Description
Book SynopsisAdam Usk, a Welsh lawyer in England and Rome during the first years of the fifteenth century, lived a peculiar life. He was, by turns, a professor, a royal advisor, a traitor, a schismatic, and a spy. He cultivated and then sabotaged figures of great influence, switching allegiances between kings, upstarts, and popes at an astonishing pace. Usk also wrote a peculiar book: a chronicle of his own times, composed in a strangely anxious and secretive voice that seems better designed to withhold vital facts than to recount them. His bold starts tumble into anticlimax; he interrupts what he starts to tell and omits what he might have told. Yet the kind of secrets a political man might find safer to keep—the schemes and violence of regime change—Usk tells openly.
Steven Justice sets out to find what it was that Adam Usk wanted to hide. His search takes surprising turns through acts of political violence, persecution, censorship, and, ultimately, literary history. Adam Usk'
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"In prose that is extraordinarily alive both to its subject and to its own suspenseful disclosures, Steven Justice teaches us to read a Latin chronicle as a piece of written craft, and few have sustained that attention this far or this finely. More importantly, Justice assesses and advances major principles of narrative interpretation, concerning how narratives relate to contexts, how rhetorical traditions foster or undermine particular visions of history, and how the discipline of literary analysis maintains a delicate balance between rigorous adherence to its established tenets and wider connections to other questions and explanations-matters that must surely energize discussion among humanities scholars of all periods." * Andrew Galloway, Cornell University *
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1. The First Secret
Chapter 2. The Story of William Clerk
Chapter 3. Fear
Chapter 4. Prophecy
Chapter 5. Utility
Chapter 6. Grief
Chapter 7. Theory of History
Chapter 8. Adam Usk's Secret
Conclusion
List of Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
