All accounts of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer begin in 1544 with Thomas Cranmer’s production of an English Litany, a Processional rite used during times of crisis. Historians have always assumed that the Litany was the sole war-related devotional innovation in 1544, and Cranmer’s new rite has always been treated diachronically, without ref…[Read more]

All accounts of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer begin in 1544 with Thomas Cranmer’s production of an English Litany, a Processional rite used during times of crisis. Historians have always assumed that the Litany was the sole war-related devotional innovation in 1544, and Cranmer’s new rite has always been treated diachronically, without ref…[Read more]

A short blog post for the CLIR Re:Thinking blog on recent high-profile events at the Boston Public Library and the Library of Congress that led to the departure of library directors Amy Ryan and James Billington.

This article gives a brief biographical sketch of Iseult Gonne, daughter of Irish activist Maud Gonne and wife of the Irish author Francis Stuart. It also describes and analyzes her relationship with the poet W.B. Yeats, who once proposed to her, and discusses her role in several of Yeats’s poems, including “To a Child Dancing in the Wind.” The…[Read more]