Archival discoveries reported in Notes and Queries in the past two years have identified the ‘M Streamer’ who narrates most of William Baldwin’s prose satire Beware the Cat (1561) with the real historical figure of Gregory Stremer, contradicting a long-held belief that Baldwin’s narrator was a fiction. The present note sheds another glint of light on Stremer’s London life. It further establishes him as a living person rather than a confection, and suggests that a connection to Westminster is possible after all, perhaps on precisely the ‘semi-formal or independent basis’ that Parsons conjectures.

In 1584, shortly after his bar-mitzvah, the young Italian Jew Leon Modena (1571-1648) composed an eight-line poem so remarkable that it has never been rivalled in its own genre. Known as Kinah Shemor in Hebrew, Chi nasce muor in Italian, this elegy makes sense simultaneously in both languages. It stands at the head of a little-known tradition of short poems, fragments, and fragments of memories of short poems, often composed by Jews and operating at the borders between Hebrew and romance vernaculars, Jewish and Christian communities. More than merely bilingual or macaronic, for Modena the form seems to have existed somewhere between language and music. Yet for want of a formal name, this tradition has long slipped through the cracks of the critical canon.

Leon Modena’s Kinah Shemor publishes the first critical edition and English translation of the poem to take into account all three of its primary witnesses. It places Kinah Shemor in Modena’s thought as a bridge between poetry and music and between Jewish and Christian religious communities, and describes the poem’s afterlife in relation to broader questions of genre theory, critical taxonomy, and the Christian study of Jewish literature in early modern Europe.