Early Modern Notes

At the Old Bailey Online we have a pot of money to carry out an analysis of site users and add some enhancements to the site particularly aimed at academic researchers and teachers. The project runs until next March (more info here).

As part of this, we’ve posted a short online survey. If you’ve used Old Bailey Online for research or teaching, even if not very often, please fill in the survey – it shouldn’t take more than about 10 minutes and it will help us to decide how best to make use of the funding (and to set future priorities).

Greetings! Here is the latest early modern Carnivalesque for your Sunday reading.

Historiography and methods

Wynken de Worde is building a syallabus for early modern book history

David Rundle examines responses (or non-responses) to claims of plagiarism in The Unacceptable Face of The English Face of Machiavelli?

Early Modern Online Bibliography has a discussion of Exploring reception history in Women Writers Online

Cultures: literary, visual, musical

Ptak has a fascinating post on ‘the overall full-body indexes, the general NYC subway map-like overlays on the entire body’: Mapping Humans, 1400-1759: Bloodletting, Moles, Bumps and the Stars.

At Bibliodyssey, you can gawp at the astonishingly beautiful Ottheinrich Bible, begun in the early 15th century and completed in the 16th.

Three Pipe Problem attempts to Unravel Giorgione’s ‘The Tempest’ (c.1505), and leans toward the theory of Waldemar Januszczak. Alberti’s Window, on the other hand, can’t find a satisfactory interpretation of the painting.

The History Woman is highly impressed by the V&A’s exhibition of Raphael’s Cartoons and Tapestries for the Sistine Chapel (though less impressed by the V&A’s admission policy).

Atrium Musicologicum surveys 16th-century music: The Spirit of the Renaissance .

Serendipities reviews ‘Printed images and the Reformation’ in Printed Images in Early Modern Britain (ed. by Michael Hunter, Ashgate, 2010).

Bibliodyssey is enchanted by Robert Fludd’s Temple of Music.

Gilbert Mabbot finds a 17th-century print Creepy. Indeed!

Whitney Trettien muses on A Blank Poem (1723); or, the Present of Absence: ‘…in short, blankness is sarcasm; it signifies the nothingness and “No Body” of what it’s supposed to celebrate.’

Of science and nature

William Eamon examines The Renaissance Curioso: ‘What did it mean to be a curious person in the Renaissance?’

Adrian Teal (guest posting at Dainty Ballerina) discusses Hops, Hogsheads and Horsepower, A Highly-Selective History of Beer. Mmm, beer…

Women in Medieval and Early Modern History has some Weird Science: Sex and Reproductive Knowledge in the Early Seventeenth Century, when pregnancy was still the subject of much uncertainty and strange beliefs.

Predicting the weather in the 17th century: A sign of great heat to follow (from Airs, Waters, Places) and If Mists arise out of Ponds (Dainty Ballerina).

Dainty Ballerina also brought us Strange news from the Deep, a mid 17th century account of a whale stranded in Essex (and this story of a 17th-century whale skeleton in London was in the news).

The Renaissance Mathematicus examines the life and work of the observational astronomer John Flamsteed (1646-1719) in Return of the stamp collector.

The Royal Society’s History of Science blog explores What scientists want: Robert Boyle’s to-do list.

Wonders and Marvels has a guest post by Jennifer Ouellette on Dangerous Curves: Maria Gaetana Agnesi, 18th-century polyglot, mathematician and nun.

The Artist’s Progress examines responses to the proposal of a Dog Tax in 1796. (It didn’t go down well.)

Jonathan Dresner examines The Lead Poisoning Thesis in Imperial Japan.

Crime and punishment

Executed Today looks at the hanging of Antonio Rinaldeschi, bad gambler for sacrilege in 1501: ‘passing an image of Holy Mother at the piazza Santa Maria de Alberighi, he gathered up some nearby dung and flung it at the sacred pic’.

Early Modern Whale surveys Thomas Barton’s ‘Brief Relation’ of the life and death of Thomas’s brother William, who was hanged for murder in 1661.

From the Hands of Quacks has begun a series of posts on The Criminalized Body: this one focuses on the 1752 Murder Act and public dissections in 18th-century Britain.

