This Week's Acquisitions

(Actually, two weeks of acquisitions: the mailroom just reopened on Tuesday.)

• John Banville, Shroud (Knopf, 2003).  An aged professor (based on Paul de Man) with a stolen identity finds himself threatened with exposure.
• Adam Thorpe, Pieces of Light (Carroll & Graf, 2000).  Elderly man haunted by his childhood in Africa.
• Luise Rinser, Abelard's Love (Nebraska, 1998).  The son of Abelard and Heloise seeks the truth; originally published in Germany.
• Annie Proulx, Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2 (Scribner, 2004).  Short story collection; follow-up to Close Range. 
• Judith Knelman, Twisting in the Wind: The Murderess and the English Press (Toronto, 1998).  Studies how Victorian journalists dealt with sensational female criminals.  Capital Punishment U.K. lists women hanged from 1800-1868 and 1868-1955; see also this brief Guardian article on Margaret Higgins and Catherine Flanagan.  On (alleged?) poisoner Florence Maybrick, see a 1913 newspaper article and LawBuzz. 
• D. J. Deane, Two Noble Lives: John Wicliffe, the Morning Star of the Reformation; Martin Luther, the Reformer (S. W. Partridge  & Co., n.d.).  Two short didactic biographies.
• W. H. Beckett, The English Reformation of the Sixteenth Century: With Chapters on Monastic England and the Wycliffite Reformation (RTS, 1890).  Ecclesiastical history. 
• David W. Bebbington, The Dominance of Evangelicalism: The Age of Spurgeon and Moody (InterVarsity, 2005).  The Anglo-American evangelical scene during the Victorian period, including the major revivalists.
• Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: A Life (Yale, 1998).  Prize-winning biography.  There's a contemporary account of Cranmer's execution at English History; the Medieval Source Book has a letter from Cranmer on Anne Boleyn's coronation.