Early Modern Notes

Carolyn Steedman, “Servants and their relationship to the unconscious”, Journal of British Studies, 42 (2003).

The immense effort of legal, political, and philosophical thinking devoted to the question of service in the eighteenth century is some measure of an anxiety of the employing classes, one that was perhaps managed by masters and mistresses through a routine and ritualized moaning about their household servants. [329] …

Emulation theory was elaborated for the main part out of eighteenth-century employers’ routine condemnation of their servants’ supposed habit of copying the manners, and behavior, and above all, the dress of their betters, revealing to their masters and mistresses their true desire to be like them. … A theory that had little reference to lived experience in the eighteenth century appears to have framed much historical explanation of its social behavior… there is very little evidence that it was a practice among servants, rather than an elaborate anxiety of employers, that expressed the hope that the servants might be doing just that: watching them, their betters; knowing them, copying them. [334]

Take that, Neil McKendrick.

(Thanks to Rob for the tip-off to an article I should have noticed ages ago.)

Do you use the Athens password system to access the online resources that your university has subscriptions to? (I do, and I imagine many students and academics in British universities do too.) Well, watch out. According to my university’s weekly email newsletter:

It has been brought to the attention of the Athens team that there is a new Athens scam in progress. A message purporting to come from support@athens.ac.uk asks individuals to check their details by viewing an attachment. The attachment seems to contain a virus. Please be assured that Athens does not communicate in this way; the Eduserv Athens Service Desk email address has never been support@athens.ac.uk and we only communicate with Athens administrators, not individual Athens users.

PS: in vaguely semi-related news, Spam Karma informs me that the flood of spam comments has suddenly dried up to a trickle. I’ve had only 5 spam comments within the last 3 days. Where did they all go? I should be pleased. But somehow I feel slightly miffed. Not to say snubbed and overlooked.

The next History Carnival will be held at Siris on Friday 1 July.

Email your nominations for recently published posts (preferably since the last carnival) about history, which can be your own writing or that of other bloggers, to the host, Brandon: branem2[at]branemrys[dot]org

You should include in your email: the title and permalink URL of the blog post you wish to nominate and the author’s name (or pseudonym) and the title of the blog. (I also recommend that you put “History Carnival” somewhere in the title of the email so that it can be easily picked out amidst all the spam and other stuff that tends to clog up our mailboxes.) You can submit multiple suggestions, both your own writing and that of others, but please try not to submit more than one post by any individual author for each Carnival (with the exception of multi-part posts on the same topic).

If you have any questions about the criteria for inclusion, check out the Carnival homepage (link above)… or just send it along anyway and let the host decide.

(Because I am writing this conference paper and blogging is such a good form of avoidance…)

Yesterday evening there was the most spectacular thunderstorm we’ve had in quite a while. It had been building up all afternoon, really, horribly muggy. And then the sky started to turn this ominous shade of slate grey and there was only one way it could all end…

(Here is a more normal view from the same window as that last picture…)

I couldn’t get a picture of the lightning though. Now that was something.

As I’ve said, I like Blogsome. It’s very convenient, and it’s based on WordPress!

But there are a few niggly things that have irritated me about the setup. I know enough about the back workings of WordPress now to be able to fix them, but newbies might not.

For example, when it comes to organising your links in your sidebar: all the standard templates I’ve tried give you a single list - compared to this blog, where I have several different categories of links (’About’, ‘Weblogs’, etc), which is what people often want. Any different link categories you create in the Links Manager in the admin interface are just ignored.

This is because of a particular template tag that is being used in the main file. If a Blogsome user goes into ‘Manage’ in the admin interface, and clicks on ‘Files’, they get to the online editor which by default should show “index.html” (or go down below the box and click on “Main Page”).

If you explore the file in the box and scroll down, you will come to this piece of code, which is a template tag:

{get_links (probably followed by various attributes) }

That is Blogsome’s way of structuring the “get_links” WP template tag. But if you want “a nested HTML unordered [ie, not numbered] list of all links as defined in the Links Manager, sorted under link category headings” - all of which means: what you can see on the right in my sidebar - you need a different tag, “get_links_list”.

