Customer Reviews

The Longman Anthology of British Literature (The Early Modern Period)

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The book pictured here is the first edition. Longman is now in its second edition. Both are excellent for their copious selection of canonical authors and inclusion of women writers and
sociopolitical contexts. The new edition also contains superb color plates and a few corrections;I have written elsewhere about it.

The biography of Sir Thomas Wyatt states that "Anne implicated by association those who were supposed to have been her lovers." It was her musician, Mark Smeaton, who was arrested before she was and tortured, who was made to confess possible names, since the charges were trumped up anyway by Thomas Cromwell; Anne implicated no one. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, is listed as having died in 1545; his actual execution date was January 19, 1547, since he wasn't even arrested and charged until 1546, a year after his supposed death, according to Longman. The anthology is generous in its introductory essay where it states that Henry VIII's reasons for breaking with Rome were "many and complex," since the primary motivating factor for his doing so was to be rid of Catherine of Aragon so he could wed Anne Boleyn.

I'm only 60 pages into the anthology but the errors are unsurprising, given the number of similar errors in Volume 1A. A disappointment: buy the Norton anthology edited by the respected M. H. Abrams instead.