of the first annotated, edited edition, “a work of nearly 4,000 pages.”
Christopher Hill
Tiptoe Through the Tudors
“Most interesting, however, is the very full picture we gain of social relations. In peasant society, when a family killed a pig, the neighbors came and helped, receiving cuts from the carcass in return; the gift was expected to be reciprocated on a later occasion. Similarly, when a gentleman went hunting he was likely to slaughter more game than his household could consume: boars’ heads and sides of venison were distributed to friends and neighbors, again in the expectation of return favors.”
