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The Courtier's Library - The List of Books

The List of Books


1. Nicholas Hill, the Englishman, How to differentiate sex and hermaphroditism in Atoms. The same, On their anatomy and midwifery in buried embryons; to which is appended The Art of manufacturing Fire-vessels and Implements appertaining to such, by his fellow-citizen and synchronist Master Plat.

Nicholas Hill (died 1610) wrote a treatise on philosophy entitled Philosophia Epicurea Democritiana, Theophrastica (1601). His belief in the philosophy of atoms was ridiculed by Ben Jonson—'Those Atomi ridiculous, Whereof old Democrite, and Hill Nicholas, One said, the other swore, the world consists' (Epigram cxxxiii). Anthony à Wood says of Hill, 'I shall only say that our author Hill was a person of good parts, but humorous; that he had a peculiar and affected way, different from others in his writings, that he entertained fantastical notions in his philosophy...' (Ath. Oxon. Ed. Bliss, ii. 87).
Sir Hugh Plat (1608) was a writer and inventor. In 1572 he wrote 'The Floures of Philosophie, with Pleasures of Poetrie annexed to them'. This was a collection of philosophical maxims translated from Seneca, with the addition of some dull verses of his own. In 1594 he produced 'The Jewell House of Art and Nature, conteining divers rare and profitable Inventions, together with sundry new Experiments in the Art of Husbandry, Distillation and Moulding'. He followed this up in 1603 by a tract 'Of Coal-Balls for Fuel wherein Sea-coal is', and by other pamphlets describing his experiments, some of which dealt with cosmetics and face-washes for ladies. In 1605 he was knighted for his inventions, which covered a wide field. Some, such as his manures for agriculture, proved really useful; others were merely fantastic, such as his project for making wine from grapes grown at Bethnal Green. In 1608 there appeared his last work, 'Flora's Paradise ... with appendix of new, rare, and profitable inventions', in which Plat described his fire-balls and his cosmetics, and declared that his Bethnal Green wine had been praised by the French Ambassador. Both Hill and Plat were born in London, and Donne therefore described them as conterraneos.[fellow-countrymen]

2. A Rival of Moses: the Art of preserving Clothes beyond forty years, by Topcliffe, an Englishman: with an English commentary by James Stonehouse, who has published a treatise To keep Clothes near the Fashion in the same peculiar language.

Richard Topcliffe (1532-1604) was one of the most cruel and detested of the informers against the Catholics. It was he who tortured Southwell the poet. In 1593 he was on the commission against Jesuits. He was allowed by the authorities to keep a torture rack in his own house, so that he might examine Catholics there. His activities were so notorious that a verb topcliffizare, to inform, was current in Elizabethan slang, and he was detested by many Protestants as well as Catholics. Three independent manuscripts of Donne's fourth Satire read 'A Topcliffe would have ravish'd him away' instead of the standard reading 'A Pursevant would have ravish'd him away' (Grierson, ii. 125).
Sir Charles Firth suggests that the clothes which Donne accuses him of keeping for forty years may have been the vestments used for celebrating Mass, and that these were part of the evidence supplied by Topcliffe against the Catholic priests whom he arrested.
Sir James Stonehouse of London was knighted at Whitehall July 23, 1603 (Nichols, Progresses of James I, 1, p. 216). He may have been the James Stonehouse who matriculated at Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1581, and became a student of Lincoln's Inn in 1585.

3. The Art of copying out within the compass of a Penny all the truthful statements made to that end by John Foxe, by Peter Bales.

John Foxe was the author of the famous Book of Martyrs (1563) describing the sufferings of the Protestant Martyrs during the Marian persecution. It was attacked in 1566 by the Catholics for its inaccuracy, and in 1603 Robert Parsons the Jesuit condemned it as a series of lies in his Treatise of the Three Conversions of England.
Peter Bales was the author of a treatise on handwriting called The Writing Schoolmaster (1590).
Ad idem, '
to that end', that is, John Foxe in his massive folio purposely reduced his true statements to the small amount which Bales could write on a penny.

4. That the Chimera is a prophecy of Antichrist, by an anonymous Sorbonist.

The antagonism between the Sorbonne and the Papal Court is satirized by Donne in his dedication of Ignatius his Conclave to the 'Two Tutelar Angels, Protectors of the Popes Consistory, and of the College of Sorbonne'. 'Most noble couple of Angels, lest it should be said that you did never agree, and never meet, but that you did ever abhorre one another . .'

