Early Modern Notes

I have been known to say a few words about people who don’t really understand blogging presuming to hand down blogging commandments. (Let’s not even get started on the frauds popping up everywhere to tell us ‘How to Make Shitloads of Money from Blogging with My Ten Brilliant Commandments that No One Ever Thought of Before’.)

Thoughtful reflections coming out of long experience of reading blogs are another matter, so I like this list of What Makes for a Good Blog. Especially perhaps this one:

Good blogs reflect focused obsessions. People start real blogs because they think about something a lot. Maybe even five things. But, their brain so overflows with curiosity about a family of topics that they can’t stop reading and writing about it. They make and consume smart forebrain porn. So: where do this person’s obsessions take them?

(H-T.)

Welcome to the 42nd edition of Carnivalesque, a summer special for everything early modern. Many thanks for all your nominations!

Research (or, the Holy Grail)

Gavin Robinson has been investigating saddlers’ wills. You might at first think this a dry and narrow subject, but it got more nominations than any other post, and I recommend reading it to find out why. As Gavin notes, early modern wills can tell us a lot about people’s lives and family relationships, not just their property. William Deacon’s will provides us some insight into his marital relations, perhaps: he instructed his executors to make sure that his wife didn’t embezzle anything from his estate. Or there was William Chevall, who left his niece just one shilling because she had got married without his consent. (Bonus links: a few useful resources, 1, 2, 3.)

At Mercurius Politicus, Nick posts a series on The Pamphlet War Between John Taylor and Henry Walker (2, 3, 4, 5), based on a paper presented to the Birkbeck Early Modern Society in July. He examines in detail the two writers, the texts, the readers and the publishers, to illuminate the sophistication and complexity of the pamplet wars of the 1640s.

Politics, religion and war

Well, if it’s the seventeenth century, we’re never far from religion, politics and bloodshed. Executed Today visits Prague’s ‘Day of Blood’. On 21 June 1621 ‘the Habsburg crown took 27 nobles’ heads in Prague’s Old Town Square for attempting to lead Bohemia to independence’; merely the beginning of far more widespread death and destruction, the Bohemian Revolt sparked off what is commonly known as the Thirty Years’ War.

In ‘It is good for me that I have been afflicted’, Dave Noon discusses the assassination of Metacom, aka King Philip, on 12 August 1676 and the brutal war that bears his name. For the English colonists, the war was a test sent by God, and their eventual victory a sign of His blessing. (Bonus link: Mary Rowlandson’s Narrative.)

Gracchii explores and contextualises the Plot against Pepys, at Westminster Wisdom. Between 1679 and 1681 (and perhaps there has never been a more fertile moment in British history for plots and paranoia, accusations and counter-accusations), Samuel Pepys was accused of transmitting secret plans to France and threatened with execution; he survived because he was able to discredit his accuser. (Pepys the blogger.)

K at Musings and Imaginings has been pondering The Book of Martyrs. She notes that many of the authors on Jesuit missions to England in the 16th and early 17th centuries and the Gunpowder Plot are sympathetic towards the Jesuits and concludes that it’s largely to do with the widespread appeal of martyrdom and self-sacrifice.

Debunkers and awkward buggers

David Rundle asks When was the Renaissance? He uses a visit to a recent exhibition on the art of ‘the renaissance’ as a springboard for a thoughtful discussion of the artificial and not entirely helpful academic divide between ‘medieval’ and ‘early modern’, and the need to be aware that ‘Renaissance’ is an invented concept that can obscure as much as it illuminates. ‘In short, it is tidier to have a Renaissance confined to the sixteenth century and certainly less complicated to imagine it was a single phenomenon which manifested itself across Europe. But, in this case, I am on the side of messiness.’

