Early Modern Notes

The next History Carnival will be hosted on Saturday 1 October (tomorrow!) by Lisa Roy Vox at The Apocalyptic Historian.

This is the last chance to email your nominations for recently published posts about history to the host: vox[AT]apocalyptichistorian.com.

Suitable posts might be focused on a historical topic, reflections on the particular challenges and rewards of studying, researching and teaching history, reviews of history books or web resources, discussions of ‘popular’ histories, etc.

You should include in your email: the title and permalink 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).

Helen Mirren is The Best Elizabeth Ever.

And Barbara Flynn makes a pretty splendid Mary Queen of Scots. Patrick Malahide as Walsingham, yum. This is quite some casting. Although I’m not entirely convinced by Jeremy Irons’ Dudley for some reason I can’t quite work out. [But he was pretty good. It's probably personal bias: I'm just not much of a fan of Irons.]

Grand stuff. Love it.

Update 1/10: Second Chance Saturday! It’s being repeated this evening at 7pm. And I have a spare tape on the shelf. Yippee!

I’ve been hearing good things about Jasper Fforde‘s books, and just recently picked up a secondhand copy of Lost in a Good Book. But this is the second in the series. And I can’t find a copy of the first one locally right now.

So, maybe the fans can tell me: is this the kind of series where it really matters to read them in the right order? Or can you just leap in anywhere?

And if I really should wait and read the first one first, some suggestions for unserious books to read instead this weekend could be fun…

Everyone’s favourite scribbler has set up Mrs Spectator’s Coffeehouse, using blogging software (MT) to create

a clearinghouse of online resources for researchers interested in the long 18thc.

This site is a modest attempt to gather links to online resources which concern the long 18thc. There are a number of excellent places where one can find academic or other resources, but none, as far as I know, which focus on quite this range of online resources, from small weblogs to large projects.

It’s a fledgling site at the moment, but I look forward to seeing it expand (not least for me to pinch new stuff…). You can send suggestions for sites that you think ought to be included to: jones [at] unbsj [dot] ca.

(WordPress trivia and request: just discovered, thanks to the logs in Spam Karma, that a trackback to a WP ‘Page’ (i.e, this one) won’t show up in the list of recent comments. Probably because the hack I’m using for that list predates the invention of Pages. Poo. It really is time I found a new plugin for this. Except that all the WP recent comments plugins I’ve found seem to display the first words of comments and I prefer to just have the title of the post… anyone know of one that will do that?)

IBIS Links (from the Institute for British and Irish Studies, University of Southern California) “is the web’s first clearinghouse for electronic resources in British and Irish Studies.” Haven’t looked to see what’s in it yet…

American-orientated, but nonetheless useful advice for new post-grads/graduate students from Unfogged. (Found in the comment thread to this post at Crooked Timber.)

By the way, Rob is back from the webless wilderness and has just started on his MA. Hope he enjoys it as much as I enjoyed mine. (The 3-part formula that worked for me: Study-Party-Pub. But I did have to spend the first month or three of my PhD recovering. Good job the MA was just a one-year course.)

CFPs

British Society for Eighteenth-century Studies 2006 Conference, January 2006, Oxford, UK.
“We invite proposals for individual papers and especially for full panels of three (or, exceptionally, four papers) on any aspect of the long 18th century, not only in Britain but throughout Europe and the wider world.” Submit 200-word abstracts (for 20-minute papers), via the web site by 30 September 2005

Early American Cartographies, March 2006, Chicago, US.
“This cross-disciplinary conference investigates the enduring significance of space and place in scholarship of the early Americas”. 350-word abstracts, by 1 October 2005.

21st Annual Conference on Music in 18th-century Britain, 25 November 2005, London, UK.
“We encourage proposals for papers focusing on all aspects of music in 18th-century Britain.” Proposals should be approximately 250 words, for 30 minute papers. Collaborative or related topic papers welcome. Further information/Submit abstracts by e-mail: c.sharpe {at} ram.ac(.)uk or csharpe {at} camberwell.free-online.co(.)uk. Please include your name, address or institution, telephone, and email address in the body of the message. Deadline: 7 October 2005.

