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| Humility, from Scivias III.8: The Pillar of the Savior's Humanity. Rupertsberg MS, fol. 178r. |
| Hodie aperuit nobis clausa porta quod serpens in muliere suffocavit, unde lucet in aurora flos de Virgine Maria. |
Today was opened unto us a shut-up gate. For the serpent drew it tight, in woman choked— yet from it gleams within the dawn the Virgin Mary’s flow’r. |
A British fantasist whose playboy image is a sham; a New York couple drowning together while on holiday at a resort in Maine; and the unintentionally sticky fingers of both Pope Paul VI and the author himself (pp. 91-92): each makes an appearance in Eric Rasmussen’s The Shakespeare Thefts: In Search of the First Folios. This volume serves as the popular equivalent of a “Behind the Scenes” documentary for Rasmussen’s monumental scholarly project of the last two decades: to track down and catalogue in exhaustive detail as many as possible of the 232 known extant copies of the 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare’s works, considered by many to be one of the most important and prized printed books in the English language.
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| Image from WikiCommons. |
Today is indeed (or at least was, in the old calendar)[1] the feast of Saints Crispin and Crispinian. According to legend, they were on this day in A.D. 286 or 287 martyred under Diocletian and his co-emperor, Maximianus near Soissons in modern-day France. But this day in the English-speaking world shall always “be in our flowing cups freshly remember’d,” for on Crispin Crispinian in 1415, King Henry V defeated the French at Agincourt and ushered in a brief renewal of his crown’s hold upon France.
