Early Modern Notes

I’ve decided to create my own publications archive page. At the moment, this will involve self-archiving the publications on this site, since Aberystwyth (unlike a growing number of UK universities) doesn’t provide an institutional open access archive, and there isn’t as far as I know any kind of discipline-based OAI-compliant self-archiving option for history publications (comparable to ventures like arXiv for scientists), except in a few specialist and science-orientated fields like medical history.* Something needs to be done about that. But personally, I want to do something now rather than waiting around for more ideal solutions to happen.

The immediate spur to action was article by Steve Harnad (thanks to Jeremy).I’d been thinking about self-archiving my publications for a while, to make them more widely available to any interested readers who don’t have access to well-stocked university libraries. I was a bit concerned about the copyright issues, but on actually doing some homework I’ve been pleasantly surprised to discover that at least two of my publishers already have policies in place which allow me to do this, with some conditions (eg, how long you have to wait after publication, and whether you can post PDFs of the actual published works or only copies of the final accepted drafts).

So I’ve made a start. There will be more to come, along with some of my favourite unpublished conference papers, and later I may use it for pre-print publication as well. I would also like to set up a kind of directory of open-access scholarly publications in early modern history at some point – there are plenty out there but they’re not always easy to find. But that’s going to have to wait till I’m a bit less busy.

By the way, authors can find out their publishers’ policies using SHERPA, which also has a lot of useful guidance on self-archiving.

More useful resources:

Open Access overview
what you can do to promote open access
Promoting open access in the humanities
Open Access News blog
Budapest Open Access Initiative
Open Archives Initiative
OAIster (searches over 600 repositories)

…

*If I’m wrong about that, I’d be happy to be corrected…

The next History Carnival will be hosted on 1 May by Jeremy Boggs at Clioweb.

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

The History Carnival is not just for academics and entries don’t have to be heavyweight scholarship, but they must uphold basic standards of factual accuracy. 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).

A random curiosity-led Googling for information on 18th-century vaccination led me to some rather good resources. I won’t have much time for blogging for the next couple of weeks, so I thought I’d share some of this bounty with you to keep you occupied.

Edward Jenner and the discovery of vaccination
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: smallpox vaccinations in Turkey
Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Edward Jenner
Jenner’s Inquiry into the effects of the variolae vaccine
The life and death of smallpox

From Plague to AIDS
Early modern medicine resources at EMR
You can now access, for free, the full-text archives of every issue of Medical History (via PubMed)
The Wellcome Trust Center for the History of Medicine at UCL has some very good resources, including a wonderful tribute and bibliography of the life and work of Roy Porter.
The Wellcome Trust‘s own website, of course, has a whole range of invaluable resources for the history of medicine:
Medical Photographic Library
MedHist
Turning the Pages

UPDATES

From the US National Library of Medicine:
Images from the History of Medicine
The main History of Medicine site is also worth a visit, especially its online exhibitions section. There’s currently an exhibit on the history of forensic medicine.
Clendening History of medicine Library and Museum

History of Medicine Online
BUBL history of medicine resources
History of Chinese Medicine

1. Sweeping assertions without benefit of evidence.

1a. Especially sweeping and inaccurate historical assertions that demonstrate total and utter ignorance of decades of well-established, careful research by large numbers of historians.

1b. Not to mention when a simple 5-minute Google search would have corrected the aforesaid sweeping assertions. (And I know because I went and did one!)

2. Bloggers who haven’t actually read anything by X but feel qualified to criticise* X based on something Y wrote about X.

2a. Especially when Y is a hack journalist and X is a respected and experienced specialist in whatever the subject is under discussion.

3. Bloggers who haven’t actually read anything by X but feel qualified to criticise* Y (who has read X) for what Y has written about X.

4. When a blogger writes a post about some large scale social or economic trend or pattern, and most of the ensuing comment thread consists of people agreeing or disagreeing with the blogger based purely on personal anecdotes.

5. People who use ‘that’ when they should use ‘who’ (as in: people that use ‘that’ when they should use ‘who’). For some reason, this has been driving me absolutely crazy lately.