Bill Poser at Language Log argues that it’s wrong to view Sir William Jones (wikipedia entry, if you’ve never heard of him) ‘the discoverer of the Indo-European language family and founder of modern historical linguistics’ for two reasons: he wasn’t the first to recognise a relationship between the languages, and he didn’t use the comparative method. An interesting discussion ensues.

Recreations

John Fea (Religion in American History) is impressed by the integration of religion into the presentation of the living history musem, Colonial Williamsburg. (The museum site.)

At Philobiblon Natalie Bennett posts some reflections on Marlowe, Shakespeare and imagination, after reading History Play: The Lives and Afterlife of Christopher Marlowe, by Rodney Bolt. This sounds entertaining: of all those daft-as-a-brush Shakespeare-wasn’t-really-Shakespeare conspiracy theories, one of my personal favourites is the Marlowe-didn’t-really-die scenario. (To be continued)

Writers and Readers

At Serendipities, Kristine Steenbergh reviews Katherine Craik’s Reading sensations in early modern England (2007), in which the history of reading and the history of the body are sensuously combined. The book argues that ‘reading in early modern England was a bodily, material experience. In its pages, readers can be found licking the sweet juice of stinking books, being tickled with sugared rhetoric, softened or sharpened by words, pricked or pierced by sermons, or stirred and inflamed by poetry’. It was believed that love poetry was effeminising, while warlike words could stir manly courage.

Sarah Werner (Wynken de Worde) compares modern and early modern information overload. The printing press seemed to contemporaries to unleash an overabundance of books in which useful knowledge would be lost; readers responded by developing reading and note-taking strategies to cope with the flood of information.

Roy Booth is investigating an early modern plagiary. A 1652 pamphlet on the ‘Black Monday’ eclipse, attributed to Isabel Yeamans, turns out to be plagiarized from a treatise by Nicholas Culpepper. Moreover, ‘Isabel Yeamans’ didn’t exist until Isabel Fell got married in 1664.

Michael Sisk looks at the fall and rise of metaphysical poetry at Campus Mentis.

Returning to the Shakespeare authorship ‘controversy’, Bardiac discussed this issue in a series of posts: 1, 2, 3 and 4. (Please note: You are very welcome to comment and tell me that I should take your particular Shakespeare pet conspiracy theory seriously. But if you do I will take the piss out of you. Don’t say you weren’t warned.)

Brief notices

Fun and Games! Never mind the Olympics, Bardolph brings us news of the Cotswold Games and ‘the lost sport of erecting castles on little plinthes’. And Edward Vallance reports on the Age of Intrigue, an online RPG based in the Restoration period.

Archaeologists may have found the remains of Shakespeare’s original playhouse in Shoreditch

Tilman Riemenschneider (1460-1531) was a specialist in limewood sculpture, including exquisitely carved altars.

Erly Mdn Txtspk. No, rly.

Bad news for Shakespeare readers: the Arden Shakespeare Controversy.

Well, that will do for today, because I haven’t had lunch yet and I’m hungry. I hope you enjoyed it and that you found something here that you haven’t already seen… And if I missed anything you think I should have included, you know where the comment section is, right?

The next early modern edition will be in October and as ever, we need hosts!

There seem to be two distinct kinds of blogs with highly active comment threads.

type 1: people write comments
type 2: people read other people’s comments and then write comments

You know the first type: full of people who clearly haven’t bothered to read what anyone else said before they rush to the comment box, because they repeat exactly the same moronic/inaccurate assertion that has been made, and answered/corrected, several dozen times already.

Hmm. We need technology that would recognise the duplicated comments and give the offenders an electric shock through their computer. That’d learn ‘em.

For fans of the History Carnival and Del.icio.us:

You can now nominate posts for the carnival by simply bookmarking and tagging them with historycarnival. They’ll appear on a special Carnival Uncooked page, to be reviewed by the upcoming host.

