At this year’s St Peter’s Book Fair in September, in Melbourne, amidst a table of turned-up spines: one small tattered green book, art nouveau decorations in gold on cover. Title page: ‘The Miscellany of a Japanese Priest : Being a Translation of Tsure-Zure Gusa by William N. Porter’, with an Introduction by Sanki Ichikawa. (London : Humphrey Milford, 1914) Only on page 4 of the Introduction, hidden in a paragraph, is the actual name of the author disclosed, “a fourteenth-century priest named Kenko, who lived the life of a recluse, without being able entirely to forgo the passions and desires of this world.” Hidden in his own book. Why William N. Porter prints his name and the name of Sanki Ichikawa on the title page, but not the name of Urabe Kenko (1283-1350), also known as Yoshida Kenko, or simply Kenko, is a matter of conjecture. Perhaps short essays on the conjectures are in order. Publishing sales. English manners. Self-importerance. The ...
Report on a lecture given at Trinity College, Parkville on the 12 th of August and reflections from Philip Harvey, for the pew notes of St Peter’s Church, Eastern Hill, Melbourne Last Tuesday Susan Bell, Bishop of Niagara, gave the Barry Marshall Lecture in Melbourne on the priest and poet George Herbert (1593-1633). Priest and poet are roles inextricably bound together in the person of Herbert, something she painfully (in the early modern sense of ‘going to pains’) described. She remarked that “all his writing is about vocation to Christianity.” Son of one of the leading families of the realm, u niversity orator, courtier and diplomat, he was “a man on the way up when it all came to a screeching halt.” Herbert decided to enter holy orders, possibly due to health. He married Jane Danvers in 1629, went to work in the small parish of Bemerton near Salisbury, where presently he died, probably of consumption. His poetry, Bishop Bell called it “winsome”...