Early Modern Notes

The next History Carnival will be hosted on 1 August - tomorrow - at WILLisms. You have just a few hours to email your nominations to: willisms[at]gmail[dot]com.

Prosaic, the Little Professor on academic writing and reading

Where the wild things were, on nature writing, the particular and the universal

Back to the future, on the film The battle of Algiers

Another review of The Historian (I’ll still wait for the paperback, but it does look as though it will be fun to read)

Feature on Reginald Hill (it might even make me forgive the Telegraph for that British identity codswallop)

I need to do some thinking about my sidebar. It’s getting very long and unwieldy. (And I’d like to add some more ‘favourite posts’ and have a new section for recent online finds.)

A 3-column design would solve the problem; I can probably suss out how to adapt this current style to 3 columns. (Probably.) But 1) they’re complicated and there are all sorts of things to go wrong; and 2) I think three columns can look a bit cluttered on a screen, especially on smaller screens.

Or I could work out how to put some sections in drop-down menus and/or on a separate page. But I rather like everything to be viewable on the screen without having to click on anything extra.

I am going to have to do something though, I think. (Besides, I haven’t played with the design at all lately!) Any suggestions?

Big Fat Update
In case you hadn’t noticed, ‘Probably’ does in fact = ‘I can’. (Wow! And it seems to work in both Firefox and IE. Double wow!) But does that mean I should? What do you think? I’ll leave it like this (well, tweak it a bit, I expect) for a few hours to see how I (and you) get used to it. Your input would be much appreciated!

Attempt 1: Abject failure. I’m only here because I gave up, plugged my old kit back in and uninstalled all the new software. (So I know I can get it back if I really can’t make this thing play.)

Yes, I did read the manual, before you ask. The manual and the computer kept saying different things.

Besides, it’s perfectly normal for me to screw up installing new stuff (hardware or software) first time out. Then I work out what I was doing wrong (and yes, it usually is me) and it goes perfectly.

I hate computers. I’m going to settle down with some traditional communications technology. (A paper and then a book.) Leave the stupid computer to stew for a few hours.

I may or may not edit this post over the weekend. I have a feeling I should write something about The Telegraph’s poll on British identity (and some other articles and stuff).

But when you start by reading the line “[British] People also know how much they owe to the fact that Britain has not been invaded since 1066″, you can’t help thinking you’re in fairly dodgy territory. Admittedly, the French effort to invade via south-west Wales in 1797 was a bit of a farce, so alright, we could put that to one side. (Don’t know that contemporaries were quite so dismissive though. And they did land on the British mainland.) And 1688 - well, there was a sort of ‘invitation’ to William, with his Dutch troops, so perhaps that’s different too.

But what about 1485? Or even 1470-71 (twice)?* Or perhaps none of these count, since the armies were not led by ‘foreigners’ (even if they contained a lot of them, and were largely backed by foreign money). And it doesn’t count either, I suppose, that English armies invaded and occupied Wales in the thirteenth century, and ‘visited’ Scotland on an almost regular basis well into the sixteenth century (and, yes, Scottish armies on occasion returned a few favours too). A bit of Rough Wooing, anybody?

The Telegraph can get very worked up about British people’s ignorance of ‘their own’ history sometimes. But clearly not when that ignorance suits the purposes of a set of articles like these. It looks to me like they’re going to be the usual lazy anglocentric (and southern-anglocentric at that) thou-shalt-never-criticise-or-question-Britain’s-greatness kind of shite to me. I just look at them and start to feel very, very tired. I know I should engage. I should do something. But don’t be surprised if I can’t get up the energy.

But if anybody does read them and gets some pleasant surprises, let me know.

*1485: Henry Tudor and a French-backed army, landed in south-west Wales and marched east to England and you know the rest, right? 1470: the French-backed army of Henry VI (Lancastrian, deposed in 1461) and his son, throwing out Edward IV, who escaped to Burgundy. 1471: Edward IV (Yorkist) and his Burgundian-backed army chucked the Lancastrians out again. (I used to know all the details of those ones too. I had this Wars of the Roses thing going at one time.)