No links to protect the not so innocent, but don’t tell me you haven’t encountered them. Anyone got any more to add? Get ‘em off your chest! (Or if your guilty conscience has anything to confess…)

……….

*Perhaps I should note that I didn’t mean ‘criticise’ in the judicious academic sense. I meant it more in the sense of ‘vicious attack’.

I admit, I was puzzled at first by the story that the government is thinking of introducing the Scottish ‘not proven’ verdict as part of its plans to ‘reform’ compensation for victims of miscarriages of justice.

The ‘not proven’ verdict is controversial in Scotland. The problems with it boil down to: a) it’s a cop-out, b) it’s irrational and c) it leaves a stain on the defendant’s reputation: the jury is saying that there wasn’t enough evidence to convict but they doubt the defendant’s innocence. But nonetheless the defendant walks free. How could this have any bearing on the kind of miscarriage of justice that puts an innocent person in jail?

The Scotsman (registration required?) spells it out more clearly than the English newspaper reports I’ve seen. This is not a plan to introduce ‘not proven’ as a third option for trial juries, as it’s used in Scotland, which would merely be somewhat bizarre.

No: the proposal is only for the ‘not proven’ option to be available to appeal court judges: they could decide that a conviction was ‘not proven’, but this would not be the same as quashing the conviction – and the prisoner concerned would not be eligible for any compensation at all.

By giving the appeal judges the option to find a conviction not proven, Mr Clarke could allow the Court of Appeal effectively to strike down a lower court’s verdict on procedural grounds, yet without declaring the defendant innocent. …

In effect, someone whose conviction was later found not proven by the Court of Appeal would technically be innocent, but not entitled to claim damages.

Regardless of how many years they might have spent in prison. Innocent, but not innocent.

This undermines a cornerstone of modern criminal justice: the burden of proof rests with the prosecution – and they must prove the case beyond all reasonable doubt (this is why ‘technicalities’ matter, even if sometimes you think they’re being manipulated).

In Scottish law, the legal effect of a ‘not proven’ verdict is exactly the same as one of ‘not guilty’. This proposal is twisting the concept in a way that has nothing at all to do with that usage, however controversial it might be (and I suspect its days are numbered in any case).

It is appalling.

What do teacherly [ETA: and studenty!] folks think of a student using the expression “sexing-up” in an essay?

I think it expresses pretty well what’s going on in the source materials he’s discussing, but is it too colloquial? Should I tell him to be more boring in future?

History Carnival will soon be up at (a)musings of a grad student… and here it is!

And Carnivalesque will come tomorrow at Earmarks in Early Modern culture… and it’s here!

Bardiac has posted the NEXT draft of the REALLY dead women writers meme…

(Since the texts went behind a paywall, I hadn’t taken much notice of the Brown Women Writers Project. But there are still a few useful resources there that are free to view.)

How to create a digital library of early modern texts…

Dan Cohen has written about Search Engine Optimization for Smarties…

A good contribution to the bad academic writing debate from the Guardian…

Something for Easter… and a Jewish joke for Passover…

Is there such a thing as a British intellectual?

Intellectual or not, guess where I’ll be at 7.15 this evening?…

PS: decided not to get an Easter Egg this year… but I did buy a bar of the good dark stuff instead. I am not alone.

PPS: Spam email oxymoron of the week: “Academic Qualifications available from prestigious non-accredited universities”…

It seems that the blog can receive (manual) trackbacks but not pingbacks (no, I don’t fully understand the distinction either; no doubt I’ll find out in the course of trying to solve the problem…). And I don’t think it’s sending them properly either (actually, I’ve just spotted one sent in the last couple of days, so it looks as though that’s OK).

(I have already checked that the necessary boxes are ticked in admin…)

At first I wondered if it was associated with my WP upgrade to v2.0 (the WP support forums indicate that some people had problems with this), but on checking I found I did the upgrade back in January and I had some trackbacks/pingbacks after that, till it dried up in February.

It’s a bit of a mystery to me. Anyone got any suggestions?

(… Still don’t understand the difference between TB and PB – except that it’s different technology. What the WP codex says seems partly wrong.)

