Early Modern Notes

At last it’s official, and the work I started in Sheffield in 2006 (yikes!) is almost complete:

London Lives 1690-1800 is open for business.

There are more than 200,000 pages of manuscript material from parish, criminal justice and hospital records, transcribed and marked up for searching in the same way as the Old Bailey Proceedings Online. Plus the 18th-century Proceedings and Ordinary’s Accounts and a group of additional datasets.

The emphasis is on searching for people (although there is also a keyword search) and on nominal record linkage, to facilitate writing the biographies of ordinary and extraordinary 18th-century Londoners.

We’ve started some biographies for you. We’ve also written extensive background material and information about the project itself.

Oh, and next week we’re holding a conference at the University of Hertfordshire to mark the launch.

Do go and explore for yourselves.

Here is the latest early modern Carnivalesque, for the pick of the last couple of months’ early modern blogging. Thanks to those who sent in nominations; apologies to those who like witty themes and smart commentaries.

Cenotaphs
Airs, Waters, Places comments on John Weever’s book on Ancient Funerall Monuments (1631) and “the way he writes about the correlation between the location of the dead in the afterlife and the physical realisation of their memory in monument form in the world”.

Early Modern Gardens – Kenilworth Castle
The Gentleman Administrator draws attention to the social and political significance of early modern gardens by looking at the reconstructed Elizabethan pleasure garden at Kenilworth Castle, originally built by the Earl of Leicester for the visit of Queen Elizabeth in July 1575.

Vade Mecum
Bookn3rd has found some lovely digitised examples of these small manuscript handbooks of the medieval and early modern periods, which could contain a variety of medical and calendrical information.

Essayes of a prentise
Wynken de Worde highlights work from a student project on King James’s The Essayes of a prentise, in the divine art of poesie. The book is a collection of poems and translations in Scots dialect, and includes some luxuriously lovely poem layouts.

Casting Painting as One of the Liberal Arts
Notes on Early Modern Art looks at Johannes Vermeer’s ‘Allegory of Painting’ (c. 1667) which “seems to have expressed the artist’s desire to raise his own social status and that of painting as more than just manual labor”.

On the uses of newspapers, in and out of the classroom
Dave Mazella at Early Modern Online Bibliography considers the possibilities of using online collections of early modern newspapers in teaching students.

Collaborative Readings #3: Sayre N. Greenfield’s “ECCO-locating the Eighteenth Century”
Also at EMOB, Anna Battigelli discusses Greenfield’s essay on using ECCO as a research tool, “revealing both its possibilities and its current limitations” for text-mining early modern texts to trace specific cultural threads.

Some things memorably considerable in the conditions, Life and Death of the ever blessed and now eternally happy Mris Anne Bovves
Westminster Wisdom discusses this pamphlet (and its bad poetry), and concludes that its writer “is less interested in Anne than in Anne as an example of a religious life”.

Cromwell: the blog post of the book of the film
Investigations of a Dog is reading bad historical literature so you don’t have to; this time, it’s the novelization of the notoriously dodgy film Cromwell. Don’t miss the cover. It’s, er, striking.

Walker’s Office of Entries
Mercurius Politicus looks at a less well-known aspect of the life of the 17th-century pamphleteer and preacher Henry Walker, his entrepreneurial ‘Office of Entries’ “which seems to have functioned as a mixture of financial agent, employment agency, and bulletin board”.

John Lilburne – Abolitionist
Edward Vallance explores the appearance of Lilburne in the precedents brought by lawyers in Somerset’s Case of 1772. “In the eighteenth century, it seems to have been Lilburne’s punishment by Star Chamber in 1638, rather than his activities as a Leveller pamphleteer that were deemed worthy of attention.”

Nature’s Bias: Sex Testing
Early Modern Renaissance draws parallels between early modern and modern difficulties in establishing sexual identity.

Hystericon
The Quack Doctor discusses the ‘Hyſtericon’, an obscure 18th-century remedy, one amongst many, for the ‘Fits of the Mother’.

A London marriage gone sour, 1652
From Early Modern Whale, a news report of the suicide of a cuckolded husband.

Early Modern Underground has a series of posts on John Webster’s tragicomedy, A Cure for a Cuckold: part 1; part 2; part 3; part 4.

