Morton Bloomfield’s magisterial study of The Seven Deadly Sins, published in 1952, closes with the sad reflection that Spenser’s Faerie Queene marks the end of a venerable literary line. To him, the great moral and imaginative concept reaching back more than a millennium to Evagrius Ponticus, John Cassian and Gregory the Great was effectively over and done by the late sixteenth century: ‘The tradition of the Sins was dead; they no longer evolved; they no longer inspired great writing.’

Such a valediction seemed confirmed at the Stanford University Humanities Library when I went to photocopy the chapter of Bloomfield’s book that contains precisely this plangent obituary. There, above the copy machines, was a playful series of framed woodcuts called ‘The Seven Deadly Sins of Book Care’. Each one presented an allegorical figure of Pride, Envy and the rest of the sins, together with appropriate lines from Book One of the Faerie Queene. Along with this evocation of the glorious past was a sevenfold warning tothose using the library today. Take, for instance, the finger wagged at photocopiers who might well be guilty of Avarice: