Early Modern Notes

Everybody’s (still) talking about Stephen Greenblatt’s book on Will Shakespeare…

Leonardo da Vinci gets some attention too…

And then there are the passions of Raphael…

Is there anything new to say about Horatio Nelson and Trafalgar? Apparently, yes…

Catch up on Arrival Day and Jewish history in America…

David Starkey gets mellow in his old age? Whatever next…

Or you could reflect on why campus novels are so much more interesting than the real thing…

Or be charmed by an interview with Philip Pullman…

.
Meanwhile, I’m galloping through Tamburlaine Must Die (liking it, but The Cutting Room was better), with some Minette Walters and Josephine Tey lined up to go… Or maybe I’ll be more serious and dip into The Spoken Word: Oral Culture in Britain 1500-1850…

And nearly forgot this article on the Scottish Enlightenment

Oxford University Press is pleased to announce plans to publish a major six-volume reference work entitled the African-American History Reference Series. The work’s nearly 2500 articles have been carefully selected by a distinguished group of editors and advisers and will cover all aspects of African-American history and culture… Far more than just a biographical survey, each volume focuses on the age, the times, the events, and the people who affected the life of the central figure (and who were in turn affected by that central figure) and the development of African-American history and culture during the period.

We are currently finishing up the assignment of entries for Volumes One and Two:

THE COLONIAL WORLD AND THE YOUNG NATION, Volume 1, edited by Graham Russell Hodges.

This volume focuses on the making of African American society in early America. The transition from Africa to America is covered as well as and the way an African presence shaped the development of American society…

THE WORLD OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS, Volume 2, edited by Paul Finkelman and L. Diane Barnes.

This volume covers the important events in African American history during the nineteenth century, spanning Douglass’s life…

These are the wanted topics of interest to early modernists:

Africa, Idea of (Vol. 1: 1619-1830), 2,000 words
Antiquity (Vol. 1: 1619-1830) 3,000 words
Demographics (Vol. 1: 1619-1830), 3,000 words
Economic Life (Vol. 1: 1619-1830), 3,000 words
Education (Vol. 1: 1619-1830), 4,000 words
Emancipation (Vol. 1: 1619-1830), 1,000 words
Folklore (Vol. 1: 1619-1830), 2,500 words
Language (Vol. 1: 1619-1830), 2,000 words
Oratory and Verbal Arts (Vol. 1: 1619-1830), 2,000 words
Segregation (Vol. 1: 1619-1830), 1,500 words
Slave Narratives (Vol. 1: 1619-1830), 2,000 words

There is a very tight deadline, 22 October 2004. The contact for those interested in contributing is Anthony Aiello at anthony.aiello@oup.com or 212-726-6144, who will provide further information if required. ("Please include a copy of your resume or CV in anyemail correspondence, and be prepared to do so if contacting Mr. Aiello by phone.")

I’ll also keep the original email in my inbox for a few days in case anybody would like me to forward a copy to them… (It has more detail about the contents and vulgar things like payment. And also the 19th-century topics, for anyone interested.)

Well, I put together a nice post of reviews last week and what happens a few days later? H-Albion sends out no less (no fewer?) than six interesting new reviews at the weekend.

Blown by the spirit: puritanism and the emergence of an antinomian underground in pre-Civil-War England
Print and protestantism in early modern England
Conquest and resistance: war in seventeenth-century Ireland
Republican learning: John Toland and the crisis of Christian culture, 1696-1722
The character of credit: personal debt in English culture, 1740-1914
The savage wars of peace

Crooked Timber, for one, beat me to linking to this piece in the Guardian’s Weekend magazine, an extract from a book by Tom Hodgkinson.

And Hodgkinson cites EP Thompson, which has to make it a winner for me. On the work patterns of artisan weavers before the coming of factory regulation: “The work pattern was one of alternate bouts of intense labour and of idleness.” And I thought, hey, that’s me! And academics everywhere! Thompson again: “The pattern persists among some self-employed - artists, writers, small farmers, and perhaps also with students [idlers, all] - today, and provokes the question of whether it is not a ‘natural’ human work-rhythm.”

Because the piece isn’t about lazing about doing nothing all the time, more of a challenge to the idea that we must work all the time - and that ‘thinking’ isn’t real work. ‘Idling’ frees us to think, to ponder, to wonder. This is a celebration of the lie-in: “Late rising is for the independent of mind, the individual who refuses to become a slave to work, money, ambition.” (I do a lot of my best thinking and writing in the mornings before I’ve properly ‘got up’, relaxed in bed or on the sofa in my pyjamas, nestled with my laptop.)

And this is just glorious:

René Descartes, in the 17th century, was similarly addicted to inactivity. Indeed, it was absolutely at the centre of his philosophy. When young and studying with the Jesuits, he was unable to get up in the morning. They would throw buckets of cold water over him and he would turn over and go back to sleep. Then, because of his obvious genius, he was granted the special privilege of getting up late. This was his modus operandi because, of course, when he was lying in bed he was thinking. It is easy to see how someone so inactive should conclude that the body and the mind are separate entities. Laziness produced Cartesian duality. For him, lying in bed and thinking was the very essence of being human: Cogito, ergo sum, or, in other words, I lie in bed thinking, therefore I am.

And idling is political too:

Idleness as a waste of time is a damaging notion put about by its spiritually vacant enemies. Introspection could lead to that terrible thing: a vision of the truth, a clear image of the horror of our fractured, dissonant world… Governments do not like the idle. The idle worry them. They do not manufacture useless objects nor consume the useless products of labour. They cannot be monitored. They are out of control.

Go and read the whole thing. To be savoured, languorously, in a prone position.

Top Ten books about Elizabeth I, from the Guardian. What an… interesting mixture. But shouldn’t there have been one serious biography in there somewhere?

Previous top tens from the G:

The Renaissance

Historical novels (Dorothy Dunnett at no. 1: now, I’m not arguing with that…)

Books on Shakespeare (except that they’re not all books on Shakespeare; several are more general early modern literary/cultural history. Whoever came up with the header here?)

Lost and threatened languages

Books from Wales

Fictional detectives

Yes, the BBC has the amazing, unexpected news on how publishers are using all kinds of tricks to get us to part with our money. And how everybody wants to be on the ‘3 for 2′ tables.

Me, I’ll be in the Oxfam bookshop again tomorrow to see what I can find for the train journey back to London on Tuesday. Although I’ve started re-reading the Dark Materials trilogy and remembered that I only got the third part out of the library, so maybe it’s time for some shiny new fiction after all. Perhaps I’ll wander over to Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind for some ideas…