Rethinking the Iberian Atlantic, April 2006, Liverpool, UK.
The “first in a series of colloquia and research seminars that offer the opportunity to explore the common ground shared by different and diverse approaches to the historical and cultural study of the Atlantic”. Proposals (about 300 words) by 15 October 2005. (Notes that postgraduates are welcome, possibility of financial aid for student participants.)

Reformation Studies Colloquium, April 2006, Oxford, UK
The conference meets biennially and the papers address a number of aspects of the European and English Reformations. If you would like to offer a twenty-minute communication, please send a title and an abstract to the organisers by 30 November 2005: Dr Andrew Spicer or Dr Judith Pollmann, aspicer {at} brookes.ac(.)uk or j.pollmann {at} let.leidenuniv(.)nl

Lines of Amity, Lines of Enmity: War and Peace in the Eighteenth Century, fifth Bloomington Eighteenth-Century Workshopthe Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies at Indiana University, May 2006. 20-30 scholars will present and discuss pre-circulated papers, most expenses covered. Applications deadline: 5 January 2006 (to consist of a two-page description of the proposed paper as well as a current CV).

Conference on Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments, May 2006, New York, US.
Submissions in the form of either papers or extended abstracts by 17 February 2006.

Icons and Iconoclasts: 1603-1714,
July 2006, Aberdeen, UK. “Proposals are invited for 20 minute papers on any aspect of British and Continental literature, philosophy, culture, and history during the period of Stuart rule in Britain”. Deadline: 28 February 2006.

Announcements of conferences, seminars etc

Beyond Shakespeare’s Globe: People, Place and Plays in the Middlesex suburbs 1400–1700, 15 October 2005, London, UK.

Symposium: Membership in Communities and States in the Early Modern Atlantic World: Legal Rules, Social Judgments, and the Negotiation of Citizenship, 14 October 2005, Chicago, US.

Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682): A Celebration of his Quater-Centenary, 19-20 October 2005, Norwich, UK.

Renaissance Lives, 22 October 2005, Roehampton, UK.

Connection, contingency and chance in the early Republic’s economy, Annual conference of the Program in Early American Economy and Society, Philadelphia, US, 28 October 2005.

The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755: an interdisciplinary workshop, 28-9 October 2005, Bristol, UK.

Early Modern Terrorism, 5-6 November 2005, Manchester, UK.

Apothecaries, art and architecture: interpreting Georgian medicine, 24-5 November 2005, London, UK.

New Perspectives in British cultural history, 1600-2000: A Conference for Graduate Students and Junior Academics, Cambridge, 8-9 December 2005. Will include a plenary session on ‘The career implications of studying cultural history’. (Possibility of assistance with travel expenses.)

New Worlds Reflected: Representations of Utopia, the New World and Other Worlds, 1500-1800, 9-10 December 2005, London, UK.

(Further updates possible in the next day or so…)

BibliOdyssey is lovely, just lovely, for anyone who likes pictures (and links) with their history. Go see for yourself.

(Hat-tip to the always gorgeous Giornale Nuovo.)

In the next couple of days I’m going to do a conference bulletin (like this one) for conferences/CFP deadlines in the next 3 months or so (and brief advance notices of conferences next spring if I have time).

If you’re involved with a conference (or colloquium, workshop, etc) on an early modern or 18th-century topic, especially if it has a webpage I can link to, I’ll be happy to consider it for inclusion. If you don’t have a webpage, send a brief (one paragraph) announcement with contact details which I can paste in.

Conferences for post-grad students are particularly welcome!

Email me at sharon {at} earlymodernweb.org(.)uk, preferably by the end of Monday 26 September.

Something for the weekend: NY Times on swearing, obscenities, cursing (etc).

Mind you, I’m curious about what the Seven Dirty Words would be. (Update: Now I know.) I can’t imagine there are that many unsayables left on British TV. And just why are Americans so squeamish about the word ‘toilet’?

(Hat-tip: Head Heeb.)

This is a good idea: The 18th Century Reading Room. It’s been set up as

the interactive home of the Eighteenth-Century Reading Room of the Mina Rees Library at the City University of NY Graduate Center. In this space, we will publish highlights from the collection, display images, and provide contact information for scholars with an interest in the available materials.

And while I think of it, I should direct you to Claire’s new blog, we are still here. Lots of good stories.

1. Who is Jim Cantore and why are people searching the internet for him nude?

2. And how did they land up here when (according to the search engine) I’ve never even mentioned him before?

To celebrate its first birthday, the ODNB is making access to the entire dictionary free from today until Sunday. Go print off all those articles you’ve been wanting to read while you can!

