Burton on Melancholy Mason and Humbert?

[Cathy Ramirez]

Yes! The connections between Lolita and Burton run
deep. 

" Quartilla in Petronius never remembered she was a
maid; and the wife of Bath, in Chaucer, cracks,
Since I was twelve years old, believe, Husbands at
Kirk-door had I five. 18 Aratine Lucretia sold her
maidenhead a thousand times before she was twenty-four
years old ....  Rahab, that harlot, began to be a
professed quean at ten years of age, and was but
fifteen when she hid the spies, ......... Generally
women begin pubescere, as they call it, or catullire,
as Julius Pollux cites, lib. 2. cap. 3.
onomast out of Aristophanes, 20 at fourteen years old,
then they do offer themselves, and some plainly rage.
21 Leo Afer saith, that in Africa a man shall scarce
find a maid at fourteen years of age, they are so
forward, and many amongst us after they come into the
teens do not live without husbands, but linger. What
pranks in this kind the middle ages have played is not
to be recorded. 


--- davemarc <davemarc at panix.com> wrote:
> "He makes observations, keeps times and seasons; and
> as Conradus the emperor
> would not touch his new bride, till an astrologer
> had told him a masculine
> hour, but with what success?  He travels into
> Europe, Africa, Asia,
> searcheth every creek, sea, city, mountain, gulf, to
> what end?"
> 
>
http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/pageviewer-idx?c=moa;cc=moa;sid=02375453
>
181a847a9418f7b026d75773;q1=Anatomy%20of%20Melancholy;idno=ACM8939.0001.001;
> view=image;seq=00000226
> 
> d.
> 
> "(A) staggering triumph of education and artistry,
> at once a treatise on the
> medical, historical, philosophical and spiritual
> aspects of melancholy, a
> pep talk for fellow sufferers and a meta-fictional
> challenge leagues more
> daunting than any Melville or Thomas Pynchon crafted
> centuries
> later." --Patrick Giles, The Los Angeles Times
>
http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/divphil/burtonr.htm
> 
> 
> 


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