What We’re Reading

Antonia Fraser, Lady Caroline Lamb: A Free Spirit. Lady Caroline Lamb is a notorious and famous woman for lovers of Romantic poetry—she is remembered as one of the women with whom Lord Byron had a long dalliance. However, her reputation was sullied by the partisans of Lord Byron who tried to protect his legacy, alongside a sweeping tide of Victoria era moral reform which cast scorn on Caroline’s “free spirit” and her numerous affairs. Antonia Fraser, however, gives us a much more nuanced and sympathetic biography of “a human being – and a woman, and incidentally a mother – who at a time of woman’s submission, both legally and socially, went her own way.” In telling us the story of Lady Caroline Lamb’s adventurous journeys, we are reminded, consistently, of her (flawed) humanity in contrast to the many earlier depictions of her where her humanity was lost.

~ Paul Krause

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man. Written in 1486 by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, an Italian philosopher from the Renaissance, this book has been coined a “Manifesto of the Renaissance.” So strong was Pico’s desire to synthesize the sources of classical civilization with Christianity that, in doing so, he sometimes expressed views that are rather strange. He believed, for instance, that knowledge of magic may help prove the divinity of Christ. His peculiar ideas notwithstanding, the opening pages of Oration on the Dignity of Man provide a timeless expression of Christian humanism. Republished by Regnery Gateway with a wonderful introduction by Russell Kirk, this book explores the nature of man as made in the likeness of God. Man has fallen and is capable of terrible evil, yet he is also able to aspire upward to true nobility. Man has been given free will, and if he so chooses, he may recognize the great dignity of his human nature.

Those of us devoted to the humanities are interested, frequently, with the question of what it means to be human. Pico teaches us that true humanism must have a transcendent aim — it cannot lack reference to the God who became man. The human being only has dignity, Pico knew, because he has been created by a God who can raise him to a high dignity. Without God, man falls downward into terrible indignity, descending to “the lower, brutish forms of life.” Such is the case today in an age where human dignity is often neglected, despite man’s scientific and technological domination over nature being at an all-time high. With God, however, man can aspire to be higher than the animals and only a little lower than the angels.

~ Darrell Falconburg

Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Save Your Life. Reading In Search For Lost Time during the tail end of my undergraduate career softened my heart and helped me develop an appreciation for the difficult and complex writing of Modernism, particularly Marcel Proust. Nearly a year later, I tackled Botton’s work, and it encapsulated Proust’s nonsensical technique readers all originally experienced, pushing us to understand why and how taking a few moments to reminisce about childhood/life after one bite of tea cake can impact attitude. Proust can change your life in this way— urging the audience to stop and listen as it is the only way to enjoy the past, present, and, soon to be, future.

~ Sarah Tillard

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