What on Earth?
Meanwhile, Ink and Incapability wants to know, “what on earth is going on with Shadwell’s The Libertine?” and concludes “this is totally the weirdest play I’ve ever read”.

‘I see dead people’s books’ at LibraryThing
Early Modern Intelligencer notes that LibraryThing now includes a number of famous dead people’s libraries, with early modern examples including Marie Antoinette, Thomas Jefferson and Mozart.

And finally, the Eastern Association is a treat that should not be missed.

The next Carnivalesque will be an ancient/medieval edition hosted by Bavardess sometime in the latter half of October, exact date to be confirmed. The next early modern Carnivalesque will be in November and needs a host – email sharon {at} earlymodernweb.org(.)uk if you’re willing and able!

Sad news: Patricia Crawford has died.

1. A complaint from the grand jury at the Middlesex Quarter Sessions, 7 April 1733:

We the Grand Inquest having from time to time Observed divers loose Idle and dissorderly Persons to Assemble in a certain place called Moorfields there behaving themselves in a very loose Idle and dissorderly manner by playing at Crickett tossing up half pence and in any other new invented wayes of Gaming Which we believe tends very much to the Depravation and Corruption of youth and Good manners And especially by Booths being Continually erected in Moorfields aforesaid Doe present the same as very great Grievances and hope this Court will [use?] such Methods to suppresse the same as they in their great Wisdoms shall think fitt

2. Eleven great songs about cricket (and more in the comments), inspired by Neil Hannon‘s new project The Duckworth Lewis Method. ‘Jiggery Pokery’: the best cricket song written from the perspective of Mike Gatting, ever. “How such a ball could be bowled I don’t know but, if you ask me, if it had been a cheese roll it would never have got past me”.

Back to work on Monday. Bah. Do not want. Apart from that, Happy New Year everyone!

Sarah Werner’s Wynken de Worde, a fine blog with an emphasis on early modern books and reading, has won the Cliopatria History Blogging Award for Best New Blog.

Mercurius Politicus has found some splendid manuscript, palaeography and book history resources. Manuscript sources are the next big growth area for digital early modernists, as digitizers work out that although it’s not that easy, it’s not that hard either.

But there are losses in digitization. Diapsalmata has been reading a special issue of Image and Narrative on Digital Archives, in which several articles engage with the relationship between digital humanities and the archive.

Whereas Ted Vallance has some thoughts on those quaint paper book thingummies in 2008. (His New Year’s resolution is to buy fewer rubbish books in 2009.)

Chris at the Virtual Stoa has a New Year’s Resolution I can really get behind. Eat more butter. Mmmmmmm.

Take a look at Google, January 2001. (H-T)

I was still a PhD student. I had a website, but it wasn’t at this domain and it was a bit rubbish. (All static HTML and barely a drop of CSS in sight! Here’s the granddaddy of today’s site, believe it or not; it looks even worse than it did then. For whatever reason the archive version isn’t loading the background image and so it’s showing the background color, which is clashing nastily with the header. Why I thought that bgcolor was a good idea is anybody’s guess.)

And I didn’t have an internet connection at home. (My grey brick of a laptop didn’t even have a modem.) Fortunately, the university facilities were pretty good. But how did I cope?

A search for early modern resources. Interesting to see what’s still going (although it might be at a different address these days) and what’s defunct or disappeared altogether.

(Which sorta reminds me of the really important piece of news this week: BÉRUBÉ’S BACK!!!)

The Department of Puritans Health has just come up with its official nine types of heavy drinker, blah blah blah.

From the Graun letters page today, spotting the remarkable similarities between their document and Richard Allestree’s 1659 The Whole Duty of Man, which identified the motives of “the multitudes of drunkards we have in the world”:

2008: “‘Border dependents’ regard the pub as a home from home”. 1659: Too obvious a point to need mentioning, since “an alehouse” was often a room in a neighbour’s home. 2008: “‘Community drinkers’ are motivated by the need to belong”. 1659: “Good-fellowship: one man drinks to keep another company at it”. 2008: “‘Re-bonding drinkers’ are driven by a need to keep in touch with people who are close to them”. 1659: “A second end of drinking is said to be the maintaining of friendship and kindness amongst men”. 2008: “‘Hedonistic drinkers’ crave stimulation and want to abandon control”. 1659: “A third end of drinking is said to be the chearing their spirits, making them merry and jolly”.