…………

NB: If I don’t update on this over the weekend, there might be a different reason. The necessary piece of kit has arrived in the shop and I’m planning on going wireless. So there’s always the possibility that I might break my internet connection completely in the process and not be able to fix it until Monday.

I need to install this clever little miniposts plugin in the sidebar (thanks to Jeremy).

Then I would have somewhere to put links to useful looking resources that I’ve come across, without having to think of anything clever to say.

(Hmm. Tested out the plugin, and I’m not sure if I want to use it. It does the right thing in terms of not putting the mini-posts on the main page, but they are still listed in ‘Recent posts’ in the sidebar, which I don’t particularly want. I doubt I’ll be able to stop that. And I’m supposed to be able to edit options in admin, but all I get when I click on the tab is a 404 error message.)

The next History Carnival will be hosted on 1 August by Will Franklin at WILLisms.

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: willisms[at]gmail[dot]com.

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 further questions about the criteria for inclusion, check out the Carnival homepage (link above).

I’m digging around on this subject at the moment (I’m working on a sort of research thread I’m calling ‘Gentlemen behaving badly’; you’ll probably hear more about it before I’m done), so this is really just somewhere convenient to put together a few interesting links for me to refer to. I’ll add any more I find. And if you have any further suggestions for resources, especially good theoretical and comparative essays on (masculine/elite) honour, let me know. I’m mainly interested in sword duels of the 16th to early 18th centuries rather than the late 18th/19th century pistol duels. I’ll try to put together a reading list at some point, too.

The duel in early modern England - extract of the recent book by Markku Peltonen. Can also be sampled at Google Print.

Google Print has some other books on duelling to browse around: eg, this one on Ireland (have read that one before, but not recently).

The duel of honor: screening for unobservable social capital*
Honor’s history across the academy
The comparative history of honour

I didn’t think about it until just now, but typing ‘honour’ (or ‘honor’) into an academic library catalogue’s keyword/title search? Not very useful. And our library has very little re: duelling anyway. Neither of the recent books by Peltonen or Jennifer Low, nor the older works (Kiernan, Billacois). The book on Irish duelling is all it does have. Boo. (This means I have to go to NLW and squirm around on the hideously uncomfortable seats in the printed books room if I want to read/reread them.)

For those of you with JSTOR access:
The duel and the English law of homicide

(While I think of it, does anyone else ever have problems downloading JSTOR articles? I tried to get a ‘high-quality’ PDF of the article and it just gave me the message ‘The file is damaged and cannot be repaired’. It would only let me have the ‘economy’ version, not very good quality.)

………..

*Raises the question: should economists really be allowed to write history? (I know I said I wanted theory, but…) I mean, what do you do with this kind of sloppiness? “Although aristocrats convicted of dueling could always receive a pardon, commoners caught engaging in a fatal duel were charged with murder.” Just in case you don’t get the problem straight off, this sentence would be equally true: “Although commoners convicted of dueling could always receive a pardon, aristocrats caught engaging in a fatal duel were charged with murder.” (Conviction and charge = completely different parts of the legal process.) And let’s not get into the fact that they seem to think that ‘rules’ of duelling simply represent actual practice. Or that they apparently have no awareness of the wider context of men’s confrontational violence of which duelling was just one form. I can go for the idea that scholars from other disciplines might take the work of historians and apply their own disciplinary skills to give us all some new perspectives, without ever going near primary source material. But this pair have barely read any of the secondary literature either…

……………………………………

Bonus tracks! (In the category of ‘not really related, but came up during Google search, and don’t want to lose track of it’)

Gender and citizenship in early modern Europe, essay by Hilda Smith.

Forged documents planted in The National Archives. And an interesting post and subsequent discussion here.

From a very new blog by a grad student, History.

Because they have just subscribed to Eighteenth-century Collections Online (”every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in Great Britain during the eighteenth century, along with thousands of important works from the Americas”).

