Early Modern Notes

In the news this weekend.

Via Arts & Letters Daily, a delightful essay on the beach holiday. (Much more fun than actually doing one, to my mind; I hate sunbathing…) It reminds us that the beach as a leisure space is really another eighteenth-century invention (although one, it would seem, with some seventeenth-century forebears), created as an alternative to the spa. And that frequently this took place (and still does) in some decidedly hostile climes. Scarborough, for chrissakes.

Everyone not at Cambridge will probably find it hard to resist some amusement at the university’s discomfiture at the hands of one of its own professors. Medievalist Gillian Evans has done a right old hatchet job in an innocuously titled book, Inside the University of Cambridge in the Modern World. Incompetent management and financial controls, internal power struggles, lack of accountability…

Some good news for British (not least Welsh) sheep farmers at last, although one senses it’s a fragile recovery.