Prepare to get nothing done this weekend…

1. The History Carnival will be hosted on Saturday 15 April by Rebecca Goetz at (a)musings of a grad student.

Email nominations for recently published posts about history (a historical topic, reviews of books or resources, reflections on teaching or researching history) to rgoetz AT fas DOT harvard DOT edu, or use the submission form provided by Blog Carnival. Rebecca is particularly interested in posts on the history of taxes and taxation.

2. Carnivalesque will be hosted by Kristine Steenburgh at Earmarks in Early Modern Culture on Sunday 16 April.

This is an interdisciplinary carnival for the best blog writing on history, literature, art, religion, philosophy, etc, of the early modern period (c.1500-1800CE): send nominations for posts written in the last couple of months to: kristine DOT steenbergh AT let DOT uu DOT nl or use the Blog Carnival submission form.
………………..

IMPORTANT PS: Forgot the bit where I ask for volunteer hosts.

I keep reading how much people enjoy reading the end results, but right now hardly anyone is prepared to put in the effort to make them happen, unless I go round begging and/or twisting virtual elbows and I’m getting fed up of doing that. Bottom line: no hosts means no Carnivals, because I’m certainly not going to start doing it every few weeks. It’s up to you lot. [If you have hosted any of the carnivals in the last year or so this rant does not apply to you.]

History Carnival needs hosts from 1 June onwards. Carnivalesque is also looking for hosts for the next ancient/medieval issue in May (unless my partner-in-crime knows something I don’t) and the next early modern issue in June. If you’re interested, you can visit the carnivals’ webpages to find out more, and to get contact details. Or email me: sharon {at} earlymodernweb.org(.)uk

Someone I didn’t quite manage to fit in during my women’s history week and was reminded of when doing the women writers’ meme the other day, Moll Cutpurse/Mary Frith is fascinating as a figure on the borders between history and myth. There have been many sensationalised and fictionalised versions of her life; the fragments of court records unearthed by historians, documenting her many encounters with the law, can tell a slightly different story – though still a remarkable one.

Moll Cutpurse
Mary Frith otherwise Moll Cutpurse
The Roaring Girl

Wikipedia biography of Mary Frith
The case of Moll Frith: women’s work and the “all-male” stage
Cross-dressing in The Roaring Girl, especially The issues and Historical perspective
Clothing and society in The Roaring Girl

And will the real Mary Frith please stand up?…
Women burglars of the Old Bailey
Women on the early modern stage

This is one that I’m hoping readers might be able to help with. Because I do not have a clue.

What’s a trailing slash? It’s the / that may or may not appear at the end of the URL in the address bar above this page on your screen.

And I have a real problem with a trailing slash that Google so far hasn’t been able to solve. If you visit the URL http://www.earlymodernweb.org.uk/emn/index.php/, some very, very nasty things happen to the layout of the page. [Not any more, see update below.]

The following URLs, however, are fine:
http://www.earlymodernweb.org.uk/emn/index.php
and http://www.earlymodernweb.org.uk/emn/

So WTFFF is going on? (It’s not a browser or PC v Mac issue.) Now, I can easily set up an autoredirect so anyone trying to go to /emn/index.php/ will just get sent to /emn/ – but I really want to know why this is happening so I can fix it properly.

Please help if you can…

Update: Have done the redirect, so no one can land on index.php/ any more. OK, I don’t know exactly why the layout breaks in the way it does, but I should have learnt long ago that using an address that ends “index.php/” is a kind of category error that’s probably just asking to break things. (And now I’m going to put Moll back up the top of the page because she’s much more interesting than this stuff.)