(Free access signup page.)

Good news: This year’s progress report is proving much less painful to write than last year’s effort. Somewhere along the line I actually did stuff. I even had a few of them ideas thingies.

Gulp: The UWP editors have read my book manuscript and their comments are probably sitting in my pigeonhole in the department office right now. I’ll go up to look this afternoon.

The Women in World History website is to host four month-long online forums in 2005-06. The forums are intended for world history teachers to discuss issues about teaching women and gender in world history, and how to access classroom resources including online primary sources.

The first forum begins 1 October 1 and will be moderated by Merry Wiesner-Hanks (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) and Heidi Roupp (Former President, World History Association).

I was doing some reading around on the modern law of homicide in England and Wales, for comparisons with the early modern situation, which led me to some rather interesting places. One was the Law Commission’s 2004 report on partial defences to murder, which came with a set of appendices. One (appendix C) is a really interesting survey of attitudes to mitigating circumstances in homicides. Another (appendix G, from p.288 in the text/179 of 204 in the file) is described as ‘a sociological history of provocation and diminished responsibility’. I read on with some curiosity; and I have to say, it looks a lot more like a fairly standard legal history than ‘sociological’ history to me.

For example, it spends a fair amount of space discussing ‘chance medley manslaughter’. The odd thing about this particular (and particularly early modern) category of homicide is that although it often comes up in the contemporary law texts, and legal historians do write about it quite a lot, you won’t find much about it in work by social historians based on court records.

To be sure, if you rely on late 16th- to early 18th-century law texts as your sources, this emphasis on chance medley is quite reasonable. Nearly all the ones I’ve read so far define chance-medley as ‘killing in a sudden quarrel’ and equate it with manslaughter, and discuss it at some length (e.g., Lambarde’s Eirenarcha, late 16th century; Coke’s Institutes, early 17th century; Hawkins, Treatise of the pleas of the crown, early 18th century; later in the 18th century, Blackstone seems to confuse it with self-defence, which was something else again). And it’s quite true that in the courts those circumstances – killing in ‘hot blood’ in the course of a spontaneous brawl – would indeed tend to result in a manslaughter verdict (eligible for benefit of clergy, so the convict was rarely executed).

The only clear exception I’ve found so far – but it’s quite an important one! – is Matthew Hale (in both his History of the pleas of the crown (written before 1676 but not published until 1736) and Methodical summary (1678)). He equates chance medley with homicide per infortunium (by ‘misfortune’ or accident) and, moreover, explicitly distinguishes it from manslaughter.

Curiously, the legal historians discussing chance medley never seem to refer to Hale, but his view looks to me like a more accurate representation of courtroom practice, probably well before the 1670s and certainly after that: i.e, ‘chance medley’ and ‘manslaughter’ were two separate things. Homicide per infortunium was a pretty rare verdict by the 17th century – it had been much more significant in medieval courts, under very different laws on homicide – and had a quite different legal status from manslaughter (it resulted in an automatic pardon).

I have very occasionally come across ‘homicide per infortunium’ verdicts in the 17th-century Welsh and Cheshire records. I can’t, however, recall or find in my databases any mention of the term ‘chance medley’. Meanwhile a keyword search turned up just 8 instances in the much larger Old Bailey Proceedings Online, dating from 1676 to 1742. And here it’s Hale’s definition that seems to be in use (particularly clearly so in the judge’s summing up in the 1742 case, I think).

I may want to follow this up and see if other court archives do in fact support this argument (I could look at the published calendars of the Home Circuit assize records, for example, which would also take me back to the mid-16th century so I could look for any shifts in practice). If I have time. But assuming that they do, I’ve got to wonder why there should be this divergence between legal doctrine (in most texts) and what was happening in courts. It’s an interesting little puzzle thrown up by differences between sources that tend to be used by different sorts of historians.

Like Hale, many of the writers were judges or (I think) lawyers reporting judicial decisions. (I don’t really know enough about how and by whom these texts were produced, though.) But were they simply tending to repeat and reify a definition – itself a 16th-century innovation – that had in reality already fallen out of use? Could this turn on some sort of conflation (which crops up in a number of sources) of ‘chance medley’ with the French term ‘chaud melee’? Any ideas, anybody?

