Karl Steel

To elaborate on this tweet: The big reveal of the fourteenth-century Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is that Morgan le Fey has concocted the whole masquerade of greenness and beheading to frighten Guinevere to death. In the poem’s final section, the Green Knight, now revealed as Gawain’s recent host, Bertilak de Hautdesert, tells him this, but only after another reveal, namely, that Bertilak himself had put his wife up to trying to seduce Gawain.

James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, rich, strange, and Scottish, died at eighty-four in 1799. He was known for exposing himself: he exercised naked before the open windows of his estate and eschewed travel by carriage, insisting instead on riding his horse Alburac through the damp gray of every Scottish season. Like many other men of his ilk and era—Rousseau, Condillac, Mandeville—he speculated at length about language’s origins among our primeval ancestors.

Il Guercino, Circe Transforming Ulysses’s Men into Various Animals Pico della Mirandola’s late fifteenth-century oration On the Dignity of Man is still sometimes awarded laurels for bounding up past the Middle Ages into modernity’s open ground. Paul J.