2008: “‘De-stress drinkers’ use alcohol to regain control of life and calm down”; “‘Depressed drinkers’ crave comfort, safety and security”. 1659: “A fourth end is said to be the putting away of cares”. 2008: “‘Boredom drinkers’ consume alcohol to pass the time”. 1659: “A fifth end is said to be the passing away of time”. 2008: “‘Conformist drinkers’ are driven by the need to belong”. 1659: “A sixth end is said to be the preventing of that reproach … cast on those that will in this be stricter than their neighbours”.

In 1659 Allestree has no direct parallel with today’s final category, “Macho drinkers”, but in 1660 the Royalists would be back, bringing libertines with them …

A toast or three is due to Kate Loveman, the author of the letter, methinks (ah hah: the culprit, if I’m not much mistaken).

1. CFP: Reading Conference in Early Modern Studies 2009

The next annual meeting of the Reading conference on early modern studies will be held on 6-8 July 2009, with an informal theme of ‘Authority and Authorities’. “The Reading conferences are as broadly based as possible, reflecting the most interesting developments in current research. Accordingly we welcome proposals for either complete sessions or individual papers from scholars in any discipline or any area of early modern studies, including Atlantic, European and imperial perspectives…” (Full details at the link.)

2. Guest bloggers wanted

Brandon Watson is looking for guest bloggers at his early modern history of philosophy blog Houyhnhnm Land; not necessarily history of philosophy specialists – “the posts have to be on some facet of early modern thought (or approaches thereto), but just about anything falling under that label would work. I’d love, for instance, to get historians of all kinds, literary scholars, and the like adding their two cents; I’d also love specialists from outside the early modern period looking at how later periods viewed the early modern period or how earlier periods prepared for it; and so forth.”

3. Carnivalesque and History Carnival hosts needed

I really, urgently need History Carnival hosts for November and December (1st of the month). Please email me as soon as possible if you could do one of these: sharon {at} earlymodernweb.org(.)uk.

A host is also needed for the November ancient/medieval edition Carnivalesque (same email address will do, or carnivalesque {at} earlymodernweb.org(.)uk).

Both carnivals will also need hosts next year, so if you’re too busy in the immediate future but might like to take one on later, get in touch.

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!

Ooh, a new English Civil War drama. (After all, it’s been a long, long time since By The Sword Divided.)

And Peter Capaldi as Charles I?!

I shall be hosting the next edition of Carnivalesque for all things early modern at this ‘ere blog, on or about 17 August.

Email your nominations to sharon {at} earlymodernweb.org(.)uk or use the sparkly new nomination form.

CSL Davies has an article in the TLS on ‘The Tudor delusion’. The argument is that ‘the Tudors’ and the people they governed did not themselves use the expression ‘the Tudors’ to describe the dynasty, let alone their society as a whole, and therefore: “We must learn to do without the Tudors”.*

Elsewhere in the article (ie, when he’s not going for a final-sentence rhetorical flourish) he seems to be arguing only the need to use the term with care, because you just can’t do history if you limit yourself to using the language of the people you study.

It is impossible to discuss, say, economic development meaningfully while only using language comprehensible to Shakespeare. But contemporary vocabulary imposed limitations on sixteenth-century people attempting to discuss economic affairs; their efforts to formulate even the straightforward connection between the quantity of money in circulation and price levels, for instance, were painfully slow. “Tudor” is a term too deeply entrenched to be banished from our vocabulary, but we should be aware that it, too, is an anachronism, creating a similar barrier to our understanding of contemporary thought.

Anachronisms are dangerous. But they’re often necessary and useful. The article is well worth reading.

—

* Well, in fact, as he notes further on in the article, some of the Tudors’ subjects did call them the Tudors. But they were the Welsh ones, so obviously they don’t count. /snark

Well, I was a little cryptic the other week, but tomorrow it all goes public (and we kind of expect it to crash at some point – I’ll be almost disappointed if it doesn’t…),* and today there is a pretty nice feature in the Observer.

[Monday update... creak... groan... thud... Sorry, folks. It should get back to normal in a day or two...]

So here it is: the Proceedings of the Old Bailey Online 1674-1834 is now the Proceedings of the Old Bailey and Central Criminal Court 1674-1913.

