Word: 17th
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...George Fox was a hard man for any century to live with. In 17th century England, already a melee of warring religions and political factions, he founded a rudely revolutionary new movement, which became the Society of Friends. A weaver's son from Leicestershire, Quaker Fox preached "God's free gospel" loudly and with a countryman's directness. He attacked other religions indiscriminately, and the fierce pacifism of his followers was, politically speaking, highly suspicious...
...Unfamiliar. The vote was also a testament to the remarkable staying powers of a mild, methodical leather merchant and provincial politician from mid-France who, last February, was summoned from obscurity to accept the perishable honor of providing France with her 17th government since the Liberation. Antoine Pinay is a small (5 ft. 7 in., 155 lbs.), trig man who, in unguarded moments, resembles Charlie Butterworth with a mustache. He might be the man the French lexicographers meant when they defined petit bourgeois in the dictionary-respectable, thrifty and discreet; at home with account books but uneasy with the great...
...Milan last year, Art Critic Lionello Venturi paused before The Martyrdom of St. Matthew, famed masterpiece of 17th century Michelangelo da Caravaggio. Venturi had seen the painting often before in Rome's dimly lit church of San Luigi dei Francesi. But this time, aided by the strong artificial light of the Milan gallery, where it was on loan, he thought he saw a vague overlapping of paint surfaces around the fallen figure of St. Matthew. He persuaded government art authorities to X-ray the canvas...
...Devils of Loudun, by Aldous Huxley. A skillful account of the epidemic of devil-possession which beset the French town of Loudun in the 17th century, and of the rash priest who burned for it (TIME...
Among many readable books of true adventure, perhaps the most exciting was Ann Davison's Last Voyage, the tense report of a tragic effort, made with her husband, to cross the Atlantic in a small boat. Aldous Huxley made an appearance with an urbane history of some 17th century French Ursuline nuns who were possessed by The Devils of London. Rome and a Villa, an intellectual love affair that Author Eleanor Clark carried on with the Eternal City, made better reading than all the year's travel books put together. The finest picture book of the year...