5. Galatinus, That the Jews are ubiquitaries, because they are nowhere.

Petrus Galatinus was born a Jew, and on his conversion to Christianity became a Franciscan friar. He wrote a manual of controversy against the Jews, De Arcanis Catholicae Veritatis (1518), to which Donne alludes in Essays in Divinity (p. 11): 'As Cusanus hath done from the Alcoran, Galatinus hath from the Talmud deduced all Christianity, and more. For he hath proved all Roman traditions from thence.'
Ubiquitary (one who can be everywhere at once) is perhaps used here with a double meaning, glancing at the sect of the Ubiquitaries or Ubiquitarians.

6. That the Book of Tobit is canonical; in which, following the Rabbis and the more mystical of the Theologians, the hairs of the tail of his Dog are numbered, and from their various backward twists and intertwinings letters are formed which yield wonderful words, by Francis George, a Venetian.

Franciscus Georgius Venetus (F. G. Zorgi) wrote a treatise De Harmonia Mundi totius cantica (1525), which was a mixture of Neo-Platonic and Cabbalistic doctrines with some speculations of his own. In the Essays in Divinity (p. 14.) Donne speaks of him as 'that transcending Wit' and couples him with Pico della Mirandola as exponents of Cabbalistic learning. In a later passage of the same book (pp. 210—11) Donne alludes to one of his fanciful speculations with numbers: 'as the frame of our body hath two hundred and forty eight bones, so the body of the law had so many affirmative precepts.' See also Essays in Divinity, pp. 65, 173.

7. Peace unto Jerusalem; or a harmonizing of the glaring disagreement between Rabbi Simeon Kimchi and Onkelos, whether human flesh strengthened from the eating of swine's flesh will in the Resurrection be taken away, annihilated, or purified, by the most illuminate Doctor Reuchlin.

Kimchi, or more correctly Kimhi, was the family name of a group of Jewish grammarians and Biblical scholars who worked at Narbonne in the twelfth century. The most distinguished of the family was David Kimhi, who wrote a Hebrew grammar called the Miklol, and commentaries on Genesis, Chronicles, Psalms, and the Prophets.
Rabbi Onkelos, commonly called the Proselyte Onkelos, was a scholar of the first century, who was distinguished by his extraordinarily strict observance of the Levitical laws of purity. The official Targum to the Pentateuch is called by his name.
Reuchlin (1455-1522) was the first of the great German humanists, and was also a Hebrew scholar. In Biathanatos (p.118) and Essays in Divinity (pp. 11, 103) Donne alludes to his philosophical and cabbalistic treatises, De Verbo Mirifico and De Arte Cabbalistica.

8. The Judæo-Christian Pythagoras, proving the Numbers 99 and 66 to be identical if you hold the leaf upside down, by the super-seraphical John Picus.

Pico Mirandola (1463-94) was the pupil and friend of Ficino, the translator of Plato and Plotinus, and was also an oriental scholar who took a deep interest in the occult lore of the Cabbala. Donne mentions him several times in the Essays in Divinity (pp. 14, 21, 22, 46, 65), generally with reference to his Cabbalistic speculations.

9. Anything out of Anything; Or, The Art of deciphering and finding some treason in any intercepted letter, by Philips.

Thomas Phelips or Philips was Walsingham's factotum. He deciphered intercepted letters and was famous for his skill in this art. See Calendar of Domestic State Papers, Queen Elizabeth, vol. cclii, nos. 8, 15, 66 (May, June, 1595), and James I, vol. vi, no. 37 (Jan. 31, 1604). The last-mentioned item is a letter purporting to be a full account of the conspiracies of Watson, and of Cobham and Raleigh, from Ortelio Renezo to Giovanni Frederico. It is endorsed 'Lines intercepted', and in Cecil's hand there is added 'written by Phelippes, and suggested by him to be counterfeited'.

10. John Harington's Hercules, or the method of purging Noah's Ark of excrement.

Sir John Harington's Metamorphosis of Ajax (1596) was a satire on Elizabethan sanitary arrangements. Its title provided the wits with endless unsavoury jokes. The reference here is to Hercules' cleansing of the Augean stables.

