Recent stories of note:
“Bayeux Tapestry to Return to UK for the First Time in 900 Years”
Alex Greenberger, ARTnews
In a bit of self-proclaimed cultural diplomacy, the Bayeux Tapestry will be lent to the British Museum by France. The tapestry measures 230 feet long and depicts, in fifty-eight scenes, the Norman Conquest of England and the Battle of Hastings. The tapestry has not been seen in England for more than nine hundred years. In exchange, the British Museum will lend historic artifacts from the Sutton Hoo ship burial and the twelfth-century Lewis chess pieces to France. In 2018, President Macron first declared that the tapestry would be loaned as a sign of healthy relations between the two countries after Brexit, but the exchange was cast in doubt when it appeared that the tapestry was too fragile to travel. The tapestry is now set to appear at the British Museum in August 2026, however, where it is sure to fascinate countless visitors.
“Man of Glass”
Alexander Lee, Literary Review
Giovanni Boccaccio, the fourteenth-century author of works such as Decameron, may have been one of the giants of Italian Renaissance literature, along with Dante and Petrarch, but he was also, according to his friend Francesco Nelli, a “man of glass”—fragile, overly sensitive, and quick to anger. In Boccaccio: A Biography, Marco Santagata set out to prove this thesis by looking at his life through his written works. Santagata traces Boccaccio’s roots in Florence, an unfinished career in the church, and a subsequent life traveling Italy, the writer painfully sensitive about his shortcomings with the learned language of Latin. According to Alexander Lee in Literary Review, Santagata sheds some light on several mysterious episodes in Boccaccio’s life, including his abrupt departure from Naples in 1341. Lee faults Santagata, however, for being too uncritical of his sources. How often can one’s autobiography really be trusted, after all? Lee says that Boccaccio tended to project himself onto different characters simultaneously in his works and that Santagata overlooks the inconsistencies in these projections. Ultimately, Lee says that this biography, like the subject, is “made of glass.” For more on the subject, look for Brooke Allen’s forthcoming review in the September edition of The New Criterion.
“The Birth of Modern Choice: Where life is lived”
Daniel T. Rodgers, The Hedgehog Review
Sophia Rosenfeld argues in The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life that choice manifests not in binary, moral questions but in matters of individual preferences, tastes, and judgments. If this sounds like a rudimentary economics textbook, that’s no accident—she does bemoan the way neoclassical economists have “hollowed out” the meaning of freedom and choice by detaching value judgements from choices, which are instead construed as maximizing utility. According to Daniel T. Rodgers writing in The Hedgehog Review, Rosenfeld posits that choice arose not from the philosophical ideas of Locke or Mill, but from more ground-level changes in growing economies. She traces modern choice to rather specific moments such as Christopher Cock’s heavily advertised auctions with his dazzling array of goods in the early eighteenth century, the choice in religion epitomized by the Quaker dissenter William Penn, and the move from public to private voting. However, Rodgers writes, “the menus from which one chooses were almost never themselves the subjects of consumer choice.” In The Age of Choice, Rosenfeld questions whether these paradigms offer actual choice in the absence of “true” freedom.
