Early Modern Notes

I know this link is going to be flying around the entire universe, but I can’t resist: Microsoft redesigns iPod packaging

Very cool. (H-T: Bookish.) Though perhaps not quite as cool as this.

The next History Carnival* will be hosted on 1 March by Miland Brown at World History Blog.

Email nominations for recently published posts about history (a historical topic, reviews of books or resources, reflections on teaching or researching history) to miland[AT]usa2014[DOT]com, or use the submission form provided by Blog Carnival.

If you have any further questions about the criteria for inclusion and guidelines for contributions, please check out the Carnival homepage.

*Which will be edition #26, for anyone who noticed that there was a slight mix up with the numbering last time (so we have two 24s). I think it’s less confusing to revert to the ‘correct’ numbering this time around.

Scotland do it again. Awesome game by Scotland. England, not so much (some terrible unforced errors); the best team won amidst some truly foul weather. Brilliant, gripping stuff.

(And Wales play Ireland tomorrow in Dublin. Oh dear.)

The next Carnival of Bad History will be at Ahistoricality on 13 March!

This one’s for blog posts about getting history wrong:

* incorrect information, particularly well-loved myths and legends
* pseudo-historical distortion for political or cultural gain
* historians behaving unprofessionally or otherwise embarassingly
* historical analogies that don’t work
* historical drama, in print or screen, that messes up actual history
* anything else that’s historical and bad (if you’re not sure, nominate it anyway and let me decide!)

The next Asian History Carnival will be hosted by Jonathan Dresner at Frog in a Well on 5 March.

I also hope to have news shortly of the next Carnivalesque, which will be an ancient/medieval edition in early March…

(Or, something to keep you occupied while I’m still insanely busy.)

Long, long ago, in the requests corner, Jeremy asked about perceptions of filth and dirt in early modern Europe, while ADM was interested in shifting city boundaries and high-crime areas. I’m not sure I can answer the specific part about boundaries, but the two requests seemed to me to be more generally topics that would overlap quite well, and give you something juicy to read: cities, dirt, disease and crime. Mmm.

(These are just a start: I’ll try to add some more over the weekend. But this post has been sitting in my drafts folder for quite long enough already…)

Early modern city bibliography

Wrong side of the river: London’s disreputable south bank
London 1753
A day in 18th-century London
Epidemic disease in London
Imagining early modern London (book review) (another one)
The social world of early modern Westminster (book review)
London dispossessed: literature and social space in the early modern city (book review)
Social sites of Renaissance lyrics (currently unavailable: try here for now)
Maps and memory in early modern England (book review)
Neighbourhoods and the public in early modern German cities
Crime and society in early modern Seville
The city: medieval to modern (a course syllabus with some interesting-looking readings)
Contours of death: disease, mortality and the environment in early modern England

I was browsing through WG Hoskins’ Local history in England (originally published in 1959, although this is the 1972 edition) earlier today. And this, in the chapter on fieldwork on buildings, did make me giggle.

It is obviously not always easy for someone who may be a total stranger to approach a house and expect to roam all over it. One should always, of course, knock at the front door and ask permission to look… Men usually find it much easier than women to get inside a house as they are rightly reckoned not to notice that the house has not been polished and dusted for a day or two.

Well, perhaps I shouldn’t make assumptions just because the women in my family don’t have the dusting and polishing gene, and if complete strangers turned up at my door asking to have a look around, my first thought wouldn’t be whether the house was clean enough. But it does seem to me to conjure up an image of a vanished era, with houseproud wives and strong silent chaps who wouldn’t know how to boil an egg… and a world of innocence.

It’s official: this is the Best Expert/Scholar Blog in A Fistful of Euros’ European Blog Awards.

Now where did I put my acceptance speech and my fancy frock?

Thanks to everyone who voted for me.

I love you all!!

Juvenile Rescue and Reform: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives
Monday, April 10th 2006
The European Centre for the Study of Policing, Open University, Milton Keynes

‘From Refuge to Reformatory. The Evolution of Britain’s First State-funded Juvenile Reformatory – the London Refuge for the Destitute 1805-1830’ - Peter King, The Open University
‘Strategies of Resistance within English Residential Institutions for Juvenile Delinquents 1950-1970’ - Abi Wills, Oxford University
‘Girls and the Politics of Protection: Historical and Contemporary Comparisons’ - Pam Cox, Essex University

£10 for the day including lunch; contact Valerie Humphrey (V.F.Humphrey@open.ac.uk) for a booking form.

