Early Modern Notes

Alternative word formation: sham poo, shower…

The next History Carnival will be hosted on 1 November by Sergey Romanov at Holocaust Controversies.

Email nominations for recently published posts about history (a historical topic, reviews of books or resources, reflections on teaching or researching history) to sergeyhc[AT]gmail[DOT]com, 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).

If you nominate by email, please include 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 (except for multi-part posts).

At last, got the projects’ website set up. My dogsbody underling second-in-command found a rather lovely image to use for Plebeian Lives. (I know I raved about Thomas Bewick the other week, but have I mentioned that I adore Thomas Rowlandson?)

Anyway, by way of general update on the projects, I think we’re getting there; it feels slow right now, but I think the time we’re spending at this early stage on getting it right will make the job go much more easily later.

(At least, that’s what I tell myself in the morning after I wake up from yet another rather unpleasant anxiety dream…)

Also, wikis are pretty damn cool.

Watch out for Les Rosbifs: Hogarth comes to Paris!

It’s up at Recent Finds Weblog. Lots of early modern goodies!

Idle question: if there are Muslims living in the far northern hemisphere – Iceland, say – what do they do when Ramadan falls in midsummer?

You know when a TV mystery/thriller casts some Really Famous Actor in an apparently minor role, and all you can think is: aha, s/he must have dunnit, then. Why else would they be paying his/her fees?

Have you read any great blog posts on early modern topics – anything to do with the period c.1500-1800 CE – in the last couple of months? Have you written any? Then our intrepid* host Henrik is waiting to hear from you!

Carnivalesque will be posted on about 22 October, so you still have a couple of days to submit nominations, either by email to hkarll002[at]henrikkarll.dk or use this form.

PS: Don’t forget that the Carnival of Bad History at archy is also on 22 October. Email: badhistory[at]aol[dot]com.

…

* I’ve seen his helmet. He looks pretty intrepid to me.

It’s for real.

Tomorrow we have our training day for the data developers (the people doing all the donkey work on this project). Wednesday they get real files to play with. (We hope.)

I want to get very drunk. But I am going to be a Good Girl and have an early-ish* night.

…

* i.e, it’s not midnight yet.

…

UPDATE

I survived, just.* I’m not sure whether they did. I have this fear that whatever I said just made what’s already pretty complicated even more confusing. I don’t think I’m very good at explaining things I already know to people who don’t. I find it really difficult to slow it down and think about how something looks from a position of complete ignorance. (Another reason why I don’t think I’ll ever be a very good teacher…)

*But there have been two pints of beer and a glass or two or whatever of wine since.

History Carnival XLI is up at Clioweb!

The next one will be at Holocaust Controversies on 1 November; usual submission form.

There haven’t been enough linkfests around here lately, and my EMR drafts folder is bulging with great stuff (I will get around to doing them properly… eventually).

I sometimes pause to wonder how long it can be before the never-ending expansion of the WWW makes EMR pretty much obsolete as a resource. It was never comprehensive, but once upon a time (c.2003, maybe, after 3 years of PhD-procrastination), I might have been able to claim that the site was never more than a couple of clicks away from all the important English-language resources for early modern Europe and north America (much less so for other regions). But now? I fear that searchers are probably better off with Google. The one advantage EMR might have is that there has been some basic screening of content for relevance and quality. But it is basic, especially on the quality.

So, I do ponder where I might take EMR over the next few years. Perhaps towards more specialisation in my areas of expertise, covering fewer resources in more depth. And/or I could head in the direction of collaboration (since EMR uses blog software, it would be easy to add extra contributors… if there are any willing volunteers out there) and even ‘wikification’. Suggestions would be welcome.

But, on with the linkage!

Southeast Asia Visions: European travellers’ accounts of premodern south east Asia.
Imperial robes in the Ottoman empire
Islamic Manuscripts from Mali
Pantomime and the Orient in the 18th century

Susan Burney letters project (pilot project): a source for music, literary, social and women’s historians of the late 18th century.
William Camden’s diary
Letters of William Herle

The Herle resource is hosted at the AHRC Lives and Letters project, which has (at present) an overwhelmingly early modern focus in its projects and seems to me to be extremely under-publicised. For example, google Robert Boyle: the Lives and Letters’ Workdiaries of Robert Boyle doesn’t appear until the bottom of the second page of results (and it went online nearly two years ago). That’s frankly pathetic for a major primary source. By way of contrast, the Susan Burney project is the first hit in a Google search on her name, and it’s just a small-scale pilot.

