In Dr. Raye’s recently published book “The Atlas of Early Modern Wildlife; Britain and Ireland between the Middle Ages and the Industrial Revolution” we are presented with a most remarkable catalouge of the species that were documented as having been living in these islands before modern population studies of them began.
It is not known with any high degree of confidence whether the centaurs of London favoured pineapple and coconut based alcoholic beverages, frequented mock-Polynesian cocktail lounges, or sported immaculately maintained hairstyles, as did the more popularly known lycanthropes of that same city.
When it comes to books that not only upset the metaphorical apple cart but felled the entire orchard of toleration on the part of those able to wield raw and unmitigated power at a truly global level, few can be said to have accomplished this more so than Galileo Galilei’s “Dialogue on the Two Greatest World Systems,” of which a fresh translation by Mark Davie and William R. Shea will be published by Oxford University Press in February of this very year as an addition to their superb Oxford World’s Classics series.
Although I’ve read and taught William Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” more times that I can readily recall, until I made yet another reading of it just recently I had not sufficiently noted the natural history aspect of Friar Laurence. And the more I mused upon the passage quoted below, the more it struck me that his skills as an herbalist / botanist are truly the element upon which the resolution of the entire play turns.