Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Walsingham


This book printed in 1700 just came back to the San Francisco library where I work from its rest-cure at a restoration lab in Marin County. I am facilitating its face-lift debut and reintroducing it to the collection. Francis Walsingham has come down in popular history as the "spy master" of Queen Elizabeth I of England, and the principal person who tortured all those Jesuits. This book is a translation into French of Walsingham's correspondence (published in Amsterdam about a century after Walsingham's death) for the edification of Machiavellians all over Europe.