11. Believe in thy havings, and thou hast them. A test for antiquities, being a great book on very small things, dictated by Walter Cope, copied out by his wife, and given a Latin dress by his amanuensis John Pory.

Sir Walter Cope was a member of the Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries. He was knighted in 1603, and became Chamberlain of the Exchequer in 1609. His wife was Dorothy, second daughter of Richard Grenville of Wotton.
The reading of Pory, is preferable to that of Povy (1650), since John Pory was well-known as an energetic factotum, a great collector of news, who is several times mentioned by Donne in his letters. As to the connection of Cope and Pory, Chamberlain writing to Dudley Carleton on Jan. 3, 1608/9, mentions them together, and says 'It may be Mr. Pory hath the same intelligence, and doth advertise you more at large. Yet methinks his grand master should not be so private and familiar with him as to make him privy to such business, unless, perhaps, being of the privy council with the lady, he may come by somewhat by that means' (Court and Times of James the First, i, p. 85).

12. The Sub-Saviour, in which the illuminate, but very unilluminating, Hugh Broughton, explains beyond belief that the Hebrew language is of the essence of salvation, and that his own precepts are of the essence of the language.

Hugh Broughton (1549—1612) was a noted divine and Hebrew scholar. In his Concent of Scripture (1588) he asserted the absolute in-corruptness of the text of both Testaments, including the Hebrew points'. He was ridiculed by Ben Jonson in Volpone, II. ii, and The Alchemist, II. iii and IV. v. Donne wrote of him more sympathetically in a letter to Sir Henry Goodyer: 'A Gent. that visited me yesterday told me that our Church hath lost Mr. Hugh Broughton, who is gone to the Roman side. I have known before, that Serarius the Jesuit was an instrument from Cardinal Baronius to draw him to Rome, to accept a stipend, only to serve the Christian Churches in controversies with the Jews, without endangering himself to change of his persuasion in particular deductions between these Christian Churches, or being enquired of, or tempted thereunto. And I hope he is no otherwise departed from us. If he be, we shall not escape scandal in it; because, though he be a man of many distempers, yet when he shall come to eat assured bread, and to be removed from partialities, to which want drove him, to make himself a reputation, and raise up favourers; you shall see in that course of opposing the Jews, he will produce worthy things: and our Church will perchance blush to have lost a Soldier fit for that great battle; and to cherish only those single Dualisms, between Rome and England, or that more single, and almost self-homicide, between the unconformed ministers, and Bishops' (Letters, 1651, pp. 35-6). As a matter of fact, Broughton remained a member of the Church of England till his death.

13. Martin Luther, On shortening the Lord's Prayer.

Donne has a similar reference in the Satires:

            as in those first days
When Luther was professed, he did desire
Short Pater Nosters, saying as a Friar
Each day his beads, but having left those laws,
Adds to Christ's prayer, the power and glory clause.
(Poems, i. 53.)
'The "power and glory clause", which is not found in the Vulgate or any of the old Latin versions of the New Testament (and is therefore not used in Catholic prayers, public or private), was taken by Erasmus (1516) from all the Greek codices, though he did not regard it as genuine. Thence it passed into Luther's (1521) and most Reformed versions' (Grierson, Poems, ii. 112).

14. A Bundle of Oaks, or, The Art of grasping Transcendentals, by Raymond Sebundus.

Raymond of Sebund was a Spanish philosopher of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. He was born at Barcelona, and lectured in theology and medicine at Toulouse. His great work was the Liber Naturae sive Creaturarum, in which he declared that nature was a divine revelation, containing 'enough to teach us all particularities of Christian Religion'. See Donne's reference to him in Essays in Divinity, pp. 7, 8.

15. The Ocean of Court, or, The Pyramid, or the Colossus, or the Bottomless Pit of Wits: in which, by sixty thousand letters sent and received by the Milords of every Nation invariably in the vulgar tongues to avoid display, anything that can be propounded is propounded on the subject of toothpicks and nail-parings. Collected and reduced into a corpus and dedicated to their individual writers by John Florio, an Anglo-Italian: the chapter headings of those included in Book I are contained in the first seventy pages; the diplomas of Kings with their titles and the attestations of licensers in the next one hundred and seven pages; poems in praise of the author in Books I-XCVII, which follow.