Some copyright issues to be ironed out apparently, but there are plans for the Carnegie Mellon Million Book Project and the Royal Historical Society to work together to create open-access online versions of the Camden Series of historical sources and calendars – many of them of interest to early modernists (and medievalists). I’ll be watching out for this one.

A correspondent just sent me a link to Historic Pelham (if you’re reading this, many thanks!), a local history blog written by an enthusiast. Surely there must be more like this?

A.k.a. Fantasy History Channel!

The next carnival will be on 1 October at The Apocalyptic Historian, hosted by Lisa Roy Vox. Emails to vox[AT]apocalyptichistorian.com.

Will be resumed soon. Apologies for any particularly bizarre or incomprehensible comments I might have left behind me on Monday night. Oops. And it was a rather good bottle of wine, and I didn’t quite drink all of it, you know. I thought that showed considerable restraint under the circumstances.

But at least I didn’t have the sort of hangover yesterday that a certain person probably woke up with today.

The next History Carnival will be hosted on 15 September by Orac at Respectful Insolence.

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 at his new gmail address (rather than the one given on an earlier announcement): oracknows[AT]gmail.com by 9pm EDST on Wednesday 14 September.

The History Carnival is not just for academics and specialists and entries certainly don’t have to be heavyweight scholarship, but they should uphold certain standards of factual accuracy and integrity in the use of sources. They may be focused on a particular historical topic, reflections on the particular challenges and rewards of studying, researching and teaching history, reviews of history books or web resources, discussions of ‘popular’ histories, etc. But please do not nominate posts about current events unless they contain some significant historical perspective. If you have any further questions about the criteria for inclusion, check out the Carnival homepage (link above).

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.) 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).

PS: I’m increasingly fed up with Blogger, so the History Carnival homepage is on the move to http://historycarnival.blogsome.com. You will still be able to get some information at the blogspot page for a while, but it will no longer be updated.

Says the Beeb.

I’m about to turn on the TV (10.20am) to see if the situation on the ground in any way resembles their graphics. (In my experience over here in Wales, it often doesn’t.)

Why has the Ashes series felt so much like the Six Nations earlier this year (except that now I’m supporting England, of course)? I went through exactly the same sort of agonies watching Wales in the winter. But then we did it in the end.

(Quite apart from the fact that supporting Wales at rugby union and England at cricket over the last 10-15 years have often been the same sort of experience. Painful, traumatic, too many false dawns, periods when I just couldn’t bear to watch any more… but I kept coming back. Perhaps I really am a masochist.)

Well, 6 hours and 90+ overs to go. Everything still to play for on the last day. What have you got for us, Warney?

….

Updates…

10.25am: Weather looks better, though no blue sky.

11.45: Sunny. 82-3. And a very very tight nearly run-out…

Good job my sofa is right up against the wall so I couldn’t get behind it anyway.

Lunchtime: 127-5. I feel sick.

And actually there is a foot or so of space one side of the back of the sofa if I move a box out.

2.10pm: 182-5. (188 ahead.) Man, Pieterson came up with the goods today (78, including 3 sixes). And Collingwood solid as a rock, if rocks can be ginger. As Ed says, this has turned into a ODI. There could be one hell of an Aussie run chase after tea.

Teatime! 221-7! And Pieterson got his first Test century. Joyous, glorious stuff. (After the early lucky breaks. The Aussies must be sick sick sick about those dropped catches.)

4.15pm. Pieterson: 6 X 6. That’s all.

Mind you, his ego will need to be sat on a bit after today.

4.44pm: … Make that 7 X 6, and the 150.

5pm: Bye bye to Pieterson… and to Richie Benaud, at almost the same minute.

What a day it’s been. Oh my. But we did it in the end…

Do you remember the Knitted homes of crime tea cosies?

Then you just have to see these ‘cuddly’ toys.

(Thanks to BitchPhD.)

I think I saw some fairly unimpressed reviews of Elaine Showalter’s new book about ‘the academic novel’. Now she has a piece in the Guardian. OK, she likes Gaudy Night. But not one mention of Alison Lurie? (My personal favourites, I think, are The nowhere city and Foreign affairs.) Harrumph.

Not that I would be so shallow as to judge a writer by how much her taste in books coincides with mine, of course…