A Stain in the Blood: the remarkable voyage of Sir Kenelm Digby
JOE MOSHENSKA

The life of Kenelm Digby (1603-65) is one you simply could not make up, though Digby himself had a good go at it, composing in his youth a chivalric romance called Loose Fantasies, in which he wove autobiography and fiction together in frustratingly seamless fashion. It is among the sources that the Cambridge English don, Joe Moshenska, has used to fashion an intriguing, elegant and enjoyable biography of a man who was perhaps England’s ultimate polymath in an age of many claimants to the title.

Digby was a swordsman and a courtier; a friend of Charles I; a literary disciple of Ben Jonson; a writer on, and experimenter with, alchemy, cookery and medicine. Digby was also (despite some infidelities that Moshenska rather glosses over) a famously uxorial husband, contracting a youthful love match with the noted beauty Venetia Stanley, and turning his grief at her untimely death in 1633 into an extraordinary public performance of mourning, which involved sending for his friend Anthony van Dyck to paint a post­humous likeness while Venetia’s body was still warm in its bed.