I don’t even know where to start. Obvious keywords (if you’re me): murder, robbery, highwayman…

I have just discovered something I hadn’t heard of before. Some of you will know Henry Fielding’s book, An enquiry into the causes of the late increase of robbers (1751). That’s in ECCO, unsurprisingly. I didn’t know, however, that his book occasioned responses such as ‘Philo-patria’s’ A letter to Henry Fielding, Esq; occasioned by his Enquiry into the causes of the late increase of robbers. (I wonder if there are any more like this?)

Philopatria takes the view that the prime cause (the ‘fountain-head’) of robbery is “Debauchery”, and ticks Fielding off for not including in his book a section on “how to suppress Debauchery among the lower kind of People”. The answer: legislation “for the Discovery and Conviction” of prostitutes - and get rid of them by transportation. (Well, it’d have cheered up the convicts in the colonies, I suppose.)

… the only way to prevent their [robbers’] Increase, and wholly to extirpate them, is, to prevent Debauchery, to rid this great Metropolis of lewd and infamous Women; who most certainly are the Engines, that set them to Work, and for whose sake they hazard their Lives. …

Also, Philopatria would really rather like it if “all Places of public diversions” were suppressed except under strict licensing laws, and only rich people in private houses should be allowed to gamble (as an “innocent Amusement”).

I think I might transcribe it; it’s only 10 pages or so. It’d be fun to add some more texts to Hanging not punshment enough.

This book will set you back over £200/$350.

From Alun.

(And I actually mistyped the title above quite unintentionally - getting ‘is’ the wrong way round is one I do quite often, which is a bit of a problem, being a hsitorian - but it seemed apt to leave it. It’s not as though I’m charging several hundred dollars to read my un-proofread blog.)

William Blake, The Little Vagabond

  Dear mother, dear mother, the church is cold,
But the ale-house is healthy and pleasant and warm;
Besides I can tell where I am used well,
Such usage in Heaven will never do well.

  But if at the church they would give us some ale,
And a pleasant fire our souls to regale,
We’d sing and we’d pray all the live-long day,
Nor ever once wish from the church to stray.

  Then the parson might preach, and drink, and sing,
And we’d be as happy as birds in the spring;
And modest Dame Lurch, who is always at church,
Would not have bandy children, nor fasting, nor birch.

  And God, like a father rejoicing to see
His children as pleasant and happy as he,
Would have no more quarrel with the Devil or the barrel,
But kiss him, and give him both drink and apparel.

(From Songs of Experience (1794).)

Our Great Leader says that 9/11 was a wake-up call, but that much of the world subsequently turned over and went back to sleep.

As opposed to leaping out of bed, getting on a borrowed horse and galloping off in the wrong direction.

The Carnival of Bad History is looking for a host for its next issue on 1 September.

The world is full of bad history. Best-selling novels are full of it. Nostalgia-dripping reruns on Pax and the Hallmark channel are full of it. Blockbuster summer movies are full of it. Statements by the leaders of public opinion are full of it. Boy, are they full of it. Alan and John thought the world needed a place to expose bad history…

So they came up with a special blog carnival to showcase bloggers who do just that. If you think you could host (or if you want to nominate blog posts you’ve read recently), badhistory@aol.com is the email address.

Julie and I are also on the lookout for bloggers with an established interest and experience in historical matters before 1800 to host future issues of Carnivalesque. I’d especially like an early modernist person for early September. (If I don’t get a volunteer soon, I shall have to ‘persuade’ someone. Could get ugly.) Email: carnivalesque@hotmail.co.uk (or me: sharon@earlymodernweb.org.uk)

And there are always openings for hosting the History Carnival. There are presently spaces from about October onwards for history-minded bloggers. Email me if you’re interested.

(Not sure what a blog carnival is? This explains.)

“As I knew I could not attain a heavenly paradise … I became a historian.” The reviewer has some criticisms, but The Historian could be worth reading. (It’s an updating of the vampire novel, and Count Dracula himself is the historian.)

Searching for women who wrote in Latin: not quite as difficult as you might think.

Winners of the alternative Harry Potter ending competition.