So, what you need to do is to replace the existing get_links tag in your Blogsome template with this

{get_links_list order=’name’} (or ‘_name’ if you want Z-A instead of A-Z)

to get the list sorted (alphabetically) by the link categories. Alternatively, if you use

{get_links_list order=’id’} (or ‘_id’ for descending instead of ascending order)

the categories will be ordered by their ‘id’ numbers rather than alphabetically.

Then remember to hit the ‘update template’ button, and when you view the blog again (assuming that you have created links under different categories in your Links Manager, of course), it should have had the desired effect.

(Don’t forget that if anything goes wrong, the Blogsome setup is such that you can easily retrieve the previous version of the template. It’s a pity that it doesn’t have a preview facility though.)

Some historically-minded bloggers who currently have their heads down in the archives and research libraries…

The Improvisatrice
eb
GZombie
Meg
Anne
Edward

Are you out there too? Or slaving over the microfilm reader? Tell us how you’re getting on!

Me, I have a conference paper to get out of the way (OK, shouldn’t be hard), and there’s a fun conference up the hill later this week, so it’ll be a quiet week archives-wise, I suspect.

If you’re organising a conference on anything early modern, I do try to do fairly regular notices of CFPs and upcoming conferences and I’ll always be glad to include yours (especially if it has a webpage I can link to. You can email me at: sharon@earlymodernweb.org.uk). I don’t know if this has any effect on readers, though: has anyone sent a proposal to or simply attended a conference after seeing it here? I’d be curious to know.

Right, there haven’t been enough link-extravangaza-style posts round here lately. What (early modern) topics do you, dear readers, want to learn more about this summer?

But there’s something really annoying about lying awake till 3am panicking that you are shite at everything (I mean absolutely everything), you are not having any ideas and not getting enough work done, so that when you wake up in the morning you are sleepy, have no ideas and can’t get any work done.

Bah. Shite.

Anybody else having or had problems with Firefox lately? It’s almost as though it’s frozen up. It won’t load pages (it just hangs - doesn’t timeout or anything), won’t even open new windows (even in Safe Mode). IE is working fine, so it wouldn’t seem to be an internet connection problem (which I thought I had for a while yesterday, but now I’m wondering if that was Firefox-related too).

And if this sounds at all familiar, what can I do about it? Do I need to reinstall or upgrade? I don’t want to have to go back to IE! (I keep looking for the tabs… And is there an equivalent of Ctrl-L in IE?)

(When not watching the OC, that is. Love OC. Hate T4. Who is that moron “interviewing” Josh Schwartz?)

How the west was spun, Annie Proulx on the heroic myth of the American west

…And Howard Zinn on myths of American exceptionalism

Salman Rushdie on facts

Blake Morrison on Richard Ingrams on William Cobbett

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in verse

Antony Gormley (you’ve just got to see what he’s made this time…)

JG Ballard claims to be hooked on CSI. I found myself wondering whether it was quite the same CSI (the original, never the spinoffs) that I’ve been hooked on for several years. Hmm.

Germaine Greer on photography and politics

Right, OC’s on. More later.

Coffee. Mmmm, coffee. Is it too hot for coffee this afternoon? Maybe not if I make it with ice cream…

I so want to go to this new Stubbs exhibition.

Horation Nelson. It’s the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar this October, so there’s going to be a lot of Nelsonia over the coming months.

Dressing down at the Civil Service. (C4 News viewers will know that this story prompted Jon Snow to strip in the studio during the week. Shocking. Jon without his funky ties? Unthinkable!)

I was looking for someone who wasn’t, as it turned out, in the DNB and turned this up. Not quite Bodyline, mind you. Oh, The Ashes they’re a-coming and we’re gonna thrash those upstart Aussies. (Like we’re thrashing those upstart Kiwis, no doubt.)

