Somewhere around the mid or late 1990s, I gave up on ever converting my dissertation to a book, and too much time has passed since then to catch up on intervening scholarship. My main problem, as I understood it, was learning how to move from a graduate student’s dissertation need (especially in this case, which surveyed a huge chronological range of material) for ample citations to a publishable book’s need to strip those down to a minimum.

As I have skimmed my content for these postings, I find myself impressed with the Richard of 25 years or so ago, and I’m hit for the first time since then with a sharp pang that I never finished turning this into a book.

I proofread a fair amount on this go-round, but far from everything. When I have the stamina, I may go through everything to repair problems like the following:
– Occasionally, material is repeated from one chapter to another.
– Drafts sometimes include notes to myself during my revisions , and probably have typos.
– Some chapters are PDFs, other are pasted text.
– Commands for Xywrite, my word processor of choice way back when, may occasionally be visible.
– The formatting is not always consistent–for example, some chapters have endnotes, some have bottom-of-page footnotes.

You will have to be very very interested in the topic to read much of what’s here, but I can’t bear to let it fade to oblivion when I’m dead. And if the topic(s) happen to interest you, you will find a wide survey of Western attitudes from classical times through the 16th century, along with what my vanity tells me are many ingenious connections between and among seemingly divergent ideas. (Cf. Samuel Johnson on metaphysical wit as taking ideas and yoking them together by violence.)