John Florio, born about 1553, was the son of an Italian Protestant who fled to England late in the reign of Henry VIII. In 1598 he published World of Words: a most copious and exact Dictionary in Italian and English, which was dedicated to the Earl and Countess of Rutland and the Earl of Southampton. He also published a translation of Montaigne's Essays in 1603. Donne here ridicules the rhapsodical style of his prefaces and dedications.

16. The Justice of England. Vacation exercises of John Davies on the art of forming anagrams approximately true, and posies to engrave on rings.

Sir John Davies, lawyer and poet, was the author of Nosce Teipsum, Orchestra, and also of a number of Epigrams. In his 'gulling sonnets' he made use of law-terms to parody the legal metaphors used in such sonnet-sequences as Zepheria. As for his posies and anagrams, he wrote a sonnet 'upon sending her (his mistress) a gold ring, with this posy, Pure and endless' (included in Davison's Poetical Rhapsody, ed. Bullen, ii. 106). In his Lottery presented before the late Queen's Majesty, we find a couplet written for Lot 7: 'A Ring with this Posy, As faithful as I find' (Poetical Rhapsody, i. 13).

17. A few small Treatises supplementary to the Books of Pancirolli; to the Book of Things Lost is added A Treatise on Virtue and on Popular Liberty, begun by a chaplain to John Cade and finished by Buchanan; to The Book of Things Found is added a treatise on The Multinominous Disease in English by Tom Thorney and afterwards in Latin by Thomas Campion, and A Treatise on taking a Wife after Vows by Carlstadt.

Guido Panciroli or Pancirolli (1523-99) wrote a work describing first the wonderful things known to the ancients, the secret of which had been lost in later times, and secondly the modern inventions which were unknown to the ancients (Rerum memorabilium deperditarum . . . et nuper inventarum libri duo). Donne has a reference to this book in Ignatius His Conclave (Nonesuch edition, Donne's Poetry and Prose, p. 391).
George Buchanan (1506-82) was tutor to James I during his boyhood in Scotland. He was a violent opponent of Mary Queen of Scots, and wrote several pamphlets charging her with numerous crimes. In 1579 he produced De Jure Regni, in which he upheld a limited form of monarchy and made a plea for the right of popular election of kings. He defended tyrannicide in certain cases where the monarch was extremely wicked. The book was suppressed by Act of Parliament in 1584, but it had great influence on the thoughts of the time. In Ignatius His Conclave (Nonesuch ed. p. 397) Donne mentions Buchanan with Knox and Goodman among those who 'have troubled the peace of some states and been injurious to some princes'.
John Cade was the famous rebel who in 1450 led an insurrection against Henry VI.
Tom Thorney is mentioned in Donne's 'Character of a Scot at the first sight' (Paradoxes, Problems, 1652, p. 66). A marginal note in the O'Flaherty manuscript of Donne's poems and paradoxes, in Harvard College Library, describes him as a surgeon.
Thomas Campion, poet, musician, and physician, was born about 1567 and died in 1620. In 1602, his book, Observations on the Art of English Poetic, was published. According to the D.N.B., which suggests that he obtained his M.D. degree in some foreign university, it was in January 1606/7 that Campion was first described as 'doctor of physic'.
Carlstadt (1480-1541) was one of the Reformers. His real name was Andreas Rudolf Bodenstein, but he was commonly known as Carlstadt from his birthplace, Carlstadt in Bohemia. He was the first priest among the Reformers to write against the celibacy of the clergy and to take a wife himself, and it is for this that Donne mentions him here.

18. Bonaventura, On removing the Particle 'Not' from the Ten Commandments and attaching it to the Apostles' Creed.

St. Bonaventura (1221-74) was a great scholastic theologian and Catholic mystic. There were several other writers of the same name, one of whom, Frederic Bonaventura (1555-1602), was an Italian natural philosopher, who opposed the current beliefs on various scientific subjects (see his De Natura Partus Octomestris (1600), and other works).

19. Of Apochryphal Knights, one book by Edward Prinne, slightly amplified by Edward Chute.

Edward Prinne was one of the followers and dependents of Don Antonio, titular king of Portugal, in the reign of Elizabeth. Two Letters from Prinne to Lord Burleigh are to be found in Queen Elizabeth and her Times, ii, pp. 179, 350, by Thomas Wright (1838). For Edward Chute see John Chamberlain's Letters during the reign of Queen Elizabeth (Camden Society edition, p. 64): 'Capt. Chute (that should or would have been knight in France . . .' and Calendar Domestic State Papers, James I, vol. vi, no. 44: 'Seditious words spoken by Sir Edward Chute' (Jan. 1603/4). There is no Sir Edward Chute recorded in Shaw's List of Knights, and Donne's words imply that his title was not an authentic one.