Christina (or possibly Christiana) Willes, “pioneer of round-arm bowling in cricket” (forerunner of modern overarm bowling), was baptised in February 1786, the daughter of a Kent landowner. She married Richard Thomas Hodges, another Kent squire in 1810. (Their death dates are not known). It was their son Edward who recorded his mother’s contribution to the development of the game in a 1907 article:

It was my mother’s skill in throwing the ball to him [John Willes, Christina’s brother] for practice in the barn at Tonford … He then trained a dog to fetch the ball, and there was a saying that Willes, his sister, and his dog could beat any eleven in England.

There seems to be some debate over whether the story should be taken at face value or whether “the suggestion that John Willes took his cue from his sister could… have had its origins in the playful ridicule of contemporaries”. The truth of the matter could have some significance:

Her name has been invoked by historians of women’s cricket as that of the first of her sex to assist in the game’s technical development, and was mentioned, inevitably, in coverage of the battles over the discriminatory admission policies of the MCC, which belatedly opened its doors to women members in 1999.

Whether she gave him the idea or not, John Willes’ adoption of the bowling style itself incurred some controversy.

John Willes first bowled round-arm at Lord’s in 1806; ten years later the MCC formally outlawed the practice, but Willes continued to use the style in county games and tried it once again at Lord’s, famously, in a match between Kent and the MCC in 1822. He was no-balled for throwing—becoming the first player to incur this penalty—and reportedly rode out of Lord’s ‘in high dudgeon’, vowing never to play the game again (Frindall, 14). The umpire reputedly acted under the influence of Lord Frederick Beauclerk, a formidable cricketing presence of the era and a decided opponent of the innovation. After holding trials in the previous year the MCC gave its approval to round-arm bowling in 1828; the change was formally written into a full revision of the game’s rules in 1835.

Never say that cricket doesn’t move with the times.

After all this time (you know, a whole year), I can still make splendid new discoveries of blogs that are not new at all (I don’t think) and are right up my alley. This makes me happy.

(Found at the Cranky Professor, who should be on the blogroll but I can’t remember if he is. Oops, fixed that…)

Non-sequitur, except in the sense that it also made me very happy: the scribblingwoman, Miriam Jones, has got tenure.

I’ll be in Oxford for a couple of days for a conference in early July. Any Oxford bloggers interested in meeting up?

Yep, it’s been a bit quiet around here lately. I think it’s likely to be that way for a while. I’m still in the archives, and I will be writing more on that at some point, eventually…

Then I got a “whim” (yes, dangerous, I know) and made a food blog - OK, that didn’t really take very long. And it’s fun.

But something else has been getting a lot more of my attention this week. As I mentioned before, changes are coming to Carnivalesque: it will be a ‘pre-modern’, not just an ‘early modern’ blog carnival. Well, I’ve been working on some really exciting stuff for that:

First: a new webpage! (And I think it’s very pretty, but I would.)

Second: a new partner in crime! Julie Hofmann will be mostly looking after the ancient and medieval history side of things. She’s a medievalist; some of you may know her already as one of the moderators of the H-Teach discussion list, among other things. You can email either of us about anything to do with Carnivalesque at: carnivalesque@hotmail.co.uk

And, third: a cute logo!

(Feel free to copy or hotlink the button either here or at the Carnivalesque page, where you can find the code to put it on your own blog.)

The next edition of Carnivalesque is an early modern one, on 5 July. It is being held by Jonathan Dresner at Cliopatria, and you can email your nominations to him at: dresner[at]hawaii[dot]edu

The first ancient and medieval Carnivalesque will be in early August. Start writing…

But do I have to go to Denmark? (Thanks to Kristin Brorson.)

(Ah, there’s at least one UK supplier.)

A deal has been struck: students resident in Wales won’t have to pay top-up fees at Welsh universities, while English and Scottish students will (as will Welsh students who go to English universities). The National Assembly will compensate the universities for the difference (more than £50 million a year by 2009/10). It has also, apparently, pledged to address under-funding of Welsh universities compared to their English and Scottish counterparts, amounting to £100 million (per year?).

(I wonder if I’ll be in Wales for long enough to see whether the money makes any noticeable difference?)