This doesn’t only mean that you can now search for 200,000 trials held at the Old Bailey over a period of 2 and a half centuries. The other new set of goodies is the full text of (almost) every Ordinary of Newgate’s Account between 1690 and 1772 (in the next few months this should expand to a full archive of every known surviving Account from c.1674 onwards).

I’ve written here before about these grimly fascinating pamphlets. They’ve been used by a number of historians, including Andrea Mackenzie and Peter Linebaugh, but the surviving pamphlets have been scattered across a number of different libraries and archives. From now on they’ll be together in one fully searchable digital archive. Plus, I’m in the process of completing a database that links every convict mentioned in the Accounts to their trial, providing it has a surviving report (perhaps 3/4 of the links have already been made).

This should make for some interesting research possibilities. For example, historians often argue that women who successfully ‘pleaded their bellies’, ie had their death sentence postponed on grounds of being pregnant, usually escaped hanging. In fact, we say that in our own background section. But I’m not so sure. Through the process of cross-referencing trials and Ordinary’s Accounts, I’ve already discovered several women whose sentences were respited for pregnancy but subsequently carried out (eg in September 1695. So what I’ll be asking (once I’ve finished making the damned links) is: how many were executed and how many were permanently reprieved? Have we historians been getting it wrong? Answering those questions wasn’t impossible before now, but it would have been extremely difficult. And there will, no doubt, be many more possibilities like this.

***

The other news, because I haven’t been plugging it enough and you’ve probably all forgotten, is that we’re holding a conference in July to celebrate the relaunch: The Metropolis on Trial, in the throbbing metropolis of… Milton Keynes. If you’d like to attend, registration is open and you can download a booking form at the website. If you want to book the accommodation we’ve arranged at discount rates, you need to send the form in by the end of May at the latest and preferably as soon as possible. There is a 2 person room sharing option which is really good value (if you’re skint and looking for someone to share with maybe we can put people in touch here – leave a note in comments).

***

Linkage…

(Note that old links will continue to work for a few months, and we may well set up proper redirection at some point.)

Old stuff on OBP at this blog: Old Bailey category and the Old Bailey Symposium.

Old Bailey Files at The Head Heeb.

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*Already this morning some searches have been very slow, which is not a good sign.

Last November, I dashed off a quick post about someone I’d encountered in an Ordinary’s Account: It’s Your Neck or Your Arm

On the evening before execution, a respite of 14 days was brought for George Chippendale, and to be continued, if within that time he shall submit to suffer the amputation of a limb, in order to try the efficacy of a new-invented styptic for stopping the blood-vessels, instead of the present more painful practice in such cases. For this indulgence, he, together with his brother and his uncle, had joined in a petition to his Majesty, and thankfully accepted it, appearing in good health and spirits, ready and chearful to undergo the experiment. (Ordinary’s Account, May 1763.)

Well, I got at least one important thing wrong, anyway. It wasn’t George’s arm that was, er, on the block. It was his leg.

How do I know this? Well, by sheer chance, a few weeks after I posted that, I got an email query at work, from a family historian who was searching for a George Clippingdale in the Old Bailey Proceedings. The problem was that the OBP reporters (unlike most other sources the researcher had consulted) spelt his surname Chippendale. (Spelling variations are not an uncommon problem in 18th-century sources, as I’ve mentioned here before.)

So, we got that sorted out, and that would normally have been the end of it. But then the researcher happened to mention that his George was reprieved from a death sentence because a surgeon wanted to use him in an experiment.

At which point, I thought ‘Hang on a minute… that sounds familiar’, and came over here and checked my earlier post. And it’s the same man!

Naturally, of course, I had to write back with a barrage of questions. And the researcher was kind and generous enough to send me his write-up of everything he’d found out about George – and to agree to let me tell you lot about it.

(But I warn you, there’s a sad ending.)

(more…)

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.