Well, hardly ever. But after all, rules is made for broken.*

This is the five early (pre-1800) women authors meme, picked up from Philobiblon…

Already in:

Bardiac’s Starter:
Behn, Aphra – Oroonoko
Christine de Pisan (aka Pizan) – The Book of the City of Ladies
Julian of Norwich – Revelations of Divine Love
Locke, Anne (aka Ane Lok, etc) – A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner
Marie de France – The Lais of Marie de France

Dr. Virago:
The Paston Women – The Paston Letters
Margery Kempe – The Book of Margery Kempe
Anonymous – The Floure and the Leafe (Her reasoning for this is on her blog)
Lady Mary Wroth – Poems

La Lecturess :
Anne Askew – The Examinations of Anne Askew
Mary Sidney – Psalms
Anne Finch – Poems
Katherine Phillips – Poems
Teresa of Avila – Life

Amanda:
Bradstreet, Anne: collected poems
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Fama y obras póstumas
Lanyer, Aemilia: Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum
Wroth, Lady Mary: Urania

Medieval Woman:
Trotula – The Diseases of Women
Female Troubador Poets:- La Comtessa de Dia – “A chantar m’er” & other Trobairitz poetry excerpted.
Hrostvitha of Gandersheim (c.930-c.1002) – Plays Gallicanus & Dulcitius

Heo Cwaeth:
Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) Scivias and Liber Divinorum Operum
Rachel Speght (1597 – Some time after 1621) Mouzell for Melastomus and Mortalities Memorandum
Anna Comnena (1093-1153) The Alexiad
Frau Ava (1060-1127) First named German poetess. “Johannes,” “Leben Jesu,” “Antichrist,” “Das Jüngste Gericht”
Dhuoda (9th century, inexact dates) Handbook for William: A Carolingian Woman’s Counsel for Her Son

Philobiblon’s additions:
Sei Shonagon, The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, extracts here and here
Eliza Haywood The History of Miss Betsey Thoughtless (1751)
Chen Tong, Tan Ze and Qian Yi, authors of The Peony Pavilion (1694)
Isabella Whitney, A Letter… in meeter by a yonge Gentilwoman: to her unconstant lover (1567) and A Sweet Nosegay, or Pleasant Posy (1573)
Elizabeth Elstob, The Rudiments of Grammar for the English-Saxon Tongue (1715).

And I’ll add these for you:

Mary Sidney Herbert, The triumph of death (c.1600) (translation of Petrarch)
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, The atomic poems (1653)
Jane Sharp, The midwives book (1671) (If you have access: Full text from EEBO)
Sarah Fyge Egerton, The female advocate (1686)
Mary Collier, The woman’s labour (1739)

…………

*Except the one about blogging while drunk.

The Guardian on Bellini and the East, a new exhibition at the National Gallery.

Charlie says… Public Information Films at The National Archives.

A newish website on Historical Fiction looks fun.

The Reading Experience Database 1450-1945 is looking for contributions. Perhaps it’ll (eventually) be able to add something to the debate now heating up over gendered reading preferences.

Rob MacDougall has discovered The Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society. (And see Giornale Nuovo for more on Athanasius Kircher.)

Is it a fish? Is it an ugly bugger? Neener-neener-neeeeeeeeeener! (And, unless you’re scared of insects… Wow.)

… And here’s an upcoming centenary to celebrate: TH White was born 100 years ago next month.

You may recall that I was building up to some serious redesigning the other day. I had some ideas as to what I wanted, and some recent WP designs that had got me thinking.

Well, here it is. I like it and I hope you do too. I think it makes a nice change from the usual way of doing these things.

I think this is pretty much done now. I probably have one or two little extra features I want to add later, but it’s time to take a break.There’s one or two little odd behaviours in IE that I need to work out (nothing serious as far as I can tell), but everything seems right in Firefox. I haven’t checked it in Opera yet.* Finally, if someone can test it out in Safari** for me and see if there are any problems, that’d be much appreciated (though I can’t promise to be able to do anything about them).

(Much of the rest of this post will be deeply boring to most of you. Stop reading now unless web design turns you on.)

It was a matter of working out just what I wanted and what I really wanted rid of – and then finding out what was possible (or to be more precise, what I was able to work out).

It struck me that what was really grabbing me about some of the new designs was not that they jettisoned scrolling (I don’t mind a bit of scrolling, within reason), but that they got rid of the sidebar. I hated those sidebars. So what if they’re the norm? I didn’t want to lose all of the information conventionally contained in sidebars (although no question that mine had got filled up with a lot of baggage), but how to escape from them while retaining key information in a convenient location?