I finally decided to have a food blog. No frills, no fussing over design, no trying to be clever: just a place to keep links to online recipes that I’m trying out and have liked (I’m fed up of thinking, now where was that great recipe…?), and to put down some of the favourites in my notebooks and recipe books. And it won’t be a food diary exactly, but I might comment on successes and disasters sometimes. And stuff like that.

(Tomorrow night I shall be doing ‘quick’ lemon and olive chicken. I love that recipe.)

So: A Rich Cabinet. (You get extra points if you recognise the reference without looking it up. If you don’t, it’s in here.)

PS: Meant to point out that I’m using Blogsome to host it. I’m quite impressed with this outfit - free hosting and as simple to set up as Blogger, but using WordPress so you have pretty much all of its flexibility behind the scenes. Only a couple of downsides I’ve seen so far (well, you have to put up with advertising, but it’s only a small box at the bottom of the sidebar): there’s no FTP facility (so you can’t add your own plugins), and you can upload images but you can’t overwrite or delete them once you’ve uploaded them. But if you’re fed up with Blogger and don’t want to pay for Typepad, and especially if you understand a little about HTML and CSS but don’t feel up to the whole business of getting your own site and installing WP, this seems pretty good.

Nosemonkey has started the discussion. Now all I have to do is think of something intelligent to say.

The local shop has piles of small, sweet beetroot.

I’m buying a pan full at a time (simmer gently, whole in their skins, for at least an hour; although I’ll have to try roasting them at some point) for salads or just on the side of a plate. They don’t last long. But, hey, they’re good for you (although apparently if you eat a lot they turn your pee pink…).

Tonight they went with potatoes, hard-boiled egg, spring onion, fresh mint and a salad dressing (olive oil, red wine vinegar, honey, a little of the beetroot liquid, seasoning - this is just a really nice sweet/sharp dressing) to make a very pink and very tasty salad. Yum yum.

(And I just found an interesting BBC recipe. Lunch tomorrow maybe. Update: Very good. And very colourful. Except that I have no idea why the writer wants us to use a blender/food processor for this recipe. It works perfectly well if you simply chop half of the beetroot finely and give it a good vigorous mix in with the mayo. What is it with these TV cooks sometimes? They want you to use every piece of equipment in the kitchen just to make a snack for supper, for chrissakes. They seem to forget that not everyone has dishwashers (machines or humans) to clear up the mess.)

Yes, it’s been a whole year. Well, well. I do feel old.

I know quite a few people on my blog trail are hard at it in the archives and research libraries:

The Zombie is in the British Library at the moment (and planning on going up to Manchester, I think?). And Nathanael is in France, living it up (I think he does spend some time in the archives inbetween glugging all that wine).

Who else is doing research now, or going to be, over this summer? Tell us about it in the comments (especially if you don’t have a blog of your own to do it in). And if you are blogging it already, let us know that too.

I sometimes forget that my American correspondents don’t know about this little box of delights, and have been asked this question more than once after referring to it in the course of an email.

The RAE, for those who don’t know, is the Research Assessment Exercise: “a series of exercises conducted nationally to assess the quality of UK research and to inform the selective distribution of public funds for research by the four UK higher education funding bodies”. Think of the stress levels involved in getting tenure, and then consider that every department in every UK university is doing it at the same time. (Repeatedly.) And a lot of money is at stake.

The ‘rules’ for the upcoming 2008 exercise (actually, the ‘census’ is in 2007) will be published shortly, and there’s a good piece in the Guardian education section this week (and more here). There are noises that this one could be the last. Well, maybe. But even if it is, there will have to be some kind of bean-counting exercise to replace it, so I’m not getting my hopes up.

I haven’t actually read Jacques Derrida’s Archive fever (Mal d’archive). But I have read Carolyn Steedman’s Dust, which mentions it (and I think this was at the back of my mind when I began to type the title for my posts about this summer’s research). For Derrida, if I have Steedman right, Archive Fever is really a kind of desire: “the desire to recover moments of inception: to find and possess all sorts of beginnings”… (Steedman, p. 5)

But Steedman takes us into other possible manifestations of Archive Fever.

