The Apocrypha and its Influence on Literature | Q&A #1 | 2025

[@techystylo]

I am so early it feels wrong. Saving this to watch on my lunch at work!

[@closereadingpoetry]

You must have that notification bell on 💪

[@РоманПаляниця-к5э]

I was waiting for this video too. I want to thank you for your work, I really got intellectual pleasure! I'm waiting for a new video. Greetings from Ukraine, which is bleeding, but does not give up!

[@HERObyPROXY]

Was just reading the Apocrypha so excellent timing!

[@robertgainer2783]

Excellent, you have discovered the work of Mary Ann Evans! Where I live is equidistant between the birthplace and family home of William Shakespeare and the birthplace and family home of Evans (or George Eliot for those unfamiliar with her pseudonym), and as such she is the second most famous writer from my area (with Philip Larkin coming in a close third). However, when I went into a bookshop (part of a large chain of bookstores) in her home town and asked for a copy of Daniel Deronda by George Eliot the store manager had never heard of ‘him’. That is despite of the big statue in the town centre, and the name of both the school and the local hospital being ‘George Eliot’. Adam Bede was actually set in a village in Staffordshire (not too far away), but Middlemarch is set in my home town (city) where Evans/Eliot went to school in Warwick Row. A great writer and intellectual. She also wrote poetry, but was less gifted as a poet than she was as a novelist (in my opinion, but happy to debate!).

[@closereadingpoetry]

That sounds like a reader's paradise! The landscapes described in Adam Bede sounded so lovely and bucolic! I love her prose but admittedly have not read her poetry.

[@lyhoangtran]

Can't wait to watch this ❤

[@MetokurAssistant]

This is so interesting

[@jamesduggan7200]

You, yourself, said it that the Apocrypha is found in the Catholic Bibles. As I understand it, Catholicism isn't as fecund as Judaism or Protestantism in cultivating literature. Of course that's opinion but it does seem to explain a facet of our reality even if it is hard to prove.

[@minui8758]

What? Augustine, Bede, Boccaccio, Dante, Chaucer, John of the Cross, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, arguably Shakespeare himself given most get religion from their mum and the whole ex Blackfriars theatre site being used for mass, presumably on his or another member of his troops orders and all of the dozens of allusions experts have noticed… Gerard Manley Hopkins, Cardinal Newman, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Flannery O’Connor etc etc… I can’t even begin to comprehend why you’d think Catholicism was lacking in literary output