The Loveres Maladye of Hereos

Abstract

It is not often that a word has dropped so completely int that its occurrence in two famous classics can be commented on for over three centuries without an inkling of its real significance, while an adjective whose meaning depends directly upon it is used again and again in another no less celebrated work without recognition by a single commentator or in a single dictionary. Hereos itself, so far as I know, has escaped all the lexicographers, with but one obscure exception. In the passage in Chaucer in which it occurs it has been, from the first comment made upon it to the last, misunderstood. In the Philobiblon of Richard of Bury it has been universally regarded as a textual corruption, and subjected by the editors to more or less ingenious emendation. And that the adjective heroical, as used in the Anatomy of Melancholy, has any other than its ordinary meaning seems to have occurred to no one who has expressed himself in print. It is the pious purpose of this article-itself the result of a happy accident-to rescue from the iniquity of oblivion a long-lost and extremely interesting word. For the lore of hereos is a mingled yarn, and some of the strangest fancies of two races through a thousand years have found a place in it.