Typically, the fever - more accurately, the precursor fever - starts in the early hours of the morning, in the bed of a cheap hotel, where the historian cannot get to sleep. You cannot get to sleep because you lie so narrowly, in an attempt to avoid contact with anything that isn’t shielded by sheets and pillowcases. The first sign then, is an excessive attention to the bed, an irresistible anxiety about the hundreds who have slept there before you, leaving their dust and fibres in the fibres of the blankets… (p. 17)

(Oh, that passage brought flooding back the memories of a place where I stayed a few years ago. The problem was not wondering about previous human occupants of the bed, though. It was the much smaller occupants that were still there that were the trouble. I still don’t know precisely what they were, but either they or something else in the bed brought me out in hives, something I’ve never experienced before or since. So, no, I did not get too much sleep.)

Or the feverish anxiety of the penultimate day in the record office:

You know you will not finish, that there will be something left unread, unnoted, untranscribed. You are not anxious about the Great Unfinished, knowledge of which is the very condition of your being there in the first place, and of the grubby trade you set out in, years ago. You know perfectly well that the infinite heaps of things they recorded, the notes and traces that these people left behind, constitute practically nothing at all… Your anxiety is more precise, and more prosaic. It’s about PT S2/1/1, which only arrived from the stacks that afternoon, which is enormous, and which you will never get through tomorrow. (p.18)

Or even the possibility of real, actual fever. It is not particularly reassuring to learn that the archive could be seriously bad for your health (anthrax-related meningitis?!). Exaggeration? Yet I already know that archives (pre-20th-century, anyway) make you sneeze. And that those old papers and parchments leave their black marks on your fingers (unless you bag yourself some gloves) and your clothes (don’t wear white in an archive. There are smudgy blackish fingerprints on my silvery laptop, too). You watch the dust rise; you mark the passing of the researcher by the little scattering of fragments of fragile paper and rotting leather and red sealing wax (those 400-year-old seals on legal documents are often simply crumbling away).

There is always someone just across from you who has a cold, which you hope fervently that you won’t catch this time. And you get the headaches that come from squinting at near-illegible handwriting… and let’s not start on the backache, often helped along by badly designed chairs. Plus, why is it that archives are either freezing cold (good for the documents, but not so much for the humans) or hot and stuffy (the budget didn’t stretch to decent airconditioning, but it did cover all those new computer terminals blowing out hot air… NLW, I’m talking to you here)?

Still, at least this summer I’m at home for my sickness. My own bed and food, no travelling, just a nice brisk walk up the hill (I hated the commuting to the PRO last year!) to settle at a desk and continue the love-hate relationship with what I do.

I say love-hate because it’s an experience of extremes: it swings between utter boredom and an overwhelming desire to pack it in NOW (several times a day, usually), to the rising excitement of the latest find - it can be something entirely unexpected, or corroboration of something you’ve already begun to suspect, or funny, or sad. But it’s never just so-so, never just another job. If it were, who’d put up with all the discomforts and the frustrations and the crappy bits?

And back to Steedman’s book, which is one that should be read by all historians. And since I have work to get back to today (but a little break from the archives; I have to get on with working on some future teaching materials and planning future courses to impress potential employers next year), I’ll just let her sign off for me.

And nothing starts in the Archive, nothing, ever at all, though things certainly end up there. You find nothing in the Archive but stories caught half way through: the middle of things; discontinuities. (p.45)

(I wish I’d remembered that quote when I was posting about disputes over livestock the other week…)

But in actual Archives, though the bundles may be mountainous, there isn’t in fact, very much there. […] The Archive is made from selected and consciously chosen documentation from the past and also from the mad fragmentations that no one intended to preserve and just ended up there. […]

The modern European public archive came into being in order to solidify and memorialise first monarchical and then state power. […] These are the origins of a prosaic place where the written and fragmentary traces of the past are put in boxes and folders, bound up, stored, catalogued …

And: the Archive is also a place of dreams. […]

To enter that place where the past lives, where ink on parchment can be made to speak, still remains the social historian’s dream, of bringing to life those who do not for the main part exist, not even between the lines of state papers and legal documents, who are not really present, not even in the records of Revolutionary bodies and fractions. (pp.68-70)