Chaucer’s pilgrims are going to Canterbury Cathedral to visit the shrine of Thomas a Becket, former archbishop of Canterbury.
Becket had been assassinated in the cathedral in 1170, following a political disagreement with King Henry II.
Pilgrimage to the shrine was a popular journey at the time the Tales were written (c. 1387-1400).
The leader of the intellectual group the “New Humanists” which, during the flowering of modernism, tried to spur interest in the classics, was Irving Babbitt, professor of romance languages at Harvard from 1894 to 1933.
Bo Weinberg, Dutch Schultz’s former henchman is killed at the beginning of E. L. Doctorow’s novel Billy Bathgate. By Schultz’s orders, he is thrown off a ship with his feet encased in cement.
In the 1928 essay “a room of one’s own”, it refers to the space a woman needs to write fiction. Specifically, Woolf says that a woman needs two things to be able to write: “money and a room of her own.” The essay was drawn from two papers Woolf gave at the Arts Society at…
The Italian religious epic Jerusalem Delivered, written in 1575 by Torquato Tasso (1544-95), concerns the First Crusade, in which European Christians fought to regain the Holy Land from the Muslims. The First Crusade lasted from 1095 to 1099.
In H. G. Wells’s novel, the name of the Invisible Man was Griffin. The Invisible Man was published in 1897. Griffin remains invisible until he is dying.
The Greek ships are enumerated in Book II of Homer’s Iliad.