In 1940, poet T. S. Eliot, then a London editor, commissioned historian Muriel St. Clare Byrne to undertake the first annotated edition of England's illuminating 16th-century Lisle Letters -the personal and official correspondence of Arthur Plantagenet (Viscount Lisle), his wife, and his friends. The product of Byrne's scholarship will be published, in six volumes, on May 31, by the University of Chicago Press. The 3,000 Lisle Letters cover the most memorable seven years (1533-40) in the reign...