Live coverage of rain at Lords. The British weather might just save our sorry hides from the complete thrashing that we thoroughly deserve.

Review of a book on fashion and politics in history. Sounds fun.

OK, yet another article on the Harry Potter phenomenon, but quite interesting.

Yes, the very first AM Carnivalesque will be held at The Cranky Professor’s place on Friday 5 August or thereabouts. Help us to make it a success!

Are you interested in ancient or medieval history? Carnivalesque is an interdisciplinary blog carnival, and we’re looking for quality blog writing on antiquity and the middle ages (up to about 1450-1500CE) on any topic in history, archaeology, literature, philosophy, art, etc, including issues to do with teaching, researching and representation of these more distant periods.

The key criteria are that posts should contain the blogger’s own writing (not just links or quotes without any comment…) and that, while participation is not confined to professionals and academics, they should adhere to basic scholarly principles of accuracy and fairness in the use of sources.

So, if you see a blog post that you think would be suitable (written within the last 3 months or so), send it in! And blogging classicists and medievalists, you have nearly two weeks to write something (or choose something you wrote already) to nominate yourselves…

Nominations and self-nominations should be sent to: professor[AT]crankyprofessor[DOT]com

Please give the URL of the post, and, if you can, the post’s title, the blog name and author’s name as well. Also, it’s helpful if you clearly put ‘Carnivalesque’ somewhere in the title of your email.

Finally, please pass on the word!

If you’d like to use the Carnivalesque logo above as a link in a post or your sidebar (especially if you don’t have your own server space for images), here’s a bit of code you can use:

Not that I can be bothered to do the entire thing, but Bitch PhD (like the new look) has just done a book meme with a great question:

3. When you take down a book for reference, how long after you finish with it does it take you to reshelve it?

I have books that practically live in piles on my table… and sometimes the floor… because of my chronic inability to put them back on shelves when I’m done with them. Not to mention the ever-expanding “to read” pile - the theory being that if I put things I need to read in a special pile, I will notice them, and get round to reading them, and then I’ll put them away nicely.

Ha. Well, it is just a theory.

In a similar example of my amazing ability to not see what’s right in front of me, last week when I was using Ingenta to access some ejournals, I noticed that these little orange buttons on certain pages bore the letters “RSS”. I think those orange buttons have been there for some time, but I simply hadn’t previously grasped what they were trying to tell me. Duh.

So, anyway, now I have RSS feeds in Bloglines to tell me when the latest issue of several key journals (for me) is out, and what’s in it. I can download anything I want to read there and then. Yay! And, let’s face it, I seem to be a lot more efficient at reading journal articles than whole books these days. (And why not? Most articles get recycled into book chapters at a later stage anyway, so unless the article’s argument has been substantially updated or I have a particular need to read the entire book, sticking to the articles often seems a much better use of my time and financial resources…)

But I’m no better at putting them away when I’ve done with them than I am at reshelving books. So don’t forget to add in that pile of printed/photocopied articles on the floor waiting to go to the filing cabinet…

…….

The Little Professor, who has a library compared to my pathetic handful of bookcases, has done the book meme too.

And this is all I intend to say on the matter of Tribble v Academic Bloggers (the subject of much controversy over the last couple of weeks, for anyone who didn’t already know; catch up here, if you’re really bothered).

What she said. I thought the article was entirely ignorant about the reality of academic blogging, and of concern only if significant numbers of people on search committees (and fortunately for me, the CHE is virtually unknown amongst British academics…) were to take it seriously and, on finding that any job applicant has a blog, simply dismiss that person out of hand without actually reading it.

Having said that, I think that bloggers are responsible for what they put out online under their own names; it’s a public sphere and it’s a good idea to behave accordingly (with courtesy and fairness and so on); and if you want to blog regularly on very controversial and sensitive, or very personal and intimate, topics, then it’s wise to go pseudonymous. Think about what you write.

