Abstract
AMONG the long didactic works of the seventeenth-century Heywood's Hierarchie of the Blessed Angells gives us as good an idea as any of the background of traditional beliefs on which the literature of the period drew, and which, trickling down through chapbooks, conditioned the thinking of unlearned as well as learned men. Every age has its fashions in learning as in everything else, and Burton, Browne, Drayton and Camden all tend to draw on the same sources for their instances and quotations; but Heywood's Hierarchie is remarkable for the number of tales and anecdotes told in the course of it, many of them forms of the Aarne-Thompson tale-types and motifs. Unless you are a specialist in literature it is most likely that the name of Thomas Heywood will suggest to you that gentle and humane play 'A Woman Killed with Kindness'; or you may think of 'The Lancashire Witches', or of Heywood's part in 'The Witch of Edmonton'; and it is no wonder that you should do so, for these plays have often been reprinted, but there has been no reprint of the first 1635 edition of The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angells, a long didactic poem, with copious prose additions, after the style of Drayton's Polyolbion or Sylvester's Du Bartas. The title-page of the book runs:
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