The criminals went to the place of execution in the following order, Morgan, Webb, and Wolf, in the first cart; Moore in a mourning coach; Wareham and Burk in the second cart; Tilley, Green, and Howell in the third; Lloyd on a sledge; on their arrival at Tyburn they were all put into one cart. They all behaved with seriousness and decency. Mary Green professed her innocence to the last moment of the fact for which she died, cleared Ann Basket, and accused the woman who lodged in the room where the fact was committed. As Judith Tilley appeared under terrible agonies, Mary Green applied herself to her, and said, do not be concerned at this death because it is shameful, for I hope God will have mercy upon our souls; Catharine Howell likewise appeared much dejected, trembled and was under very fearful apprehensions; all the rest seemed to observe an equal conduct, except Moore, who, when near dying, shed a flood of tears. In this manner they took their leave of this transitory life, and are gone to be disposed of as shall seem best pleasing to that all-wise Being who first gave them existence.*

In my research sources before I came to Sheffield, capital punishment appeared fairly infrequently, briefly and usually in the future tense: typically, the marginal note ‘suspendatur’ (abbreviated to sur’ or sr’), ‘to be hanged’. Even those terse notes of an event 300 years old, which quite possibly didn’t happen anyway (as many of those sentenced were reprieved), always disturbed me slightly.

I read the records of homicides and coroners’ inquests – murders, gruesome accidents, negligence and cruelty – and they are distressing and disturbing, yet they don’t evoke quite the same sense of culture shock as do the accounts of executions and ‘Last Dying Speeches’. We aren’t simply talking about the execution of murderers here: in the 18th century burglars, robbers, pickpockets, horse thieves, sheep- and cattle-rustlers, forgers and counterfeiters could all face slow, horrible deaths, in most cases public strangulation, and this was regarded by most people as perfectly normal and civilised. (Indeed, there were those who thought that hanging was not punishment enough.)

In my new job, I’ve spent some time reading Ordinary’s Accounts, which are one of the many sources we’re digitising. These are rich and fascinating sources, full of stories of the lives of common people. But they are also stories of death, and they give me the willies – not least because ordinary, decent, intelligent people in the 18th century had no problem with the idea of pickpockets, shoplifters, burglars, sheep rustlers, forgers and counterfeiters, receiving exactly the same punishment as murderers.

So, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of Andrea McKenzie, since she has written an entire, densely detailed book about the subject and the source: Tyburn’s Martyrs: Execution in England 1675-1775. She must be a tougher soul than me.

In fact, at the very beginning of the book she mentions some of the bemused reactions she received from people learning what her research topic was, including the gentleman who suggested that she should study “something pleasant, like great battles”. (more…)

The latest Carnivalesque is up at Serendipities, great work by Kristine. I haven’t had much time to peruse the carnival yet, but this list of 250+ killer digital libraries and archives looks like a stunning resource.

It’s the 300th [or 360th, or something] anniversary of a neglected landmark in British democratic history, the Putney Debates of 1647. Yes, it’s all very Grauniad, and Tristram Hunt gets awfully excited about it, but don’t let that put you off.

Alternatively, you could try the official fan website of Charles II…

It’s just a surprise it’s taken this long.

BBC4 is screening a new version of Fanny Hill; adaptation by – well, who else could it be? – Andrew Davies.

Some days, there you are in the archives wondering if it’s time to go home yet (for the 20th time since the coffee break), and then you turn a page and you get something to make you fall off your chair. Even though (for once…) nobody died.

It starts with a letter from a Flintshire JP, Thomas Hanmer, to the Chief Justice of Chester, Sir Richard Lewkenor, who’s about to open proceedings at the October 1607 Great Sessions in Denbighshire.

Now, it seems that a certain William Jones, a surgeon of Chirk (Denbighshire), has been bound over to appear at the Great Sessions (I don’t know what for yet; I’ll see if I can find out later). But Hanmer’s letter is about an apparently unrelated matter in Flintshire.

Jones, says Hanmer, “did undertake the dismembring of a foote from a poore woeman” in Hanmer (in Flintshire), which was paid for by the charity of a number of local people. But “ymediatlye after the finishinge of the said cure the said Johnes gotte the poore woeman wth child, whereof not long since she hath byne delivered”.

Then we have the petition of the woman herself, Elinor Evans of Hanmer, with a fuller version of the story. It really doesn’t get any better. (more…)

I haven’t actually read Jacques Derrida’s Archive fever (Mal d’archive). But I have read Carolyn Steedman’s Dust, which mentions it (and I think this was at the back of my mind when I began to type the title for my posts about this summer’s research). For Derrida, if I have Steedman right, Archive Fever is really a kind of desire: “the desire to recover moments of inception: to find and possess all sorts of beginnings”… (Steedman, p. 5)

But Steedman takes us into other possible manifestations of Archive Fever.