20. On the Navigableness of the Waters above Heaven; and whether a ship in the firmament will in the Day of judgement land there or in our harbours, by John Dee.

John Dee (1527-1608) was a famous astrologer. He was believed to be a magician, and he himself claimed to have intercourse with spirits. He wrote a large number of treatises, some of which refer to navigation, e.g. 'General and Rare Memorials pertaining to the perfect Art of Navigation' (1577).

21. A Manual for Justices of the Peace, comprising many confessions of poisoners tendered to Justice Manwood, and employed by him in his privy; these have now been purchased from his inferior servants and collected for his own use by John Hele.

Sir Roger Manwood (1525-92), Lord Chief Baron of the Exchequer, took part in the special commission which examined Mary, Queen of Scots, at Fotheringay in 1586. He was an unscrupulous judge and was charged with deliberate perversion of justice on several occasions in his later years.
Sir John Hele, Serjeant-at-law, died in 1608. He was alleged to be drunken, insolent, and overbearing, and in 1601 a petition was presented to the Council by Garter King-At-Arms, accusing Hele of violent conduct to him in public. However, in 1602 he went on circuit with Mr. Justice Gawdy in Sussex, Kent, and other counties, 'where', wrote Chamberlain to Carleton, 'he made himself both odious and ridiculous' (D.N.B). In spite of his unpopularity he amassed large sums of money, and was notorious for his avarice.

22. Equilibrium, in two volumes, or, The Art of Reaching stability in Controversy. The first method is called 'Simple', because, after posing a controversy (as for instance, whether there is such a thing as transubstantiation) the words 'yes' and no' are written on different but equal-sized slips of paper and are put in a balance; the heavier of the two must be accepted. The other method is 'complex', because, when a thesis is put forward on the one side, a corresponding thesis is put forward on the other; as 'Peter has a see at Rome' and 'John has a see at Rome'; and even if they are written in equal letters, and so forth, the heavier must be accepted. By Erasmus of Rotterdam.

Erasmus (1466-1536), the great humanist, often styled himself Roterodamus. He took up a middle position in the great religious conflicts of his time.

23. Cardan, On the nullibiety of breaking wind.

Girolamo Cardano (1501-76) was a famous Italian physician, who visited England in the reign of Edward VI. His medical and philosophical treatises, De Subtilitate Rerum (1551), and De Varietate Rerum (1557) were famous in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Donne quotes him in Biathanatos (p. 50). Nullibiety means 'the condition of being nowhere existent'. The Nullibists were a sect who affirmed that a spirit or incorporeal being nowhere exists'; see Glanvill, Sadducismus (1681), 100: 'Those other therefore because they so boldly affirm that a Spirit is Nullibi . . . have deservedly purchased to themselves the name or title of Nullibists'

24. Edward Hoby' s Afternoon Belchings ; or, A Treatise of Univocals, as of the King's Prerogative, and Imaginary Monsters, such as the King's Evil and the French Disease.

Sir Edward Hoby (1560-1617) was a diplomatist and controversialist. In 1594 he was granted by Elizabeth letters patent for buying and providing wool for sale in England for ten years. In 1607 James I gave him an exclusive licence to buy wool in Warwickshire and Staffordshire. He frequently entertained the King at his mansion at Bisham.He wrote several controversial books against the Catholics. Among them were 'A Letter to Mr. T. H.', 1609, and 'A Counter-snarl for Ishmael Rabshacheh, a Cecropedan Lycaonite' 1613.
Univocals
are terms which have only one signification. Donne applies the word derisively to the King's prerogative and to the chimera, both of which might be regarded as particularly ambiguous and doubtful subjects. Doubtless Sir Edward Hoby in an expansive after-dinner mood was capable of laying down the law on all such disputed points.

