While reading Richard Hooker’s 1593 tract Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (don’t ask me why I’m reading that), I came across the following hilarious aside:

“Whereunto if afterwards there might be added the right helps of true art and learning (which helps, I must plainly confess, this age of the world, carrying the name of a learned age, doth neither much know nor greatly regard) . . .”

Now keep in mind, Spencer’s Faerie Queene came out in 1590. Over the course of the following two decades, Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, Marlowe, and others would produce some of the greatest plays in the history of world literature. Philemon Holland, George Chapman, and others were producing masterful translations of the Greeks and Romans. In 1621, Robert Burton produced The Anatomy of Melancholy, arguably *the most learned book ever written*.