History Tidbit of the Week

[acroyear]

In this first of I hope 52, I'll be doing my own version of a "quote of the week" with history tidbits, factoids, and connections, mostly based on my readings of James Burke, but sometimes from other sources. Some will be humourous, some involve my own intellectual connections, all should be educational.

So here we go with week 1, taken from his new book, Twin Tracks:

William Lauder was a splenetic Scots classics scholar and failure, who made waves in 1747 with the announcement that he'd analyzed Milton's Paradise Lost and found it to be almost entirely plagiarized from ninety-seven other writers' work. Milton, Lauder said, was a forger.

In the uproar that followed, a cleric with a literary bent, John Douglas, spent several weeks in the Bodleian Library and Oxford, chasing up all Lauder's claimed sources and systematically revealed that Lauder himself had forged them.

Go fig. Lauder himself confessed and retired to Barbados to hide, and Douglas eventually became bishop of Salisbury.