Early Modern Notes

Not the biggest or the cleverest edition ever: just some posts at my favourite early modern blogs which caught my eye over the summer, plus the odd submission that came my way (for which, thanks).

I’m going to start with a quick plug for what must surely be the newest early modern blog on the block, The Long Eighteenth (as in century). There should, I think, be much rejoicing that Jim Chevallier has taken up blogging, kicking off with a thoughtful post on why the early modern period is so fascinating to study. And The Long Eighteenth’s founder, Carrie Shanafelt, discusses how we define the long eighteenth century. I rambled on a bit there as well, but I won’t inflict the link on you.

For some reason there’s been a lot of rhyme and unreason this summer. At Philobiblon, Natalie brought us an elegy not for the squeamish (which sparked a fascinating discussion about what the poet was up to). Meanwhile, Inkhorn at Blogging the Renaissance offered up a seventeenth-century dirty joke.

But ballads were often intended to provide serious moral lessons. At Burning Pestle, Escalus has the tale of an ungracious son. Brett Hirsch of Sound and Fury offers an emblem-book poem:

The nimble Spider from his Entrailes drawes
A suttle Thread, and curious art doth show
In weaving Nets, not much unlike those Lawes
Which catch Small-Thieves, and let the Great-ones goe. …

And then again, a ballad (ancient or modern) can tell a rousing story: at Walking the Berkshires, Tim Abbott’s Ballad of William Race recounts a 1750s rent war in the American colonies.

Cardinal Wolsey reports on a far more bloody dispute, Kett’s Rebellion, which took place in Norfolk in the summer of 1549. (An extensive selection of primary sources relating to this event, with commentaries, can be found at Virtual Norfolk).

Further contention, though less blood, over at Crooked Timber: Henry Farrell was surprised by a new book on just how impolite early coffeehouses could be. A somewhat impolite discussion followed.

Now, lest anyone imagine that the fine people group-blogging at Blogging the Renaissance are only interested in smutty double entendres, here is Inkhorn again, on early modern liberalism; meanwhile Simplicius is exploring some early modern theories of the origins of English insults.

If it’s early modern, how can there not be Shakespeare? Kristine reviewed a book on Green Shakespeare at Earmarks in Early Modern Culture. And at Senselist, a roundup of 8 people who, according to various more or less loony theories, might be the real Shakespeare.

Speaking of the strange and surreal, misteraitch reports on an 18th-century journey to the moon. With pictures, of course, since this is Giornale Nuovo.

The only problem with Early Modern Whale, as ever, is which of Roy Booth’s wonderful posts to select. But let’s stay in the realms of the fantastic, with a pamphlet Roy claims as the first occurrence of ‘silly season’ journalism in English, reporting a dragon in deepest darkest… Sussex.

More seriously, though, Roy also discusses the English legislation of 1650 that made adultery a capital crime. And just in case you’ve been finding this edition all a bit light and lascivious, here’s something more muscular for you: Brandon’s discussion at Siris of Brown and Shepherd on the Five Propositions of Hume’s Causal Theory.

And taking humour seriously: Jonathan Dresner reports on a new book on humour in Edo-period Japan.

Finally, things both pretty and practical: maps. Miriam at scribblingwoman noticed a lovely interactive map of early modern London. And at Bibliodyssey, Peacay has some beautiful images of a sixteenth-century Portolan atlas.

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Carnivalesque is always on the lookout for hosts: email carnivalesque {at} earlymodernweb.org(.)uk if you’re interested. The next edition in September will be an ancient/medieval theme issue. But it’s also Carnivalesque’s second birthday! So we might want to do something a bit special. Who knows?

Don’t forget, you can submit posts any time using this form.

Picking up the reins again… A quick reminder that the next History Carnival will be hosted on 1 September by Jonathan Dresner at Frog in a Well Japan.
You can email nominations for recently published posts about historical topics to dresner[at]hawaii.edu, or use the submission form.

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).

I need hosts for the History Carnival from 1 October onwards! You don’t need to be a professional historian, but you do need some familiarity with the history blogosphere. New faces are always especially welcome but any previous hosts who’d like another go will be much appreciated too. If you want more info, check out the carnival homepage, and get in touch with me: sharon {at} earlymodernweb.org(.)uk

And I’ll be marking my return to blog activity by hosting an early modern edition of Carnivalesque over this coming weekend (Sunday-ish). So, if in the last couple of months you’ve read or written any outstanding posts about early modern (c.1500-1800 CE) history, literature, art, philosophy, music, etc, nominate them now! You can either email me at the address above or use this submission form.

Mmm, let me tell you a bit more about what I’m getting up to. I’ve often waxed lyrical about The Old Bailey Proceedings Online (and see the OBP Blog Symposium.). So it’s rather delightfully serendipitous that my new job is as project manager for two new, related London history projects, based in the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Sheffield.

The first and relatively simple task is to complete the OBP job by adding the final run of proceedings from 1834-1913 (under the title of Central Criminal Court proceedings), integrating them into the existing site. In total, this will create a fully searchable major digital primary source for London history, and particularly for the history of non-elite Londoners, running right through from the late 17th century into the early 20th century.