But saying that you should blog carefully and responsibly is not the same as advising you never to put your name to an opinion on academic and/or social issues on a blog (or any other online space). All forms of conventional academic publication involve taking risks. If you write a book, it could get bad reviews, which a potential employer can read. If you publish articles in journals, the potential employer can read them and might hate them. A colleague of the potential employer might have met you at a conference and thought your paper was half-baked rubbish. You don’t try to prevent these situations by not publishing. Instead, you do your best to produce good quality, professional work.

Early Stuart Libels is a great online edition of early seventeenth-century political poetry from manuscript sources. Many of the poems have never been published before; others have only been available in obscure collections.

It’s been published by what is probably the best freely available early modern studies e-journal (published in an electronic edition only) out there, Early Modern Literary Studies. The chief editors are a historian and literary scholar, Alastair Bellany and Andrew McRae (the whole thing represents a collaborative effort between History and English).

It’s a high-quality scholarly edition which will be useful for both researchers and teachers; the editors’ commentaries are excellent and the poems are fully annotated, and there’s a very extensive bibliography. Those who aren’t comfortable with working online could simply download the PDF version and print it out in full: in a sense, Print on Demand virtually for free. But if you use it online, it’s searchable by name and source and browsable by a range of subject headings. This is the future of the scholarly edition we’re looking at, folks.

The editors note that “we have been concerned to show that a technically and academically proficient single-volume publication might be achieved in our chosen medium within a comparatively short timescale”.

This edition seeks in many ways to be a pathbreaking endeavour, most noticeably as a single-volume electronic text of early modern verse, and of verse largely inaccessible outside of manuscript archives… Indeed, while late-twentieth-century criticism moved away from privileging canonical works, the bulk of recent electronic publications of early modern literature have focused upon the old canon and upon drama. There is nothing intinsically wrong with disseminating the works of well-known dramatists and other literary figures to the hypertext community. In fact there are great benefits to be gained by widening their accessibility. However, the electronic medium also provides a superb opportunity to offer scholarly editions of works otherwise largely inaccessible or unknown to both the academic community and the layperson alike.

Hear, hear.

I have a mild complaint, which I’ll probably write to them about, that it’s not immediately obvious on landing at the front page that you can browse poems without using the search box (apart from the very large PDF version, I mean). You can do two things, as far as I can see, neither of which are very strongly signposted:

a) go to ‘Full site map’ in the sidebar and click on whichever section takes your fancy, which will give you a list of the poems in that section;

b) click on the ‘Quick Contents’ link in the sidebar to get to the (very good) commentaries, which have a ‘Find in this section’ box at the bottom of the page with a drop-down menu listing the poems in the section (or simply click on the arrows at the top of the pages to navigate page by page), along with links to the other sections. (I’ve just noticed that there is also a tiny ‘view menus’ link at the top of the commentary pages, which takes you straight down to the drop-down menus.)

The editors have taken an admirable approach to maximising accessibility for special needs readers, and once you’ve worked it out (my point being that these things should not have to be worked out: they should be completely obvious to even totally inexperienced web users), the site is in fact extremely easy to navigate. I think they just slipped up a bit on the signposting at the very start.

And it is a wonderful resource.

***

OK, couldn’t resist this one. Because I am a big kid and it’s a fart joke. (They’re not all rude, really, but poetry buffs shouldn’t expect much Great Art.)

The Censure of the Parliament Fart (This page explains).

Never was bestowed such art
Upon the tuning of a Fart.