Some more science:
The ‘Analyst’ controversy (George Berkeley squares up to Isaac Newton)
Linda Hall Library History of Science collection: a range of primary source texts
The Newton project
The Chymistry of Isaac Newton
The English Physitian 1652

Like growing numbers of universities, St Andrews has several major digitisation projects completed and underway. These are just a couple with early modern content:
The French vernacular book project: a major bibliographical project for books published in French before 1601.
Digitising the Acts of the Scottish Parliament, 1235 – 1707

Coin and Conscience: popular views of money, credit and speculation
Blackbeard the Pirate and the wreck of Queen Anne’s Revenge
Materialising Sheffield
French and Italian painting of the 18th century

Tonight I grilled some haloumi and it started to melt.

This is not supposed to happen. I am puzzled.

(I scraped it off the grill pan and ate it anyway. It still tasted good, even if it wasn’t quite what I intended. Salty, mmm…)

Nathanael has posted the Asian History Carnival!

Tired of badmouthing the Middle Ages? There’s always the Puritans to fall back on!

Sepoy, er, ‘demystifies‘ a cricket match.

1: Last chance to nominate posts (or email: rhineriver[at]earthlink[dot]net) for the next Asian History Carnival which is in just two days’ time, at Rhine River on 12 October.

2: The next (Good) History Carnival will be hosted by Jeremy Boggs at Clioweb on 15 October. Nominate here or here.

3: There will be a Carnival of Bad History at archy on 22 October. Not sure of the address for nominations but this is the carnival’s email: badhistory[at]aol[dot]com

4: Early Modern Carnivalesque will also be on 22 October, hosted by Henrik at Recent Finds. Email nominations to: hkarll002[at]henrikkarll.dk or use the form.

The next Carnivalesque will be an early modern edition hosted by Henrik on 22 October, at Recent Finds. Submissions to: hkarll002[at]henrikkarll.dk or here.

The first book event at The Long Eighteenth, a discussion of Michael McKeon’s Secret History of Domesticity, has been highly successful: it started with several fine posts and has been enhanced by a thoughtful response from the author and a follow-up discussion, not to mention lively conversations in comment threads. (Once it’s finished, I’ll try to post a full set of links, but for the moment it’s all on the front page: it starts here). Indispensable for anyone interested in the 18th century.

Anyone with interests in the Tudors and without access to the ODNB, meanwhile, will want to visit Holbein: behind the portraits, which the ODNB has set up to complement Tate Britain’s exhibition Holbein in England. There are 35 biographies, freely available until January.

If you’re thinking of a trip to London to take in the Holbein exhibition, you might want to visit something very different while you’re there: Kinetica, the UK’s first kinetic art museum, has just opened its doors in Spitalfields. (Channel 4 news report, which may be Windows-only.)

For Americanists, the latest issue of Common-place is up.

Those interested in modern Irish history need to know about the County Waterford Image Archive, which has several thousand photographs dating from the 1890s.

And sad news for social historians: Arthur Marwick has died.

No, you are not.

Pour yourself your favourite drink, sit back and open this in a new window, ’cause it’s one to be savoured slowly and returned to regularly: Rob has posted History Carnival XL at Old is the New New.

The next host will be Jeremy Boggs at Clioweb on 15 October.

WANTED: Host for this month’s early modern Carnivalesque, preferably around the 3rd or 4th weekend of the month. If you’re interested, email: carnivalesque {at} earlymodernweb.org(.)uk

Yesterday’s Guardian has a review of Jenny Uglow’s biography of the engraver Thomas Bewick. A reminder that the paper version has its advantages: that one was illustrated with one of Bewick’s engravings, the Leicestershire Improved Breed from A general history of quadrupeds.

Bewick’s interests ranged far beyond portraits of prize livestock (as you can see in the History of Quadrupeds); but the genre was much in vogue from the late 18th century onwards and well into the 19th century, until prints and paintings were superseded by photography – matching, of course, the rise of livestock improvement and new breeds.

Fashions of the time dictated that size (no doubt contrasting with the general run of small, skinny, scrubby mongrels) was everything. Vast cattle, fat sheep and long pigs, all perfectly groomed and set against a backdrop of idyllic pastures, sometimes tended by equally well-groomed, smug yokels. No real sheep ever looked quite like this: the animal portrait was intended to advertise a breeder’s wares, and to romanticise too.

I love them.

Thomas Bewick
Bewick Society

Livestock in Art
A matter of good breeding
Farm animal portraits

UPDATE (15 Oct): Jenny Uglow on Bewick at the Guardian.