25. Egerton's Spiritual Artof enticing Women ; or, Petticoat Preaching.

It is probable that this is an attack on Stephen Egerton, a Puritan divine, who according to the D.N.B. was one of the leaders in the formation of the presbytery at Wandsworth, which has been described as the first Presbyterian church in England. He was imprisoned in the Fleet from 1590 to 1593 for his nonconformity. In 1598 he became minister of St. Anne's, Blackfriars, and in 1603 he was one of those who presented the so-called Millenary petition to King James for the further reform of the Church of England. In 1604 he introduced a petition to the Lower House of Convocation praying that the Book of Common Prayer might be altered. Among the changes desired by Egerton and his friends were the abolition of the sign of the cross in baptism, and of the ring in marriage. He published a number of sermons and a Brief Method of Catechising (1594).

26. Of an animate Pessary, and the manner of giving every disease to women, by Master Butler, of Cambridge.

William Butler (1535-1618) was one of the most famous physicians of the time. He was a Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge, and lived in Cambridge most of his life. In 1612 he was summoned to attend Henry, Prince of Wales, in his fatal illness. John Chamberlain, writing to Sir Dudley Carleton on November 12, 1612, says of Butler ' . . though he be otherwise but a drunken sot, yet he hath a very shrewd judgment'. He is described on his monument in Great St. Mary's Church, Cambridge, as 'Medicorum omnium quos præsens ætas vidit facile Princeps'.[One who was easily seen as the prince of doctors by all of the present age]

27. The Brazen Head of Francis Bacon: concerning Robert the First, King of England.

Roger Bacon, the famous Franciscan friar and scientist, was popularly supposed to have been a magician. The legend of his magical brazen head was familiar to the Elizabethans through the prose romance, The Famous History of Fryer Bacon, and also through Greene's play, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay.
Francis Bacon, afterwards Lord Chancellor and Baron Verulam, was early in his career a friend of the Earl of Essex, to whom he owed many favours. When Essex incurred Elizabeth's displeasure, Bacon tried to dissuade him from rash courses, but finding remonstrance vain, he abandoned the Earl, and took a prominent part against him in the final trial. Donne's allusion to Essex as 'Robert the First' is a reference to the speech of Sir Edward Coke, the Attorney General, in his indictment of Essex for treason. According to Camden's Annals, Coke ended his speech with this sharp conclusion: It were to be wished that this Robert might be the last of this name Earl of Essex, who affected to be Robert the first of that name King of England'.

28. The Lawyer's Onion; or, The Art of Lamenting in Courts of Law, by the same. A Foreigner-and-a-half; or, Concerning the Half-and-half Jury.

De medietate linguæ. 'Medietas Lingua, denotes a jury empanelled upon any cause, wherein a stranger is party, whereof the one half consists of denizens, and is used in pleas, where one party is a denizen, and the other a stranger; and this manner of trial was first given by the statute of 27 Ed. 3. Stat. 2. cap. 8. and 8 Hen. 6 cap. 29,' Cowel's Interpreter, ed. T. Manley, 1684.

29. Of the Eddy running from Pole to Pole through the Diameter of the Earth, navigable without a Compass, by Andrew Thevet.

Andre Thevet, who died in 1590, was a famous French writer on geography. Two of his best-known works were Les Singularités de la France Antarctique, and La Cosmographie universelle.

30. The Quintessence of Hell; or, The private apartment of Hell, in which is a discussion of the fifth region passed over by Homer, Virgil, Dante and the rest of the Papists, where, over and above the penalties and sensations of the damned, kings are tortured by a recollection of the past.

This reference to a special inner chamber of Hell seems to be an anticipation of the central idea of Ignatius his Conclave, but whereas in the latter book Donne assigns this room to Ignatius Loyola and his Jesuits, in the Catalogue he assigns it to kings. The phrase 'ab Homero, Virgilio, Dante, cæterisque papisticis prætermisso' should be compared with Ignatius his Conclave (Nonesuch edition, Donne's Poetry and Prose, p. 360), '... the prophecies of Homer, Virgil, and the other Patriarchs of the Papists'.
'The remembrance of things past' is probably a reminiscence of Dante, Inferno, V. 121-3:
            Nessun maggior dolore
Che ricordarsi del tempo felice
Nella miseria.
["There is no greater sorrow than to remember times of happiness in this misery"]