Downe came grave auntient Sir John Crooke
And redd his message in his booke.
Fearie well, Quoth Sir William Morris, Soe:
But Henry Ludlowes Tayle cry’d Noe.
Up starts one fuller of devotion
Then Eloquence; and said a very ill motion
Not soe neither quoth Sir Henry Jenkin
The Motion was good; but for the stincking
Well quoth Sir Henry Poole it was a bold tricke
To Fart in the nose of the bodie pollitique
Indeed I must confesse quoth Sir Edward Grevill
The matter of it selfe was somewhat uncivill
Thanke God quoth Sir Edward Hungerford
That this Fart proved not a Turdd
Quoth Sir Jerome the lesse there was noe such abuse
Ever offer’d in Poland, or Spruce
Quoth Sir Jerome in folio, I sweare by the Masse
This Fart was enough to have brooke all my Glasse
Indeed quoth Sir John Trevor it gave a fowle knocke
As it lanched forth from his stincking Docke.
I (quoth another) it once soe chanced
That a great Man farted as hee danced.
Well then, quoth Sir William Lower
This fart is noe Ordinance fitt for the Tower.
Quoth Sir Richard Houghton noe Justice of Quorum
But would take it in snuffe to have a fart lett before him.
If it would beare an action quoth Sir Thomas Holcrofte
I would make of this fart a bolt, or a shafte.
Quoth Sir Walter Cope ’twas a fart rarely lett
I would ’tweere sweet enough for my Cabinett.
Such a Fart was never seene
Quoth the Learned Councell of the Queene.
Noe (quoth Mr Pecke I have a President in store
That his Father farted the Session before
Nay then quoth Noy ’twas lawfully done
For this fart was entail’d from father to sonne
Quoth Mr Recorder a word for the cittie
To cutt of the aldermens right weere great pittie.
Well quoth Kitt Brookes wee give you a reason
Though he has right by discent he had not livery & seizin
Ha ha quoth Mr Evans I smell a fee
I’ts a private motion heere’s something for mee
Well saith Mr Moore letts this motion repeale
Whats good for the private is oft ill for comonweale
A good yeare on this fart, quoth gentle Sir Harry
He has caus’d such an Earthquake that my colepitts miscarry
’Tis hard to recall a fart when its out
Quoth     with a loude shoote

I had a problem with accessing some of a certain (big, famous) publisher’s ejournals via one of the university’s main providers. So (as I was invited to do on the error page that I got instead of the article I wanted to read…), I emailed the publisher explaining in some detail what the problem was.

I get an email back in which it is quite obvious that the person writing it simply has not read what I wrote. And/or hasn’t got a clue.

Now, shall I a) email again and try not to be rude; b) email UWA Information Services; c) email the provider; or d) not bother to do anything? (I can pick up the article when I next go on campus. But I wanted to read it now, dammit. And I don’t know when I’ll next be on campus.)

Report on doctoral research in the humanities (this is for the UK, compiled by the Arts & Humanities Research Council).

Some interesting statistics. (And they think there should be more money for postdoctoral funding, with which I’d heartily concur. The AHRC, as far as I can recall, currently has no postdoc fellowship schemes of any kind. OK, the British Academy is sort of the substitute for that, but it still doesn’t seem quite right.)

Plus a section on the purpose and use of a PhD in humanities subjects (which is less specific to the UK situation than some parts of the report). Nearly/recently completed PhDs looking for jobs take note of the right things to say in interviews, if you apply for jobs outside academia.

13. There is broad agreement in the sector that the key qualities of the completed arts/humanities doctoral researcher should be a capacity for original and autonomous thinking, an ability to command a field of knowledge, research skills (the ability to frame and explore research questions, the ability to frame and test a hypothesis and to manage a project), an understanding of the appropriate research methods, the ability to produce a cogent argument and conversely to engage in critical thinking, and an ability to communicate at a high level.

14. During the last three decades the doctorate has emerged as a crucial entrance qualification to the Academy to a degree which was not true a generation ago. A key purpose of doctoral research is and must be to develop the next generation of researchers and teachers in higher education. However, this has never been its sole purpose. There have always been researchers who elected to use their research skills in a wide range of public and private sector roles. And there has always been a significant demand for places from individuals primarily interested in the intellectual challenge of doctoral research. […]

15. The view of the disciplines nationally, reflected both in the consultative seminars and in the online survey, indicates a wide acceptance across the arts and humanities disciplines of the principle that doctoral study has not one but two aims: the production of high-quality research and the training of a highly qualified researcher. Colleagues nationally are equally firm in the view that a doctorate in the arts and humanities is a valuable preparation not only for a career in the Academy but also for a wide range of research-related and management jobs in the public and private sectors. Researchers from the subject domain enter a broad range of professions outside the academy, including public administration, corporate management, library and museum work, publishing and marketing. …

The report also comments that “transferable skills developed by doctoral research must be made explicit both to researchers and to potential employers. At present it seems that both researchers and disciplines undersell themselves.” Well, it seems to me that that’s often because departments and supervisors themselves are pretty clueless about it.