There is so much going on right now (including some really exciting developments that I won’t go into), things on the blog will be very very quiet for a bit. Visitors are as always very welcome to browse around: use the ‘archives’ link in the menu bar above or the ‘EMN choice’ links in the sidebar to get an idea of what I get up to. It should all be back to some sort of normality in a couple of weeks.

Up at Philobiblon

You have just a couple of hours for last minute submissions for tomorrow’s History Carnival at Philobiblon.

Email nominations for recently published posts about history (a historical topic, reviews of books or resources, reflections on teaching or researching history) to natalieben[AT]journ[DOT]freeserve[DOT]co[DOT]uk.

A bit of news: Blog Them Out of the Stone Age has migrated to WordPress. Redirects to the new URL seem to be in place but you might want to update bookmarks, and you’ll probably need to change your RSS feeds…

Someone somewhere put me up for an award in the European Blog Awards. Thank you, whoever it was. (Scroll down: ‘Best Expert or Scholar’. Although someone’s got my surname wrong. Oops.)

Vote For Me!! Yay!

Hey, perhaps I should watch ‘Election’ again to get some hints from Reese Witherspoon on how to play dirty?

PS: Plus, the utterly delectable Giornale Nuovo is up for Best Culture blog and Best Writing; on the political side, The Sharpener is in a few categories and Europhobia is up for Best Swearing a few more.

I stumbled upon Binnur’s Turkish Cookbook earlier today (I was looking for a red cabbage salad recipe). There are good things here.

I am doing leek, parsnip and potato soup of some kind tonight. Anyone got any favourite flavour combinations for that? (I mean, I’m kinda spoilt for choice here: lemon, ginger, apple, curried…)

If servants and apprentices constitute the largest single group of arson defendants in the Proceedings, the next most prominent group consists of people from the ‘middling sorts’. And in many cases, this represents the use of arson as a weapon or tool – often one wielded in the course of disputes and quarrels with neighbours or business rivals. This included the use of false accusations of arson, and juries may have been particularly concerned about this; acquittal rates seem particularly high in cases that had quarrelling neighbours as their backdrop.

[Part 1]
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Arson was infrequently prosecuted in the Old Bailey in eighteenth-century London. There are fewer than 100 reported trials in the Old Bailey Proceedings Online database for the period 1674-1834, out of a total of more than 100,000 trials (including, for example, more than 4900 burglaries and 2300 homicides).[1] This might at first seem surprising, given just how seriously arson was viewed within early modern societies.

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The next History Carnival will be hosted on 15 February by Natalie Bennet at Philobiblon.

Email nominations for recently published posts about history (a historical topic, reviews of books or resources, reflections on teaching or researching history) to natalieben[AT]journ[DOT]freeserve[DOT]co[DOT]uk, or use the submission form provided by Blog Carnival.

You should include in emails: 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).

NB: The Carnival is on the lookout for new hosts this spring. If you’re a blogging historian and you’re interested, take a look at the carnival homepage for further details.

The first Thomas Browne Seminar is to be held in London on 8 April, and the website set up for it looks like a really great resource with a bibliography, biographical links and links to primary sources online, etc. [Note: there’s a bug in the stylesheet somewhere so it doesn’t display very well in Firefox, but it’s fine in IE.]

Plus, there’s a new website for the Society for Renaissance Studies: it includes CFPs, a list of past theses, courses, links, as well as information about the Society.

The National Archives has put online a practical tutorial in medieval/early modern Latin. They say no previous experience is required, and you can work through at your own pace. Sounds as though it could be very useful.

That is, a one day conference on Puritanism on 25 February. It sounds a good one for those interested in the subject (and for postgrads in particular).

It’s got to number 6, and I hadn’t even noticed it before.

(Which sort of reminds me of something I was saying to a friend the other day: I compared the history/academic blogosphere when I started back in summer 2004 to print culture at some point in the 16th (17th?) century when it was still physically possible to have read every book ever printed. But now I don’t think anyone could ever keep up.)

I was asked: “Is there a difference between local history and national history? (Apart from the scale obviously)”. The quick’n'dirty answer is: it’s all about the scale.

Well, this is how I see it, anyway, if you want to read on for the longer answer…

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Slightly delayed by the odd technical glitch:
It’s up!

I fell about laughing anyway. (H-T: CT. WTF, indeed.)