(This is thanks to an idea suggested to me a very long time ago by, I think, Alun Salt (apparently not) or maybe Jeremy Boggs??? - with apologies for taking so long to take it up that I can’t be sure who it was now. If you were that person, let me know…)

I forgot about my fourth blogiversary in June. My fourth anniversary at this location (and using WordPress) comes up at the end of July.

Some things hardly seem to have changed at all. There were presidential elections that year too. We’ll have to hope for a better result this time around.

Other things have changed a lot. So many blogs I loved in 2004 that no longer exist or are quite different now.

And there were a lot of history blogs that started up around the same time as me: happy 4th birthday to all of you who’re still plugging away!

So, is there anyone still reading who’s been here right from the beginning? (Can’t say I would blame you if you’d got bored by now…)

This list of The Top 100 Liberal Arts Professor Blogs has been getting linked around.

I’m not sure why. It is a pile of stinking poo.

1. Basic errors. It lists ‘Another Damned Medievalist’ as an ‘English’ blog. I think ADM will be surprised to discover that she’s been relocated to the English department when she gets back from her London research trip. She would probably also want to point out that her blog is in fact called Blogenspiel (ADM is her handle).

2. A number of the blogs listed are inactive. Miriam Jones’s original scribblingwoman blog has been defunct for some time; Miriam now has a newer blog elsewhere. The English Eclectic hasn’t been updated since December 2007 (and was never very prolific, that I can recall; and, although it was quite a nice little blog, there are more than 100 blogs that are better). These are just ones I know about. The most recent post at a blog is at the very top of the front page, for god’s sake; it takes a split second to discover that no one’s been at home for months.

3. Crappy conceptualisation. 30 of the blogs are under the heading ‘English’. That appears to mean ‘in an English department’ (except when they’re not: see 1 above). This is in contrast to otherwise mostly specific discipline headings such as ’sociology’, ‘history’, ‘philosophy’, etc. ‘English’ is not terribly helpful or meaningful, given the breadth of interests you can find in English departments. They also seem to have failed to grasp the concept of a group blog populated by members of different disciplines: Crooked Timber is listed under Philosophy. Which isn’t entirely wrong but doesn’t do CT’s range of interests any justice.

4. ‘Professor’ blogs? Some of the best ‘liberal arts’ blogs I know are not written by academic staff, but by postgrad students. There is something just not right about a list of academic blogs that (by definition) excludes blogs like Acephalous and Airminded. (I won’t pick on the UScentricness of the terminology since the site is primarily aimed at that market. Non-US readers should be aware, though, that ‘Liberal Arts’ has a particular meaning, which isn’t the same as ‘Arts’; and ‘professor’ in US universities refers to any member of faculty, not just the most senior people.)

5. I don’t want to get too much into inevitably subjective judgments about the quality of the blogs listed and what should be in and what should be out, but it is being presented as a serious ‘reviews and ratings’ site, not just personal opinions, so I will say: anyone who thinks those 10 history blogs are the top 10 in the blogosphere, even if you only include ‘professors’, is an ignoramus.*

6. And a final thing: the list in fact contains 101 entries, not 100. (There are two blogs listed under 73.) So they can’t count or correctly format an ordered list either.

I’m not fond of lists like this at the best of times, but I think this has to be the most incompetently conceived, sloppily executed, downright utterly worthless effort I have seen in four years of blogging. Now will people stop linking to it as though it might be a useful resource, please?**

***

*I’ve just realised that could be ambiguous. I don’t mean that all of the 10 are unworthy of being in such a list. A few definitely should be in anybody’s top 10. Several, however, are simply not in that sort of league.

**And before you say anything, I’ve added rel=nofollow to the link at the top. They ain’t gettin’ no pagerank from me.

Moan for the Day: I really am increasingly irritated by all the widgets and multimedia and embedded video and crap that gets added to blogs, which all tend in one direction: the blog takes longer and longer to load and hogs more and more CPU (and battery) once it’s loaded. It is not, to my mind, a good sign when a blog sends my laptop fan into overdrive dealing with a load of stuff loading in the sidebars that I have no interest in reading and youtube videos I can’t be arsed to watch. Just because you can add all that stuff doesn’t necessarily mean you should.

