![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
When I was in high school I bought poetry books with wild abandon at the kind of musty library sales in basements where all sorts of tattered treasures can be had for 50 cents.
So, fortunately, when it comes time to be writing something sort of 17th century, I have handy style referents lying around the house.
Over my corn pops today I was reading the "Overburian Characters". These are sort of scathing little parodies of personality types/social types, full of extended metaphors.
I'm pleased to learn that a Puritan is "a diseas'd peece of Apocripha: bind him to the Bible and hee corrupts that whole text: Ignorance and fat feed, are his Founders; his Nurses, Railing, Rabbies, and round breeches: his life is but a borrowed blaste of winde; For betweene two religions, as betweene two doores, he is ever whistling."
I know what apocrypha are, but I haven't got the faintest notion of what Rabbies are. Rabies? Rabbis? I also note that the sentence back then seemed to serve more the function of the paragraph today. And I envy the nested colons, I could never ever get away with multiple colons in a sentence. *sigh*
I turned a few pages to glance at extracts from Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, and it hurt my brain. In the same sort of way that I can't grapple successfully with colonial American history due to my ignorance of the Spanish Reconquest (and my relative ignorance about English behavior in Ireland in the 1500s), I find reading authors of the 1500s-1600s really hard due to their assumptions about their readers' knowledge of the classics. I don't read any Greek, I've only got a few words of Latin, and I'm not familiar with the authors and characters they reference. *sigh* I feel this way when I read Montaigne, too. (Or Holdsworth's History of English Law, with all those untranslated Greek and Latin footnotes. Those footnotes were just a cruel taunt to me.)
So, fortunately, when it comes time to be writing something sort of 17th century, I have handy style referents lying around the house.
Over my corn pops today I was reading the "Overburian Characters". These are sort of scathing little parodies of personality types/social types, full of extended metaphors.
I'm pleased to learn that a Puritan is "a diseas'd peece of Apocripha: bind him to the Bible and hee corrupts that whole text: Ignorance and fat feed, are his Founders; his Nurses, Railing, Rabbies, and round breeches: his life is but a borrowed blaste of winde; For betweene two religions, as betweene two doores, he is ever whistling."
I know what apocrypha are, but I haven't got the faintest notion of what Rabbies are. Rabies? Rabbis? I also note that the sentence back then seemed to serve more the function of the paragraph today. And I envy the nested colons, I could never ever get away with multiple colons in a sentence. *sigh*
I turned a few pages to glance at extracts from Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, and it hurt my brain. In the same sort of way that I can't grapple successfully with colonial American history due to my ignorance of the Spanish Reconquest (and my relative ignorance about English behavior in Ireland in the 1500s), I find reading authors of the 1500s-1600s really hard due to their assumptions about their readers' knowledge of the classics. I don't read any Greek, I've only got a few words of Latin, and I'm not familiar with the authors and characters they reference. *sigh* I feel this way when I read Montaigne, too. (Or Holdsworth's History of English Law, with all those untranslated Greek and Latin footnotes. Those footnotes were just a cruel taunt to me.)