31. An Encomion on Doctor Sham, Chaplain to Richard III, by Doctor Barlow.

William Barlow, Bishop of Rochester from 1605 to 1608, and Bishop of Lincoln from 1608 to 1613, was one of the leaders of the Anglican Church in its disputes with both the Puritans and the Roman Catholics. He had been a favourite chaplain of Queen Elizabeth's, and was appointed by her to attend, with two others, on the Earl of Essex while he was under sentence of death in the Tower. Barlow was present at the execution of Essex, and on the following Sunday he preached by royal command at St. Paul's Cross, setting forth the Earl's acknowledgement of his guilt, and his repentance for his treasonable designs. In this sermon Barlow carried out most precisely the instructions which he had received from Sir Robert Cecil. It was probably on this account that Donne, as a sympathizer with Essex, compared Barlow with Shaw, the sycophantic chaplain, who in 1483 preached a sermon at St. Paul's Cross in which by the order of Richard III, then Protector, he impugned the validity of Edward IV's marriage with Elizabeth Woodville, and thus denied the right of the young king, the ill-fated Edward V, and his brother Richard, to the throne. Donne insinuates that Barlow's sermon, like Shaw's, was a sycophantic defense of murder.
Barlow took part in the Hampton Court Conference between the Anglican and Puritan divines in 1604, and drew up the official report of the Conference. In 1609 he wrote An Answer to a Catholic Englishman, in which he answered the attack of Parsons, the Jesuit, on James I's Apology for the Oath of Allegiance. Donne had a very low opinion of this book, as he showed in a private letter to Sir Henry Goodyer (Letters, 1651, pp. 160-3).

32. What not? or, A Refutation of all the errors, past, present and future, not only in Theology but in the other branches of knowledge, and the technical Arts, of all men dead, living, and as yet unborn: put together in a single night after supper, by Doctor Sutcliffe.

Matthew Sutcliffe (born about 1550, died 1629), Dean of Exeter, founded a theological and polemical college at Chelsea 'where learned divines should study and write in maintenance of all controversies against the papists '(Fuller, Church History, x.5). James I was one of the patrons, and laid the first stone of the building in 1609. In the charter of incorporation, dated May 8, 1610, he ordered that it should be called 'King James's College at Chelsea'. The scheme, however, proved a complete failure (D.N.B.).
Sutcliffe wrote a large number of controversial works between 1591 and 1606, most of them against the Catholics. Donne possessed a copy of his Subversion of Robert Parsons, his confused and worthless work (Keynes, Bibliography of Donne, Appendix iii).

33. Of the Bishopableness of a Puritan, by Doctor Robinson.

This reference is so brief that it is difficult to decide which of the numerous contemporary Robinsons Donne had in mind. The famous Puritan divine, John Robinson, who went to Amsterdam in 1608 with a number of separatists, and sailed in 1620 with the Pilgrim Fathers to New England, seems to be excluded by Donne's use of the title Doctor. The most likely candidate is Henry Robinson, who became Bishop of Carlisle in 1598, and in 1599 was appointed one of the Commissioners for Ecclesiastical Causes. He took part in the Hampton Court Conference in 1604. He died in 1616.

34. Tarlton, On the Privileges of Parliament.

Richard Tarlton was the famous Elizabethan clown. He was a favourite with Queen Elizabeth, and also with the populace. He died in 1588, but his memory was kept green for many years by various publications issued under his name, though probably he had no connection with them. Among these were Tarlton's News out of Purgatory (1590) and Tarlton's Jests.

35. Baldus, In Praise of Baldness.

The 'Praise of Baldness' may be a reference to Abraham Fleming's 'Paradox Proving by reason and example, that Baldness is much better than bushy hair.... Written by that excellent Philosopher Synesius. . . . Englished by Abraham Fleming . . . The badge of wisdom is baldness. Printed by H. Denham. 1579 '. See also the poetical dispute on baldness in Dekker's Satiro-mastix, iv. iii.

36. Agrippa, On the Vanity of the Sciences; and The Praise of the Ass, by the same.

'The Praise of the Ass' is perhaps a reference to a prose burlesque published in 1595, 'The Noblenesse of the Ass. A work rare, learned, and excellent, by A. B[anchieri]'. Cornelius Agrippa, the German philosopher, wrote a treatise De Vanitate Scientiarum (1531) which seems out of place in Donne's catalogue of imaginary works. Perhaps Donne wished to imitate Rabelais more closely, as the latter had included some real books in his Library of Saint-Victor.

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