Typically, the fever – more accurately, the precursor fever – starts in the early hours of the morning, in the bed of a cheap hotel, where the historian cannot get to sleep. You cannot get to sleep because you lie so narrowly, in an attempt to avoid contact with anything that isn’t shielded by sheets and pillowcases. The first sign then, is an excessive attention to the bed, an irresistible anxiety about the hundreds who have slept there before you, leaving their dust and fibres in the fibres of the blankets… (p. 17)

(Oh, that passage brought flooding back the memories of a place where I stayed a few years ago. The problem was not wondering about previous human occupants of the bed, though. It was the much smaller occupants that were still there that were the trouble. I still don’t know precisely what they were, but either they or something else in the bed brought me out in hives, something I’ve never experienced before or since. So, no, I did not get too much sleep.)

Or the feverish anxiety of the penultimate day in the record office:

You know you will not finish, that there will be something left unread, unnoted, untranscribed. You are not anxious about the Great Unfinished, knowledge of which is the very condition of your being there in the first place, and of the grubby trade you set out in, years ago. You know perfectly well that the infinite heaps of things they recorded, the notes and traces that these people left behind, constitute practically nothing at all… Your anxiety is more precise, and more prosaic. It’s about PT S2/1/1, which only arrived from the stacks that afternoon, which is enormous, and which you will never get through tomorrow. (p.18)

Or even the possibility of real, actual fever. It is not particularly reassuring to learn that the archive could be seriously bad for your health (anthrax-related meningitis?!). Exaggeration? Yet I already know that archives (pre-20th-century, anyway) make you sneeze. And that those old papers and parchments leave their black marks on your fingers (unless you bag yourself some gloves) and your clothes (don’t wear white in an archive. There are smudgy blackish fingerprints on my silvery laptop, too). You watch the dust rise; you mark the passing of the researcher by the little scattering of fragments of fragile paper and rotting leather and red sealing wax (those 400-year-old seals on legal documents are often simply crumbling away).

There is always someone just across from you who has a cold, which you hope fervently that you won’t catch this time. And you get the headaches that come from squinting at near-illegible handwriting… and let’s not start on the backache, often helped along by badly designed chairs. Plus, why is it that archives are either freezing cold (good for the documents, but not so much for the humans) or hot and stuffy (the budget didn’t stretch to decent airconditioning, but it did cover all those new computer terminals blowing out hot air… NLW, I’m talking to you here)?

Still, at least this summer I’m at home for my sickness. My own bed and food, no travelling, just a nice brisk walk up the hill (I hated the commuting to the PRO last year!) to settle at a desk and continue the love-hate relationship with what I do.

I say love-hate because it’s an experience of extremes: it swings between utter boredom and an overwhelming desire to pack it in NOW (several times a day, usually), to the rising excitement of the latest find – it can be something entirely unexpected, or corroboration of something you’ve already begun to suspect, or funny, or sad. But it’s never just so-so, never just another job. If it were, who’d put up with all the discomforts and the frustrations and the crappy bits?

And back to Steedman’s book, which is one that should be read by all historians. And since I have work to get back to today (but a little break from the archives; I have to get on with working on some future teaching materials and planning future courses to impress potential employers next year), I’ll just let her sign off for me.

And nothing starts in the Archive, nothing, ever at all, though things certainly end up there. You find nothing in the Archive but stories caught half way through: the middle of things; discontinuities. (p.45)

(I wish I’d remembered that quote when I was posting about disputes over livestock the other week…)

But in actual Archives, though the bundles may be mountainous, there isn’t in fact, very much there. [...] The Archive is made from selected and consciously chosen documentation from the past and also from the mad fragmentations that no one intended to preserve and just ended up there. [...]

The modern European public archive came into being in order to solidify and memorialise first monarchical and then state power. [...] These are the origins of a prosaic place where the written and fragmentary traces of the past are put in boxes and folders, bound up, stored, catalogued …

And: the Archive is also a place of dreams. [...]

To enter that place where the past lives, where ink on parchment can be made to speak, still remains the social historian’s dream, of bringing to life those who do not for the main part exist, not even between the lines of state papers and legal documents, who are not really present, not even in the records of Revolutionary bodies and fractions. (pp.68-70)

***

Originally posted June 2005