Hermes was the messenger of the gods, so the branch of philosophy dealing with how to interpret messages from God, and interpretation generally, bears his name.

When Jonathan Langford asked me to do a column I thought it would be an exercise in re-interpreting the stories of Jesus’s debates with the Pharisees, an opportunity to point out things like Mark’s first mention of the Pharisees. They ask three questions, and Jesus answers them without rebuke. The first question is not addressed to Jesus, but to his disciples:

And when the scribes and Pharisees saw him eat with publicans and sinners, they said unto his disciples, How is it that he eateth and drinketh with publicans and sinners?
When Jesus heard it, he saith unto them, They that are whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick: I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.
–Mark 2:16-17

It’s a charming answer, especially since the story doesn’t say he was preaching to his dinner companions, or calling them to repentance.

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The imp of the perverse — a constant companion — suggested as a title for this installment “blankety-blank verse,” but as its topic is the Elizabethan sonnet, the title above presented itself as an amiable contrast to my last installment.  You will recall from my last post [link] that both the English sonnet and blank verse were inventions of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-47).  However, The new Princeton encyclopedia of poetry and poetics credits Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) with bringing the sonnet from Italy and adapting it, “showing an immediate preference … for a closing couplet in the sestet,”[i] as in this sonnet which he translated from the Italian of Petrarch:

The long love that in my thought doth harbor,
and in my heart doth keep his residence,
Into my face presseth with bold pretense
And there encampeth, spreading his banner
She that me learns to love and suffer
And wills that my trust and lust’s negligence
Be reined by reason, shame and reverence
With his hardiness takes displeasure.
Wherewithal unto the heart’s forest he flieth,
Leaving his enterprise with pain and cry,
And there him hideth, and not appeareth.
What may I do, when my master feareth,
But in the field with him to live and die?
For good is the life ending faithfully.[ii]

The Italian or Petrarchan sonnet features an octave rhymed abbaabba (or, in Anthony Burgess’s hands, an invocation, Abba Abba[iii]) Continue Reading →

Michael Austin is a board member of BCC Press.

Mette Harrison’s The Book of Laman, published in July by BCC Press, is the sort of book that is almost always misunderstood badly by people who haven’t bothered to read it. This is because it looks like it is doing things that it is not actually doing, and the things it is doing are so unexpected that you pretty much have to read the whole thing to understand them. I  want to talk about what those things are, but first, let’s spend a few minutes talking about what they aren’t. 

First, this is not a work of satire, There have been other books published with the same premise–the early portions of the Book of Mormon told from Laman’s perspective–that have been satirical, and the idea of telling a story from an antagonist’s point of view seems to lend itself to an ironic treatment. But this is not what Harrison is doing. She is taking the Book of Mormon and its characters extremely seriously throughout. Continue Reading →

Reviewed by Hillary Stirling

Photo by Emily Bawden Drew

In Mahonri Stewart’s The Drown’ed Book; or the History of William Shakespeare, Part Last, I felt as though I was watching a play the English-speaking world has been waiting 400 years for. Though William Shakespeare became so famous, we have precious little knowledge about his life. We’re not even entirely sure about the order his plays were written in. We have a handful of facts: names of family members, when they were born, when they died, and a few documents beyond Shakespeare’s literary works. Much has been made of his will and the fact that he left his “second-best bed” to his wife. From these bare threads of William Shakespeare’s known history,  Stewart weaves a rich tapestry that even The Bard would delight in. Continue Reading →

The following is a guest post by Mette Ivie Harrison. Mette is a former BYU “Benson Scholar” and high school seminary Scripture Chase champion. She now writes Mormon mysteries about Bishop’s Wife Linda Wallheim starting with The Bishop’s Wife. She is an All American triathlete and holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University. She is the ward historian and nursery teacher, has five children and lives in Layton, Utah. Her most recent published novel, The Book of Laman, was published in July by the By Common Consent Press.

In 1888, Orson F. Whitney, gave a speech entitled “Home Literature” in which he claimed “We will yet have Miltons and Shakespeares of our own.” At the time, Mormons were struggling with the US government on many levels, including polygamy. Church leaders were imprisoned for the practice, the holy temples were being threatened with desecration or even destruction. Mormons had already faced a long history of persecution, being chased out of Kirtland, Ohio and then Nauvoo, Illinois, the prophet Joseph Smith being martyred in 1844 in Carthage Jail. The Mormon pioneers fled to the Salt Lake Valley in part because it was not part of the United States at the time. Mormons intended to create their own government of Deseret and their own identity, but it was difficult to get the legitimacy they craved for their own faith community. Put into this context, Whitney’s speech makes the goal of a Mormon Shakespeare or Milton that much more poignant and urgent. Continue Reading →