(It was much better in the good old days when blogs were all lean and light and it was about the fighting writing. Obviously.)

Update: I’ve upgraded to the new Lean Mean Firefox 3 Machine, which should by all accounts solve a lot of these problems. But that isn’t meant to encourage you widgety buggers, OK?

There are millions of people blogging. The NY Times appears to be surprised to discover that some of them take it to extremes. Or the NY Times thinks it can get a cheap story out of some of them taking it to extremes. You choose.

In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop.

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic. There is also no certainty that the stress of the work contributed to their deaths. But friends and family of the deceased, and fellow information workers, say those deaths have them thinking about the dangers of their work style.

‘The premature demise of two people does not qualify as an epidemic’? This is a serious newspaper? ‘Death by blogging’, that’s a good one too.

This response seems appropriately respectful.

(the source)

Ari asks: who’s the most important historical figure about whom most people know nothing? (Hat-tip: popping up all over the place, but as teofilo notes below, there’s a good discussion going on at Unfogged. Unless they’ve moved onto the cock jokes by now.)

The emphasis in blogs I’ve seen so far tends to be American and modern - what do the medievalists and early modernists think?

I think I’m going to be bloody-minded and nominate Edward Bushel.

Embedded audio file. With no stop button. (That I can find.)

You can stick that right where the sun don’t shine.

Think there are no ads on your blog? Absolutely sure?

This is amazingly sneaky. But quite clever.

Did you take the Blog Readability Test and paste the HTML code into your blog? It displays a cute image using an img tag. I’ve seen it on quite a few blogs recently. But…

But what happens if the image can’t be served? Ah, then of course the image defaults to its ALT. And what would that be?

“alt=”cash advance” Get a Cash Advance.”

And the linked URL for “cash advance”: cashadvance1500.com - owned, it seems, by .. someone who doesn’t want you to know who they are (it’s all obscured by proxies. Which all the best financial companies do, of course.) …

Now, what happens if the Blog Readability site goes offline, or stops serving its pictures? Loads of people suddenly have adverts for cashadvance1500 on their site.

And I reckon the Blog Readability test is completely random nonsense anyway. I tried it a couple of weeks ago and got ‘postgrad’. Today it’s ‘high school student’. I’ve posted a handful of times in that period. I don’t think the reading level has changed that much in that time, do you?

But if you particularly like the little picture and want to keep it, I suggest you delete that alt text and link. Unless you really want to advertise dodgy money lenders for nothing. And you’d better start being careful with those HTML snippets you get from Internet quizzes and the like, because I doubt it’ll be the last time we see stuff like this.

For those interested in the British Civil Wars, a symposium is being held next July in Hull.

In a lecture delivered to the Royal Historical Society in December 1983, John Morrill concluded with the observation that ‘The English civil war was not the first European revolution: it was the last of the wars of religion’. … This symposium aims to recognise the importance of Morrill’s interpretation, and to move it forward with reference to scholarship on political and religious thought that has emerged since 1983. While it will be partly concerned with the period of the 1640s, it also aims to draw out elements of the links and tensions between politics and religion that define the long seventeenth century. Central to the symposium will be a critical engagement with Morrill’s original argument: in what ways is it still persuasive, and in what areas might it be revised?

But what really struck me was that the organisers are using a Wordpress.com blog as a website for the symposium. A smart idea: it’s free and not dependent on a university department’s web space, so interesting material can be left up afterwards for as long as you want; it’s simple to set up and can be used to post news and information about the event quickly and easily (with RSS feeds, of course), as well as paper abstracts and even copies of the papers themselves for pre-circulation (though that’s not something we do that much in history usually…). And then, think about the possibilities for discussions with people who can’t actually attend the event. And podcasts! And…

It’s a really obvious thing to do with a blog, when you think about it, isn’t it?