Early American Crime has the story of Thomas Mount (ex. for burglary in 1791) and the Flash Company.

Georgian London looks at Jeremy Bentham’s ideas for penal reform in The Birth of the Surveillance Society

Politics and people

Chaos Bogey has a digression on The Step Between covers Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell, sixteenth-century politics and the power of queens.

The National Library of Scotland’s Rare Books blog discusses Patrick Hamilton and the beginning of the Scottish Reformation.

Executed Today considers Anthony Babington‘s plot and execution in 1586.

Early Modern History quotes Clarendon on Sir John Coke (1563-1644), Charles I’s Secretary of State 1625-1640.

Mercurius Politicus notes an account of a curious portrait of Oliver Cromwell in It is I.

The Gentleman Administrator stalks Charles II during his exile in Jersey.

Boston 1775 goes in search of “One Dewksbury Who Lives about 4 Miles from You”, who (if anyone managed to find him) belonged to George Washington’s early intelligence network.

Vast Public Indifference traces a picture of the die-hard Whig family of The Littlest Martyr, Charles Pratt Marston, who died during the Boston siege of 1775-6.

The Artist’s Progress uncovers The Many Guises of Marie Antoinette in French caricature ‘from the first rustlings of revolution to her execution in 1793′.

And that’s it folks! Hope you enjoyed it…

Many thanks to Nandini Ramachandran, Jason of Executed Today, Nick Poyntz, William Eamon and Jonathan Dresner for sending in nominations. And apologies to the latter two, whose emails I managed to overlook in my inbox until after posting because I put them in the wrong folder.

*******

Don’t forget the History Carnival is coming soon, at Notes from the Field on 1 October – please send your nominations of the best history blogging since 1 August.

This month is Carnivalesque’s sixth birthday, not to mention its 66th edition, which seems as good an excuse as any to bring it back where it started (well, apart from a small change of address. Bear with me here). So, I’ll be hosting here on about the 25th.

Send in your nominations for the best early modern blogging of the last couple of months via the nomination form or email sharon {at} earlymodernweb.org(.)uk.

… strangely, much the same as the old place!

(Except that you’ll need to change the address in your feed reader…)

Tuesday 7 September was the first anniversary of the founding of the twitterstorians’ list by Katrina Gulliver. I couldn’t mark the day because I was away from home and struggling with slow and unreliable internet access for most of the week, but I wanted to post something anyway, and it gave me a few days to mull over my thoughts.

I joined Twitter in June 2009, and wouldn’t change any of my reasons for doing so:

And yet, what is Twitter if not another manifestation of the adaptability of the blog as a medium of communication? … Twitter’s genius is not the 140 characters. It’s the hash key. Oh, and the @. Tagging rocks, and metadata rules our world, baby.

But that doesn’t begin to cover what I’ve learned about Twitter in the course of using it, and being put in touch with so many historians via #twitterstorians. As someone who was around when academic blogging started to really take off five or six years ago, it’s striking how many complaints about Twitter – narcissistic, shallow, trivial – echo, in even more extreme forms, what used to be said about blogging then (but which you don’t hear so much now that blogging has become so ubiquitous even in the mainstream media. Funny, that…).

After all, Twitter as a form of blogging (‘micro-blogging’) takes certain aspects of the medium, brevity, rapidity and ephemerality, to new extremes. But Twitter doesn’t just shorten posts and move things along quicker. The single most significant difference, I think, is the way in which it removes the familiar blog structure of “post” and “comments”, and simply sweeps away the hierarchy of “blogger” and “commenter”. All tweets are equal. Getting started on Twitter is even simpler and more inviting than starting a blog.

Add to that the ease of finding and following other people and (crucially) making them aware of your existence: it’s easy to take for granted those automated emails when you follow people and the simple effectiveness of the @ and RT and the hashtag (I confess I didn’t immediately get the point of the RT: so I asked Twitter, of course, and it was gently explained to me). The nearest comparable tools available to bloggers were the damnably unreliable tools of pings and trackbacks (ah, you Twitter kids don’t know you’re born…).