People do PhDs for a number of reasons, not least in order (they hope) to become academics, and for personal fulfilment and intellectual satisfaction. (Few students, I suspect, embark on a PhD in humanities with the intention of using it as a way into an entirely non-academic career.) It’s important to know that if you don’t make it in the hideous competition for academic jobs, you have other options. But the crucial question, in the end, is not whether you get valuable transferable skills from doing a PhD. You do. But do you get enough of them to justify the extra investment of time and resources in the years of research over and above doing a Masters? In terms of useful professional research skills, what does a PhD add to a MA thesis for the non-academic workplace where most people with humanities PhDs will end up?

How did I miss this?

English Ballad Archive 1500-1800

The Scottish Chapbook Project looks promising too, although I’m not sure whether it will contain images/texts of the chapbooks themselves.

(Thanks to Fraser Eaton at C18-L. )

This is funny. (Well, it has a serious side too.) A witness statement from Flintshire, 13 November 1605, concerning “a watch that was appoincted at Caerwis [Caerwys] for the stay of passengers and all maner of straungers… at the tyme of the treasons comitted by Percy, and Catsby”:

Robert ap Thomas ap William* of Caerwis, deposeth and sayth that the said xij^th day of November at night, he the said Robert togeather wth Robert Williams, Thomas Gruffith and William Pyers beinge appoincted to watch by Hugh ap John Wynne the head constable, wthin the towne of Caerwis, the said Robert Williams beinge verie unwillinge to watch the same night… [but the constables refused to accept a substitute,] wherupon the said Robert Williams came himself wth the rest that were formerly appoincted to the heigh crosse at Caerwis to watch, and at there cominge thither, some of the neighbours of the towne sent them some ale, they drunke the same night xx^tie [20] pottes of ale duringe the tyme of the said watch the said Robert Williams and one Hugh ap Thomas ap Richard of Skiviocke… did singe certaine Christmas carrolles, untill John Thomas ap Harry petti constable came to the place to commaund them to keepe sylence, afterwards one William Thomas Williams passinge by aboute vj roodes [probably ‘rods’: 6 rods = 33 yards] from the place where the watchmen did sitt, the said Robert Williams came to him and would knowe of him whither he would goe, who aunsweared that he would goe homewardes, yett the said William Thomas Williams tolde this deponent that he would walke up and downe the towne to see whither they would keepe true watch that night and soe he went by them three or foure tymes, at the laste Robert Williams tooke excepsions against the said William Thomas Williams and woulde have taken his staffe from him that hee had in his hand, which the said William Thomas refused to deliver to him, but sent this deponent to the pettie constable and said that he would deliver his staffe unto him (beinge an officer) and soe he did, wherupon the said Robert Williams gave the said William Thomas Williams very badd wordes, and the said William Thomas aunsweared that in respect he was a watchman he would have nothinge to doe wth him, sayth further that he knoweth of his owne knowledge that Katherin verch Ithell wief to the said Robert Williams is a great recusant, and hath absented herself from church for many yeares past… Robert Williams as this deponent thinketh beinge very angry that he was appoincted to watch, gave himself to singe and drinke the moste parte of the night till morninge…

(A second witness told much the same story more briefly, adding only that Robert Williams was an alehousekeeper.)

I don’t think I need to explain what the ‘treasons’ were, do I? But I probably should note that Flintshire was one of the key centres of surviving Catholicism in 17th-century Wales (the other main county was Monmouthshire). Not least because of the popularity of St Winifred’s Well with Catholic pilgrims. The JP who examined the witnesses was Roger Mostyn of Mostyn; some very close relatives of his were prominent Catholics. Even before November 1605, large numbers of recusants were being prosecuted in Flintshire; it must then have become very uncomfortable for them.

