Charles Matthews wrote:
The article you posted seemed to take the epistemology as the basic "lesson": if you tell me we "know" that, what do you mean by "know"? It's a reasonable assumption that being analytical about how something in an encyclopedia article can be described as "known" would prove educational, say in the early teenage years. The article was on the first poetry anthology published in English, and the question I would have is more about general relevance of content. Just one statement: the first edition had many poems containing religious commentary that were taken out in later editions. OK, fine, if you know the publication date was 1557, the year before Mary Tudor died, you are going to ask more and different questions, not just "how do we know that?" which can probably be established by putting two books side by side. (This is about [[Tottel's Miscellany]], by the way.)
There is an unfortunate tendency for current day editors to view the history of past centuries in a more compressed manner than warranted. The article in question includes the sentence: "It is generally included with Elizabethan era literature even if it was, in fact, published in 1557, a year before Elizabeth I took the throne." That doesn't mention Mary at all. It ignores the effect of the less than Catholic Elizabeth's rule in comparison to that of her sister.
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