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“... What we don’t mean, surely, is a special way with words. ‘If anatomy is not destiny,’ says Mary Jacobus in her rigorous, scholarly collection of essays, Reading Woman, ‘still less can it be language.’ A woman’s writing is always feminine, and it isn’t necessary to make anything of this. A man’s is always masculine, for that matter. The ...”

“... books, though it is the kind of strain that implies energy, not exhausted repression or defeat. Mary Daly is a theologian trained at Fribourg. Her two earlier books, The Church and the Second Sex and Beyond God the father, analysed the misogynist basis of Christianity and its influence on western thinking. In the latter, she suggested that to be human is ...”

“... the barbarians threatening the traditional university, and how such fiction subjects them to what Mary Jacobus ‘has called, felicitously, textual harassment’. Feminism has given new fuel to the sense of threat, and the response, not only in male writers, has been to resort to stereotypes. Caute’s novel echoes this pattern. It seeks to pre-empt such ...”

“... that it sanitises ‘sex’ in a way which promotes the conditions for an odd convergence with the Mary Whitehouse type of morality, a convergence which is beginning to assume a disquieting character as some radical feminist groups press for the banning of books they consider obscene. Large-scale revisions of linguistic usage under accelerated pressures for ...”

“... exemplars, must have been second only to the Bible in popularity. Compiled by the Dominican Jacobus de Voragine around 1260, it became a standard text on every preacher’s bookshelf and was translated into every vernacular. Its first English version, the Gilte Legende – produced by ‘a sinful wretch’ in 1438 from a French intermediary – enjoyed ...”

“... in the gaps, the absences, the unsayable or unrepresentable of discourse and representation’ (Mary Jacobus), a possible or indeed sensible strategy? Or is it a ‘kind of programmatic writing’ which ‘consigns women and their language, all over again (as they have been traditionally consigned by inspired “phallocentric” writers such as ...”

“... Marie), and in that year assisted in the engagement, or ‘troth-plighting’, of their daughter Mary to one of their apprentices, Stephen Belott. Some years later Belott sued Mountjoy for an unpaid dowry of £60, and Shakespeare was among those called to give evidence at the Court of Requests in Westminster. He did so on 11 May 1612, though – somewhat ...”

“... remarkably resilient. He lived to be eighty, having served four monarchs (Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, Elizabeth I) and spent 43 years as a member of the Chapel Royal. Unfortunately for historians, his music and his longevity are all we have to go on, since Tallis left almost nothing about himself. Unlike William Byrd and John Sheppard, he wrote no letters ...”

“... might be filled with colourful and thrilling, terrifying or sentimental images of Jesus and Mary and the saints, but these were not, they explained, objects of worship: they served only as didactic tools for the illiterate. Not idols for whom prayers were uttered and candles lit, they were edifying comic books. When those who venerated the image of a ...”

“... of work already done: by Gill on ‘Salisbury Plain’, by Butler on ‘The Ruined Cottage’, by Jacobus, Jonathan Wordsworth and others. Elsewhere he is less successful. His history is more literary-biographical than intellectual, and he passes by without comment significant work in intellectual history. James Chandler’s Wordsworth’s Second Nature ...”