As a solution, I stole the idea of the central horizontal menu bar below a single post on the front page from Squible. But I didn’t want the rest of that package. I wanted more posts on the front page in the conventional manner, to run below the horizontal bar (and I didn’t want just short excerpts. You’d think it’d be possible to alter the default length of excerpts (120 words), wouldn’t you? But no, apparently not).

I wasn’t entirely sure if breaking up posts on a page in this way was actually possible in WP. The solution I discovered was a template tag I hadn’t noticed before: get_posts, which allows you to do exactly that (by creating ‘multiple loops’ within a page, for those familiar with the WP terminology).

So on the front page there’s now a ‘middlebar’ and ‘bottombar’, which have been seriously streamlined compared to the old sidebars. I’m also thinking about whether it’s possible to put a bit more info on other pages without cluttering it up again. We’ll see.

…………

*Update: Opera seems fine except that there’s a clear space 20-ish [now reduced to about 10] pixels wide down the right-hand margin of the page. No idea why (I’ve noticed that it does the same thing to EMR, to a lesser extent). And IE has a funny little bug I haven’t quite figured out: the white border line down the left-hand side of posts should start right below the underlining on the post title, but it doesn’t always show properly (on my screen anyway). [Both of these are fixed. I think.]

**Further update: found a useful tool for this: iCapture takes a screenshot of how your webpage looks in Safari. There was a problem with the middlebar which I think I’ve sorted out. Other than that, one or two very minor variations that I can live with.

EDITED TO ADD (5.40pm): Yes the place does suddenly look different. I think I’ve got to the point with the redesign where the front page looks about right, so I’m going to keep it up and work through the minor bugs I know I have to deal with. If something is broken, DON’T PANIC! … Yet.

…………

I discovered largely by accident yesterday that the search engine for the blog wasn’t working properly. I’m pretty sure I’ve found out why (an absolute vs. relative paths thing in the technical lingo – the search was set up wrongly for use on pages other than the main page) and I think I’ve fixed it, but if you’d take a couple of minutes to test it out for me, it’d be much appreciated.

What I’d like you to do is to run a quick search (the box is in the righthand sidebar) for anything that takes your fancy (and gets some results!).

1. Do the search from the main page (www.earlymodernweb.org.uk/emn/).

2. Go to the individual page for this post and repeat the same search.

3. Do it one last time from this post’s category page.

If you get identical results each time, it’d be quite helpful, but not essential, if you just leave a comment saying it was OK. But if you get different results each time, it’s really important that you leave a brief comment (or email if you’re shy), giving the search word/phrase you used.

Thanks!

Other WordPress users who have search boxes on multiple pages of their blogs (ie, as well as the main page) might want to check this out too…

The next Carnivalesque will be an early modern edition and will be hosted by Kristine at Earmarks in Early Modern Culture on 16 April.

Carnivalesque is an interdisciplinary blog carnival for the best blog writing on history, literature, art, religion, philosophy, etc, of the period: send nominations for posts written in the last couple of months about all things early modern (c.1500-1800CE) to: kristine [dot] steenbergh [at] let [dot] uu [dot] nl or use the submission form.

Money Money Money…

The new issue of Common-place is online and it’s a special on the theme of the filthy lucre. Looks great as ever – an essay by Joyce Appleby I’m saving as a reward after I do some work this morning.

I’ve been stressing about finishing my book since, well, it feels like forever. I’ve been avoiding the conclusion for weeks (since the last fevered push, in fact). And what do I find when I finally open the file and look at it?

It’s a breeze. It’s virtually done. I even pretty much got that final concluding paragraph down (well, half of it: still want that knockout final sentence really). What was I worrying about again?

I don’t quite understand why my perceptions of where I’d got to with this thing were so far removed from the reality. I could have had this polished off with a few hours’ work any time in the last few weeks. Instead, I kept avoiding it because I was convinced it was a hideous deformed monster baby requiring radical surgery for which I didn’t have the time (or inspiration).

