Enfilade

Marking Earth Day (with Arbor Day just around the corner, on April 28) . . . distributed by The University of Chicago Press:

Peter Dale and Brandon Yen, Versed in Living Nature: Wordsworth’s Trees (London: Reaktion Books, 2022), 256 pages, ISBN: ‎ 978-1789146448, $40.

Verdant with illustrations, a meditation upon the rootedness of trees in Wordsworth’s writing and beyond.

This is the first book to address William Wordsworth’s profound identification of the spirit of nature in trees. It looks at what trees meant to him, and how he represented them in his poetry and prose: the symbolic charm of blasted trees, a hawthorn at the heart of Irish folk belief, great oaks that embodied naval strength, yews that tell us about both longevity and the brevity of human life. Linking poetry and literary history with ecology, Versed in Living Nature explores intricate patterns of personal and local connections that enabled trees—as living things, cultural topics, horticultural objects, and even commodities—to be imagined, theorized, discussed, and exchanged. In this book, the literary past becomes the urgent present.

Peter Dale lives in Essex. His previous books include The Irish Garden: A Cultural History. Brandon C. Yen divides his time between the United Kingdom and Taiwan. He is the author of ‘The Excursion’ and Wordsworth’s Iconography.

C O N T E N T S

Preface
1  Between the Royal Oak and the Liberty Tree
2  An Ash Tree in Cambridge
3  Yews and the Earth
4  Ways of Seeing
5  Gardens and Parklands
6  Peregrinations
7  Scotland, 1803
8  Burns Taking Root in Cumbria
9  A Voyage to Ireland
Epilogue

References
Further Reading
Acknowledgments
Photo Acknolwedgments
Index

From Macmillan:

Paterson Joseph, The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho: A Novel (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2023), 432 pages, ISBN: ‎978-1250880376, £17 / $28.

It’s finally time for Charles Ignatius Sancho to tell his story, one that begins on a slave ship in the Atlantic and ends at the very center of London life. . . . A lush and immersive tale of adventure, artistry, romance, and freedom set in eighteenth-century England and based on a true story

It’s 1746 and Georgian London is not a safe place for a young Black man. Charles Ignatius Sancho must dodge slave catchers and worse, and his main ally—a kindly duke who taught him to write—is dying. Sancho is desperate and utterly alone. So how does the same Charles Ignatius Sancho meet the king, write and play highly acclaimed music, become the first Black person to vote in Britain, and lead the fight to end slavery? Through every moment of this rich, exuberant tale, Sancho forges ahead to see how much he can achieve in one short life: “I had little right to live, born on a slave ship where my parents both died. But I survived, and indeed, you might say I did more.”

Paterson Joseph is an award-winning actor who has been fascinated by Sancho for many years. He wrote and starred in the play Sancho: An Act of Remembrance in 2018, which was staged in the UK as well as the US. A veteran of the stage, TV, and film, Paterson has appeared on The Mosquito Coast, an Apple TV+ original series; Doctor Who; Noughts + Crosses; and other BBC programs. The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho is his first novel.

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Thomas Mallon recently reviewed the book for The New York Times (11 April 2023), observing that

. . . in an author’s note, Joseph explains his desire to present Black English characters “in the form in which I met Oliver Twist, David Copperfield and Jane Eyre.” Entering the realm of fiction, he catches the genre’s particular mood in Sancho’s 18th century. All the sudden shifts in fortune, the deathbeds and legacies, along with the guileful use of what Sancho calls “cheek”: These are elements in the episodic, picaresque adventures of every Tom Jones and Moll Flanders that elbowed a way through the Georgian era. . . .

The full review is available here»

The Battle of Culloden was fought on this day (16 April) in 1746. From Penguin Random House (I much prefer the British cover, shown here, over the American one. –CH) . . .

Flora Fraser, Flora Macdonald: ‘Pretty Young Rebel’: Her Life and Story (Knopf, 2023), 288 pages, ISBN: ‎978-0451494382, £25 / $30.

A captivating biography of the remarkable young Scotswoman whose bold decision to help ‘Bonnie’ Prince Charlie—the Stuart claimant to the British throne—evade capture and flee the country has become the stuff of legend.

After his decisive defeat at the Battle of Culloden in 1746, Prince Charles Edward Stuart was a man on the run. Seeking refuge in the Outer Hebrides, hoping to escape to France, he found an unlikely ally in Flora MacDonald, a young woman in her early twenties, loyal to the Stuarts. Disguising the prince as an Irish maid, petticoats and all, Flora conveyed Charles by boat to Skye, where they lodged safely with her family, until the prince’s inexpert handling of feminine attire caused concern, and he was persuaded to forgo the ruse before fleeing the area undetected. Flora never saw him again.

This famous incident led to Flora’s enduring appeal as a courageous Scottish heroine, inspiring and influencing countless novels, poems, and songs—most notably, the classic ballad “Skye Boat Song” adapted from a traditional tune in the late nineteenth century. But her remarkable life didn’t come to a close with her clandestine mission to Skye. Faced with a confession from one of the boatmen, Flora was arrested and taken to London on charges of treason, where under interrogation, she wittily deflected questions and staunchly defended her motives. She was eventually released under the 1747 Act of Indemnity, but disaster would befall her yet again: in 1774, Flora and her husband, Allan MacDonald, fled the impoverished highlands for a brighter future in Cross Creek, North Carolina—utterly unaware of the burgeoning revolution that would upend their lives there, with Allan imprisoned and Flora fleeing, penniless, back home to the Hebrides.