The 18th-century project, Plebeian Lives and the Making of Modern London 1690-1800, is much more difficult and complex. Like many other early modern and 19th-century digital primary sources, the OB/CCC proceedings are printed texts – relatively easy to read and transcribe, and to mark up for digitisation. But the majority of the Plebeian Lives sources will be archival manuscript materials. They will cover a wide range: including legal records such as coroners’ inquests; parish records (eg: pauper letters, vestry minute books); the records of Bridewell and Bethlem hospital; apprenticeship records. There’ll also be printed texts, such as Ordinary’s Accounts.

Like the Old Bailey/Central Criminal Court databases, they’ll all end up online: thousands of documents, full text, fully searchable, freely available to all internet users without any subscription barriers. What’s more, we hope to construct a search engine that will make it possible to simultaneously search a number of related online primary source resources alongside ours, including the OBP, and others at different sites such as British History Online.

This is the goal, at least. (I am terrified, whenever I stop being insanely excited.) Right now, all I have for this is a humungous (1 terabyte) hard drive filled with the first batch of scanned document images (very large, high quality .tif files, which is why they take up so much drive space).

The practical difficulties are not minor. Every phase of the process is lengthy and much of it (to be honest) fairly tedious, for both projects. All those documents and printed texts must first of all be microfilmed, scanned, and ‘rekeyed’ (transcribed): that part of it is outsourced, although we have to produce various documentation to guide the rekeyers (and generally nag and cajole the contractors to give us what we want when we want it). Some of the documents will be much better preserved and/or easier to decipher than others.

Then we have to mark up the transcripts in XML, another dull and painstaking task, which will be undertaken in two ways over the next 2 years or so. Right now and with my, um, ‘help’, the HRI programmers are writing fearfully complicated programs that will do substantial sections of the CCC transcripts automatically; the rest will be done manually by several part-time, home-based workers (some of them are postgrad students) who will start this autumn.

Once that markup is done, the CCC project will be quite straightforward to finish off, since it will be essentially a matter of adding it to the existing OBP database and giving it a few tweaks. But for our 18th-century plebeians, our job will barely have begun.

Firstly, the HRI people have to create a powerful search engine that anyone can use fairly easily and, of course, we have to create a web site to present it. We hope that many people with 18th-century interests, from genealogists to academics, will find their own ways of using the resource. What we want to do with it is to analyse the data in order to “reconstruct how ‘ordinary’ Londoners interacted with various government and charitable institutions in the course of their daily lives”. We’ll be doing large scale quantitative analysis and record linkage (to find out, for example, patterns of relationships between claiming poor relief and ending up as a victim or perpetrator of crime). The technique of nominal record linkage has tended to be applied to small rural populations: the computer made record linkage practical in the first place, now the internet is making possible the extension of its methods to the teeming metropolis. On the other hand, we want to do qualitative analysis: where we can find rich enough information about individuals, we’ll trace their individual experiences and uses of the institutions available to them.

I (eventually) get the fun job of writing biographies to put on the website. My bosses have to sit down and write the serious monograph.

I think I have one of the coolest jobs in the universe right now.

. . .

[Parts of this post have been revised and x-posted at my other new bloghome, The Long Eighteenth Century.]

(It may still be August, but the heatwave is a distant memory here in Yorkshire.)

So, an awful lot seems to have happened since my last proper post:

I don’t live in Aberystwyth any more. OK, it’s nice to be in a place that isn’t at the end of nowhere (there are real trains! that go often! and work!), and Sheffield has a lot going for it. But. I really miss all my old places. And the bilingual Welsh/English signs. And the sea.

I work in an open-plan office with several other people. This is more than a little strange, something I haven’t done for over a decade. But, you know, this is a Good Thing, not least because I have to get my flabby arse out of the house and go do stuff every day instead of lounging about on the sofa with my laptop pretending to work working. (Especially as I don’t as yet have a sofa. I just ordered it. I’ve moved from a semi-furnished flat to an unfurnished house. My credit card hurts real bad this month.)

I may not have a sofa, but I do have a new laptop: I got a shiny MacBook. And you know, now I do get why people go on about them so much. A PC will do the job, no problem. (You should see the kickass (and yet surprisingly cheap) piece of desktop kit I just ordered at work which someone else is paying for. Nice.) But, you know, a Mac is something else again. It gives pleasure; it’s fun to work with, and very stylish. To be more practical, it’s amazingly fast and I just love its keyboard, which feels different to anything else I’ve ever typed on. Among other cool things. (The only problem is that, being as it’s one of the white ones, it doesn’t half get grubby easily, dammit.)

What else?… Oh yes, the new job. Suffice to say, I’m thoroughly enjoying myself and it’s very different, if all a bit nerve-racking. Well, no doubt there’ll be more to say about that in the months to come.

(PS: I forgot this, but at some point while I was away this blog had its second birthday.)