Two lessons from this:

1. I am a compleat fule.

2. If you’ve been putting off finishing that paper or chapter for the last month because you think it’s a pile of utter dreck, you could be as mistaken as I was. Stop avoiding it and do something about it.

But this one seems timely and potentially interesting, at least, and they should have no shortage of material…

Plagiary – Cross-Disciplinary Studies in Plagiarism, Fabrication, and Falsification.

I’ve recently added Renaissance Lit to my blogroll. This new blog is a nice idea, posting announcements of CFPs and upcoming conferences of interest to early modernists – especially, but not only, lit scholars.

Therefore, naturally, I keep getting this intense urge to redesign the entire blog. And now the Easter holidays are here, I think it may become inevitable.

So, dear readers, is there anything that would increase your viewing pleasure?

I’m contemplating following the in crowd with one of the recently emerging WP themes that do away with forever scrolling down the front page: they show just the most recent post (or even just a chunk of it) and titles/summaries of previous posts below. Chapati Mystery and History:Other are both using versions of Squible (which also does away with the sidebar). Or there’s the similar Hemingway reloaded theme. But neither of those feels quite right. The one that’s really got me thinking since I saw it in operation at Alun’s place is kiwi. Mmm.

The downside I can see with this type of theme is for irregular visitors. It’s fine for people who subscribe to the RSS feeds and/or come by every day for their, um, fix. But not everyone does that. There are blogs that I stop by maybe once a week or so. Then it’s more convenient just to scroll down the page and see what’s been happening. So I like the fact that kiwi (in Alun’s version anyway) shows the full text of the most recent post plus excerpts of the previous posts. Takes up more space on the screen, but it’s more accessible. Squible is lovely aesthetically (I think) but just too compressed.

Whatever happens, I can guarantee it won’t be straight out of the box. (Because that would just be too easy.) So your ideas and requests are welcome.

Now I’d better get on with some real work…

[Update: Frustratingly, the link to download the theme so I can take a look at it seems to be buggered. Same with the site forums. And can I find an email contact address anywhere on the site? Pah. Anybody got an up-to-date copy of the zip file they can send me? Please?]

Acephalous is looking for help compiling a list of ‘best intro’ books to literature and lit-theory for a wide range of historical periods and topics. He’s doing well on the modern sections (competing intros to Foucault coming out his ears…) but there are a lot of medieval/early modern gaps.

I wonder what a list of ‘best introductions’ to various themes in social and/or cultural history would look like? Maybe if I have time later I’ll start something up. Of course, people are welcome to leave suggestions (for categories that ought to be included and for books to read).

Has Copernicus Sashimi (1543.typepad.com) gone to the great Blog Kingdom in the Sky? Or moved on to a new home? Anybody know?

I have a blog set up at crimenotes.wordpress.com (you get one automatically when you set up a WP account) and a chat with Kristine reminded me that I might as well do something useful with it. For now, at least, it’ll probably just be a link-dump for crime and legal history resources (not just the usual early modern stuff). Maybe it’ll grow into something more interesting later.

Here’s the RSS feed, for when I get round to adding something.

Plenty of history bloggers wrote something about women during Women’s History Month: these are just the ones I’ve noted so far. They’re in no particular order, except that I’ve divided them into posts about women’s/gender history (issues, methods, sources) and posts about individual women. If you know of something I’ve missed, just leave a link in the comments…

Women’s history
Why medieval women writers belong in the canon
Women philosophers in the SEP
Women, stereotypes, 1950s
Feminists, historians, fiction
Sources for women’s history
Researching early modern women online

Sor Juana, 1651?-1695
I like medieval women (especially queens)
All the usual slanders against a queen
Europe’s first professional writer?
Christine de Pizan
Aethelflaed
Chrodield and Basina
Hilda of Whitby
Hrotswith von Gandersheim
A young lady makes a decision
Dr Lamb’s darling
Linda Phillips
Sarah Fyge Egerton
Sarah Throckmorton
Martha Ballard
Judith Leyster
Anne Cranford and Anne Stanbury
The cuckold’s wife
Lizzie Borden
Roman Women’s History Month (first in a series)