And I don’t know whether this story is best regarded as:

a) illustrating anti-Catholic paranoia in the aftermath of the Plot at the local level, with efforts to increase surveillance of people’s movements; or
b) a rather nice example of the disadvantages of relying on ‘amateur’ and ad hoc local policing within early modern communities…

Although it wouldn’t be too hard to do both at once.

……..

*I can be so slow sometimes. I’ve only just really noticed the name of this witness. Although I can’t say with any certainty, there’s quite a strong chance that Robert ap Thomas ap William would be the brother of William Thomas Williams; although their names are written down slightly differently, both represent the same patronymic, ’son of Thomas son of William’. It might explain how Robert knew about William’s plans to keep an eye on the watch that night, anyway.

The very model of a modern Labour minister. Gilbert and Sullivan updated for the (No2) ID card generation.

(Hat tip: Ralph Luker, unless it was someone else.)

Well, if you do read the thread that I linked to yesterday, I think you can come up with a couple of main conclusions, one to do with the content of the books and the other about the creation of an ‘imagined community’ of readers:

1. Readers love books that give them lots of puzzles to work on - both little geeky puzzles and big ‘where is it all going’ puzzles. Clearly, the HP books score highly on both those counts, and that in particular is why adults are reading them as well as children, I think. Never mind if the writing is bad; that’s not what counts. This has nothing to do with ‘literary criticism’ (or professional book reviewing). It’s about becoming a detective, about creating theories in the spaces left (intentionally or otherwise) by the writer, because there is a very simple and deep joy to be had from being able to go: Yes!! I knew it! Beat you!

But you don’t want to get too much right: there must be unexpected twists, unresolved questions, large and small ambiguities so that you can start again in anticipation of the next book.* It’s a competition between reader and writer, but it’s crucial that there must never be a clear winner.

2. And readers love it even better when they can congregate to discuss, dissect and argue over those puzzles. They join forces to try to outwit the author (though I think what they usually do is to multiply the possible questions and answers to dizzying confusion). In the process, they make a community of detectives.

And Harry Potter emerged at just the right time to extend the established forums for book geeks into the world of the Internet. Now, in case you hadn’t gathered, I have never read a word of a Harry Potter book (except quotes). But I have participated in that kind of thing once, for a while with the Dorothy Dunnett networks, first in newsletters (my first ever published words were a letter to a DD fanzine…) and later, briefly, online. (But it was just too huge and time-consuming - Dunnett wrote millions of words and was a superb spinner of webs and mysteries who attracted a lot of rather obsessive and highly articulate fans - and I had to give up before I got addicted.)

The excitement of sharing theories that previously had been locked away in my head with other people, and learning new ideas that had never occurred to me, too - that was a heady experience. And I could feel the same sort of excitement reading the HP discussion; even more so, since we’re talking about fans who have got hold of and finished this book within 24 hours of its publication.

You could say the Internet helps to make that sort of rapid reading en masse possible in the first place (how many people pre-ordered their book online rather than from bookshops, I wonder?); you could even argue that it makes it newly imperative to do so, since there is another competition going on, isn’t there, the race to be able to join the haves who can gleefully jump into this discussion and leave behind the have-nots (the muggles, of course) who can’t.** But certainly, the blogs and the discussion lists facilitate this vast virtual community-building process, and they make it instant. No need to wait 3 months for the next magazine, you can get out there and talk and puzzle and argue to your heart’s content RIGHT NOW.

Would JK Rowling be anything like this big without the Internet? I don’t think so. But here’s another question, since there’s only one book left to go: I wonder who might be the next JK Rowling? What will be the next Harry Potter phenomenon? I think there will have to be one before long. Because it’s what readers will want.

…

*Which is why, incidentally, I think the final instalment tends to be an anticlimax. Too much has to be tied up; and you know that the competition has really come to an end. You and the rest of the readers can puzzle some more, but the author has withdrawn, and without her, it’s only half the game. Put it another way: in the end, the author always wins, and that’s what makes it go wrong.

**This is why I’m writing about the readers instead: it’s just about compensation for feeling left out. I mean, who wants to be a muggle?