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Adam Usk'S Secret Steven Justice
Adam Usk'S Secret
Steven Justice
Adam Usk, a fifteenth-century professor, royal advisor, schismatic, and spy, wrote a peculiar book in a reticent, nervous prose better suited to keeping secrets than setting them in writing. Steven Justice sets out to find what Usk wanted to hide and comes to surprising conclusions about the foundations of literary and historical study.
Marc Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.; Adam Usk, a Welsh lawyer in England and Rome during the first years of the 15th 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 withold 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 the Adam Usk wanted to hide.
Contributor Bio: Justice, Steven Steven Justice is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.
| Media | Books Book |
| Released | March 25, 2015 |
| ISBN13 | 9780812246933 |
| Publishers | University of Pennsylvania Press |
| Genre | Interdisciplinary Studies > Medieval (500-1453) Studies |
| Pages | 224 |
| Dimensions | 161 × 235 × 24 mm · 498 g |
| Series Editor | Karras, Ruth Mazo |
