The parallel adventures of Matt Talbot
Matt Talbot’s corpse-girdling chains and cords are what attracted scholars’ attention. But those scholars, like almost everyone else, utterly ignored the man while he was alive.
Later, when analysts wrote about Talbot, some did it with reverence, others with joking contempt. The two camps agree on the basic facts, but differ utterly on the explanation….
So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.