Update: And so, of course… I have to have one too, don’t I?

The Cliopatria Awards are open closed for nominations!

They are intended to recognize the best history writing in the blogosphere in the last year. There will be awards in six categories:

* Best Group Blog
* Best Individual Blog
* Best New Blog
* Best Post
* Best Series of Posts
* Best Writer

Nominations close Midnight EDT on Friday 30 November (5am 1 December GMT). Get your nominations in now!

Full disclosure: I’m heading up one of the judging panels. (All bribes gratefully received.)

It’s argued that that computer literacy in schools should mean more than word processing. (And the kids are well ahead of the schools.) What would a digitally literate UK entail?

There are four million bloggers in the UK. (Recently, I confess, I’ve been feeling a bit ambivalent about the unstoppable march of The Blog. OK, I was never quite one of those blog evangelists whose mantra was: EVERYONE MUST BLOG!! It was more like Wow! Isn’t this exciting! Think of the possibilities! And then everyone did. It was fun in 2005 being the Brave Band of Beleaguered Bloggers vs the Doubting Tribbles and the Establishment. Now the Establishment has not only a blog but also a Facebook profile and an eye-torturing MySpace page. Harrumph.)

New book arrived today.

Update: the foreword is a bit of a hoot. As is A Mormon and His Wives Dancing to the Devil’s Tune (p.64). It’s fun just opening pages at random to see what happens.

Mr H. at Giornale Nuovo is shutting up shop.

Stephen Fry: Gadget Boy. Luvvies must blog!

I think I’ve written scathingly before about “blogging commandments”. (But I can’t be arsed to look it up.) It’s as though there are people who feel compelled to try to impose their own petty tight-arsed order on the glorious chaos and anarchy that is commonly known as the blogosphere (and who, moreover, always seem to value quantity of traffic over quality of content) with stuff like:

* You must blog often. (Have they never heard of RSS feeds?)

* You must write short posts. (Have they never heard of Tim Burke?)

* You must stick to a topic. (Have they never… oh, nevermind.)

So these (belatedly-discovered) twenty blogging commandments were refreshing as well as funny. Highlights:

1. Yea as you walk in the Shadow of the Valley of Ideas which come not, post ye not for its own Sake, for it is better to have a Week with no Posts than an array of seven Posts about Naught.

2. Compare ye not with other Bloggers; just as their Truth is not your Truth, their Format is not your Format.

5. Therein will ye uncover this simple Truth should ye search for it: it matters not the Size of thy Flock, nor how often they attend thy Sermons; it is in the Care ye show for them, and they for you, that is foremost.

6. Therefore I verily say unto thee, focus ye not on the Number of those reading your Blog, but on the Content to be written therein.

11. Though ye may be of the Opinion that certain Ideas and Posts of other Bloggers be the product of a deranged Mind, be ye kind: lead yourself not into the Temptation of entering the Realm of flame Warfare, for what is written on their Blog in Rage and Fury can return to bite thee in the nether regions.

15. And though ye may enjoy great Amusement and Merrymaking in crafting your favourite Post, be ye not crestfallen should ye discover it quickly lost in the Mists of Time. Just as the News printed yesterday be used today for lining the Cages of Birds and carrying home from Market the Fishes of the Sea, so too will these Posts dwell in the Realm of the Forgotten Blog Posts forever.

19. These Truths are not set in Stone, but pixelated Dust, and will change as surely as the Tide will ebb and flow and the Multitudes will swoon over another Fit of Hissy by the Paris Hilton of Babylon.

Amen.

From the Guardian’s media blog:

Before Dumped it had never really occurred to me that when you throw something away it actually goes somewhere.

It made me feel suddenly very very tired.

(Yep, Channel 4 is running a show about rubbish [AmEng: trash]. Stop laughing at the back.)