This is "silver-tongued" Henry Smith discussing zeal in a sermon (printed in 1593). This passage comes from Smith's sermon on "The Dialogue betweene Paul and Agrippa" in Acts 26:26-29. The sermon is a great example of Smith's ability to turn single words into powerful displays of exhortation and admonition. In this case, he picks up on the words "almost" and "altogether" in the passage--Agrippa says to Paul, "Almost thou perswadest me to become a Christian" and Paul replies, "I would to God, that not onely thou, but also all that heare me this daie were both almost, and altogether such as I am." Smith works his way into arguing that folks in his time are content with "almost." This lack of zeal leads to the situation described in the somewhat confusing passage above.

What interests me here is the final phrase, Smith's claim that in the present, almost-oriented situation, someone who merely swears the Pope is antichrist and that flesh is acceptable to eat on Fridays is a "Christian euerie inche" and has "zeale, knowledge and religion in Folio." Smith of course doesn't think such a thing; he is calling attention to the wrongheadedness of the "almost" culture, in part by reference to the folio format. As I have been working on the language of books, I have found that most writers use "X in folio" in surprising ways. Specifically, they frequently use the folio format (as Smith wryly does here) to signal something other than fullness and richness. Typically, the end point of a reference to the folio format is to minimize or reduce, rather than to enhance or enlarge. Smith's reference to folio here resembles Shakespeare's in Don Armado's line, "I am for whole books in folio." In both cases, a big book functions, ultimately, as a sign of intellectual poverty.

The blog is a dying medium. It peaked several years back and is now in something like decline. Except for a few exceptional cases, it's difficult to reach readers with a blog. At least, this is what I intuit from the present media ecosystem. I recall a moment, sometime around 2010, when I realized I could spend my entire day, every day, reading the blogs of people I knew personally. (It calls to mind similar moments in the past, noted by scholars like Roger Chartier and Andrew Piper, when a surfeit of books made reading everything feel as impossible as it actually was.)

So, why blog? I have a few reasons.

1. I can't do Twitter. For various reasons, including the way the platform seems designed to make one's life seem insufficient (it's the HGTV of the internet), I stepped away from Twitter a few years ago. I have only regretted it when I missed out on interesting conversations on so-called Academic Twitter.
2. I am not on Facebook, and I never have been.
3. I want to share stuff! In my research and teaching, I regularly encounter things that I think other people will like, or at least find interesting. In the past, Twitter provided an outlet for this stuff, but see #1.

So, a blog it is. I'll try to keep it short.