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In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries the Inns of Court and fashionable London taverns developed a culture of clubbing, urban sociability and wit. The convivial societies that emerged created rituals to define social identities and to engage in literary play and political discussion. Michelle O'Callaghan argues that the lawyer-wits, including John Hoskyns, in company with authors such as John Donne, Ben Jonson and Thomas Coryate, consciously reinvigorated humanist traditions of learned play. Their experiments with burlesque, banquet literature, parody and satire resulted in a volatile yet creative dialogue between civility and licence, and between pleasure and the violence of scurrilous words. The wits inaugurated a mode of literary fellowship that shaped the history and literature of sociability in the seventeenth century. This study will provide many insights for historians and literary scholars of the period.
What is a moonbow? What does it mean when someone absquatulates? Over 400 words to amaze, confuse and inspiring budding wordsmiths (and adults!).
"This is the story of the Allied codebreakers puzzling through the most difficult codebreaking problems that ever existed.
Arranged thematically--from Class and Character, Sex and Snobbery, to the Foreigner's Eye View--here is the definitive collection of the British nation's funniest quotations. Among the many great and good who dazzle us with their wit are Martin Amis, Jane Austen, Billy Connolly, Quentin Crisp, Roald Dahl, John Lennon, Queen Victoria, and Oscar Wilde.
An exploration of wit, witlessness and social and comic conventions in the plays of Shakespeare, Jonson and their contemporaries.
We are becoming less intelligent. This is the shocking yet fascinating message of At Our Wits' End. The authors take us on a journey through the growing body of evidence that we are significantly less intelligent now than we were a hundred years ago. The research proving this is, at once, profoundly thought-provoking, highly controversial, and it's currently only read by academics. But the authors are passionate that it cannot remain ensconced in the ivory tower any longer. With At Our Wits' End, they present the first ever popular scientific book on this crucially important issue. They prove that intelligence — which is strongly genetic — was increasing up until the breakthrough of the Industrial Revolution, because we were subject to the rigors of Darwinian Selection, meaning that lots of surviving children was the preserve of the cleverest. But since then, they show, intelligence has gone into rapid decline, because large families are increasingly the preserve of the least intelligent. The book explores how this change has occurred and, crucially, what its consequences will be for the future. Can we find a way of reversing the decline of our IQ? Or will we witness the collapse of civilization and the rise of a new Dark Age?
Juan Huarte de San Juan (1529-1588) was a Spanish physician and natural philosopher who strove to answer why men possess specific natural abilities that prepare them to excel only in particular fields of knowledge. With his treatise Examen de ingenios para las ciencias (Baeza, 1575), dedicated to King Philip II, Huarte hoped to form a body of naturally accomplished professionals by providing readers with clues to identify their leading wit and the career path associated with it. The book experienced such overwhelming success in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—it underwent fifty-five editions in six different languages—that it is now considered one of the most influential Spanish scientific books of the early modern period. The present edition modernizes the text of Richard Carew’s The Examination of Men’s Wits (London, 1594), the first rendering into English of Huarte’s work—via a previous Italian translation. In addition, the Introduction contextualizes both the Spanish and the English texts and their authors, discusses the censorship imposed by the Inquisition, the (often deliberate) textual divergences of the English translation, the multiple translations and editions the book underwent in early modern Europe, and its domestic and European reception, with a focus on the English scientific, educational and literary arenas. William Camden, John Marston, Ben Jonson and Sir Francis Bacon are some of the household names acquainted with Huarte’s theories, thanks to Richard Carew’s widely read English version.