Oxford

With three exceptions, all of the many books, papers, and articles cited in FLOREAT LUX are actual publications. Thomas Potts’s The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster was published in 1613, shortly after the trials to which he was a witness, though that account unwittingly does more to condemn the magistrates than the accused. Jonathan Jones is a well-respected figure in art criticism, and his 2002 Guardian article on Rothko is worth tracking down. The century-old numismatic paper that Sabrina locates in the Maughan, Nelson’s Gold Coins Issued at the Mint at Oxford, etc., gives a stirring account of the Civil War context (FLOREAT LUX’s author conducted research in that same library, with access granted by the kind permission of King’s College). Even some of the very obscure and dry-sounding references can be entertaining, such as Volume 17 of the Numismatic Chronicle and Journal of the Numismatic Society, published in 1855, that Bronaryre gives Sabrina, listing the location and provenance of all known extant Oxford Crowns, including the Ashmolean’s (pictured, courtesy of the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford)—it numbers these as either ten or eleven, the dubious eleventh rumored “to have been in possession of a lady, a friend of Dr. Disney, Hollis’s Executor,” a line which with Victorian delicacy brings to mind an illicit relationship paid for with purloined treasure.

The other publications referenced in FLOREAT LUX are likewise real—among them: Philosophiae Magnae Paracelsi; De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae; Démonologie, ou traitté des démons et sorciers; Hexagrammum Mysticum Theorem; Catalogus plantarum horti medici Oxoniensis; and the incredibly named The Spirit of Solitude: an Autohagiography: Subsequently re-Antichristianed The Confessions of Aleister Crowley.

The Cartulary of the Monastery of St. Æthylwine at Easton Grey is fictional, based loosely on two 19th-century Oxford University works of scholarship on medieval cartularies: The Cartulary of the Abbey of Eynsham and The Cartulary of the Monastery of St. Frideswide at Oxford, both of which feature detailed analyses of their seals, although none of them Templar. Lastly, The Wonders of the Windrush and Cavendish House Dishabille are both obviously fictional, although the cover art of FLOREAT LUX offers hints as to how they might have looked.