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Columns::September 17, 2001
New retirement plan possibilities result from new tax law
Conference focuses on quantum computing, communication
Thriving under pressure
Twelve-string guitarist Leo Kottke opens new performing arts season
Lithographs by major Spanish artist on exhibt at Georgia Museum of Art
Campus Closeup
Kudos
Retirees
All spaced out
Campus News
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| English professor Charles Doyle was reading religious and political pamphlets of the 17th century when he discovered Wren’s poem. Photo by Peter Frey |
Find of the (17th) century
English professor discovers previously unknown poem by architect Christopher Wren
By Phil Williams
phil@franklin.uga.edu
One winter morning in 1650, Anne Greene walked to the gallows. A serving girl to Sir Thomas Read of Oxford, England, she had been condemned to die for infanticide after her illegitimate baby, fathered by Read’s grandson, was born prematurely or, possibly, stillborn.
Despite the doubtful circumstances, a jury convicted her of murder. She arranged for friends to help dispatch her more quickly by hanging from her legs when the noose tightened, and also by striking her on the chest. After she had been hanged, her body was cut down and taken to Oxford University to be used in an anatomy demonstration. The mid-17th century was not a squeamish time.
As the lesson commenced, the “cadaver” moaned and began to move. The startled students and lecturers revived Anne, and she became their patient--something of their adopted “project.” Eventually she gained a pardon, married and bore several children.
Charles Doyle, associate professor of English at UGA, was reading a 1651 pamphlet about the hanging when he noticed something remarkable. One of the light-hearted commemorative poems accompanying the narration was written by Christopher Wren, then an 18-year-old undergraduate and later the most famous London architect of his day. The poem, which is mentioned in none of the standard biographies of Wren, was apparently his first published work.
“Christopher Wren’s time was not an age of specialization,” says Doyle. “We cannot be surprised to find the great anatomist-mathematician-astronomer-architect trying his hand at verse. Nonetheless, it is pleasant to discover Wren, who so often emerges from the biographies as a rather prim virtuoso lacking in human charm, making a spirited effort to join in some academic fun.”
Doyle’s discovery was published in the summer issue of the journal ANQ (American Notes and Queries), which presents scholarship in the humanities.
Wren’s work as an architect is the cornerstone of his fame. After the Great Fire of London in 1666, he re-planned the entire city, supervising the rebuilding of 51 churches. He is most famous today for designing St. Paul’s Cathedral. He was also known in his time as a brilliant mathematician, praised by no less a figure than Sir Isaac Newton.
Prior to eminence as an architect, Wren studied at Oxford with the physicist Robert Boyle on “experiments in intravenous injections and transfusion,” says Doyle. Wren even furnished illustrations for a 1663 treatise on the anatomy of the brain. It is not known if he actually witnessed the attempted dissection of Anne Greene, but Doyle considers it likely.
The pamphlet carries a full 17th-century illuminating title: “Newes from the Dead. Or A True and Exact Narration of the miraculous deliverance of Anne Greene, Who being Executed at Oxford Decemb. 14. 1650. afterwards revived; and by the care of certain Physitians there, is now perfectly recovered. Together with the manner of her suffering, and the particular meanes used for her Recovery. Written by a Scholler in Oxford for the Satisfaction of a friend, who desired to be informed concerning the truth of the businesse. Whereunto are added certain Poems, casually written upon the Subject.”
There were, in fact, 33 poems--in Latin, French and English.
“Twenty-five youthful Oxonians commemorated the event in light verse fraught with bookish learning,” writes Doyle. “One of those poems is by Wren.”
The poems abound in somewhat juvenile puns, strained paradoxes and allusions, not to mention grotesque imagery. Wren revised his poem slightly for the second edition, which came out later in the same year, now with 52 poems by 40 contributors.
Glancing at Wren’s poem, one can be glad he chose architecture and mathematics as his life’s work.
A scholar of 17th-century literature and culture, Doyle discovered the book--and noticed the unpromising verses by the future celebrity--while examining minor religious and political pamphlets from the 1640s and 1650s (“great quantities of sub-literature,” as he says) in a Los Angeles library.
“Modern science was really born during the Puritan Revolution in England; it was a time of great curiosity,” says Doyle. “It’s not surprising that you’d find academicians writing poetry about such an odd event.”
One particularly curious fact is noticeable on the title page of the pamphlet. In several surviving copies, some or all of the capital P’s are missing from the title page, leaving “hysitians” (for “Physitians”), “oems” (for “Poems”), and the like. Why? Doyle speculates that the printer must have needed the P’s more urgently for some other job.
It’s the kind of thing that might have set off another round of bad poetry from the young Oxford wits.
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