In this probing, evocative portrait of a tumultuous life, Flora Fraser peels away the layers of misinformation, legend, and myth to reveal Flora MacDonald in full. Fraser presents a fascinating picture of this headstrong and irrepressible woman. As Samuel Johnson declared upon visiting her in Scotland, her name was “a name that will be mentioned in history, and if courage and fidelity be virtues, mentioned with honor.”

Flora Fraser is the author of The Washingtons: George and Martha; Beloved Emma: The Life of Emma, Lady Hamilton; The Unruly Queen: The Life of Queen Caroline; and Princesses: The Six Daughters of George III. She lives in London.

Published by the University of Wales and distributed by The University of Chicago Press:

Nigel Aston and William Gibson, eds., The Anglican Episcopate, 1689–1800 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2023), 368 pages, ISBN: 978-1786839763, £70 / $88.

The eighteenth-century bishops of the Church of England and its sister communions had immense status and authority in both secular and religious society. In this volume, leading experts offer a comprehensive survey of all things episcopal between the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 and the early nineteenth century, when the Anglican Church enjoyed exclusive establishment privileges in much of Britain. The essays consider the appointment and promotion of bishops, their parliamentary duties, and their relation to Wales, Ireland, Scotland, and the American colonies.

Nigel Aston is a Research Associate at the University of York and Reader Emeritus in the School of History, Politics, and International Relations at the University of Leicester, where he taught for two decades. He is the author of several books and numerous articles on British and French eighteenth-century religious and political history, including the forthcoming book Enlightened Oxford: The University and the Cultural and Political Life of Eighteenth-century Britain and Beyond (Oxford University Press, 2023).

William Gibson is Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford Brookes University and Director of the Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church History. His most recent book is Samuel Wesley and the Crisis of Tory Piety, 1685–1720 (Oxford University Press, 2021).

C O N T E N T S

Introduction — Nigel Aston and William Gibson

The Politics of Church and State
1  Securing the Mitre: The Promotion and Progress of a Bishop — Nigel Aston (University of Leicester)
2  Lord Bishops: The Episcopate in National Politics — Ruth Paley (History of Parliament)
3  Bishops and the Monarchy — Grayson Ditchfield (University of Kent)

Performance
4  Pastors of Their Flock: Visitation, Ordination, Confirmation — Colin Haydon (University of Winchester)
5  Authority, Conflict, and Consensus: Bishops, Their Clergy, and Diocesan Government — William Gibson (Oxford Brookes University)
6  Bishops and Patronage — Daniel Reed (Oxford Brookes University)

Cultures
7  Wives and Families: The Domestic Life of Bishops — Nigel Aston (University of Leicester) and William Gibson (Oxford Brookes University)
8  Bishops and Eighteenth-Century Intellectual Life — Robert Ingram (University of Ohio)
9  Bishops, Taste, and Culture — Matthew Craske (Oxford Brookes University)

Beyond England
10  Episcopacy in Scotland — Rowan Strong (Murdoch University)
11  Anglican Bishops in Wales — John Morgan-Guy (University of Wales: Trinity St David)
12  The Other Establishment: Bishops in the Church of Ireland — Toby Barnard, (University of Oxford)
13  Anglican Bishops, the Wider World, and the Other Christian Churches — Ted Campbell (Southern Methodist University)

Appendix: Episcopal Incomes — Ruth Paley (History of Parliament)

From The University of Chicago Press (though not entirely clear from the blurb, Drucker’s book provides a historiography rather than a history of the alphabet—as stated in the introduction, excerpted below)

Johanna Drucker, Inventing the Alphabet: The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2023), 384 pages, ISBN: ‎978-0226815817, $40.

Inventing the Alphabet provides the first account of two-and-a-half millennia of scholarship on the alphabet. Drawing on decades of research, Johanna Drucker dives into sometimes obscure and esoteric references, dispelling myths and identifying a pantheon of little-known scholars who contributed to our modern understandings of the alphabet, one of the most important inventions in human history. Beginning with Biblical tales and accounts from antiquity, Drucker traces the transmission of ancient Greek thinking about the alphabet’s origin and debates about how Moses learned to read. The book moves through the centuries, finishing with contemporary concepts of the letters in alpha-numeric code used for global communication systems. Along the way, we learn about magical and angelic alphabets, antique inscriptions on coins and artifacts, and the comparative tables of scripts that continue through the development of modern fields of archaeology and paleography. This is the first book to chronicle the story of the intellectual history through which the alphabet has been ‘invented’ as an object of scholarship.

Johanna Drucker is the Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies and a distinguished professor in the Department of Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has been the recipient of Fulbright, Mellon, and Getty Fellowships and in 2019 was the inaugural Distinguished Senior Humanities Fellow at the Beinecke Library, Yale University. Her artist books are included in museums and libraries in North America and Europe, and her creative work was the subject of a traveling retrospective, Druckworks 1972–2012: 40 Years of Books and Projects. Her publications include Visualizing Interpretation, Iliazd: Meta-Biography of a Modernist, and The Digital Humanities Coursebook.

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From the introduction:

“. . . this study is not an addition to the number of authoritative books on alphabet history. . . Instead, this work is a contribution to the intellectual history of this topic. Who knew what when about the alphabet? And how did the way they knew it—through texts, images, inscriptions, or artifacts—affect their conception of the identity and origin of alphabetic writing? As a historiography, this account traces the ways knowledge and belief shaped the understanding of alphabetic writing.”