The cumulative effect is that Twitter facilitates the networking and linking and community-building elements of blogging to a far greater degree, more effectively and rapidly, than blogs were able to do (so much so that, yes, it can become slightly overwhelming). Much of what is said on Twitter, far from being ‘narcissistic’, refers and/or links to something happening elsewhere. Blogs and twitter networks complement each other; 140 characters is more than enough for a (shortened, of course) link and teaser, to facilitate pursuit of the bigger ideas, the more nuanced conversations, elsewhere online.

Of course, that isn’t all it does; the flexibility of Twitter is apparently endless. It’s a place to hang out and relax, a place to communicate with work colleagues, a place to get news, ask for help, vent. I use Twitter to keep in touch with ‘real-life’ friends who live hundreds of miles away, as much as with people I’ve never met in real life. Its use as a ‘backchannel’ at conferences is well-established, enabling people who are attending to discuss (or criticise) presentations and share resources, and helping people who couldn’t attend to follow (and contribute to) the discussions. Innovative uses of the tools facilitated by the Twitter API (something else I didn’t know about, let alone grasp the significance of, a year or so ago) are emerging, such as Digital Humanities Now, which ‘takes the pulse of the digital humanities community and tries to discern what articles, blog posts, projects, tools, collections, and announcements are worthy of greater attention’.

I’ve been thinking, ever since I joined Twitter, about ways that it could potentially be used to revitalise the History Carnival. It certainly did help as a supplementary channel for announcements, but this seemed to only tap the surface of its potential. So, I’ve finally created a History Carnival account, which apart from all the usual networking things you can do with a Twitter account, has enabled me to appropriate the same tools used by Digital Humanities Now to create The Broadside as a regular, Twitter-generated supplement to (and resource for) the Carnival itself.

Early this year, we had our first experiment in tweeting and blogging a complete edition. Maybe that will become a regular occurrence. Hopefully it’s the kind of thing that can spread the word of blog carnivals to new audiences. And, like most things to do with Twitter, it was fun.

Twitterstorians’ anniversary posts
Andrew Devenney
Gentleman Administrator
Georgian London
The View East

See also…
ProfHacker on How to start Tweeting
Twitter and the book trade: the good, the bad and the ugly

This should be of interest to many users of the Old Bailey Proceedings, especially teachers and researchers: you can now use the ‘one-click’ function in Zotero to bookmark documents on the site – when browsing, you’ll see the Zotero icons appear in the browser address bar.

It definitely works for single trials, full sessions and Ordinary’s Accounts, saving the key metadata for the page; it may also work in non-trial sections of sessions (adverts, supplementary material, etc), but I haven’t checked this. It also works from search results (but not stats and map searches); it’ll bring up a list of all the results on the page with checkboxes to save as many or few as you want.

(I believe that Adam Crymble should get the credit for writing the translator, but will happily correct this if I’m wrong!)

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.

Carnivalesque 62 (early modern) has been posted by Lucy Inglis at Georgian London, with everything from 18th-century paint colours to tiny dogs.

The next History Carnival will be hosted by Warren Stewart on 1 June at Magnificat. To nominate the best history blogging of the last month, email warren {at} magnificatbaroque(.)com or use the nomination form.

The next Carnivalesque will be an ancient/medieval edition at The Cranky Professor, date to be confirmed but probably around 20 June; usual nomination form.

The latest ancient/medieval Carnivalesque is up at Even in a little thing.

The next History Carnival will be at The Vapour Trail on 1 May. Nominations to m.bellanta[AT]uq[DOT]edu[DOT]au or use the nomination form.

Welcome one and all to the 86th edition of the History Carnival, and many thanks for all the nominations.

March was Women’s History Month and we had a rich seam of posts about women in history. Let’s open proceedings with the Tenured Radical’s question: It’s Women’s History Month: Do You Know Where The Women’s History Blogs Are?

At Zenobia: Empress of the East, Judith Weingarten explored the life and work (and afterlife) of one of my favourite artists, Judith Leyster, in An Uppity Dutch Master: Part 1 and Part II.

Abigail Quinnley at the Quinnley Stand wrote about the mythology of Lilith, the first wife of Adam, in Original Sin?

At The Vapour Trail, Melissa Bellanta posted on Trained on rashers and ice-pudding: the Victorian skirt dance.

The Women’s History Network Blog published fine posts from various historians throughout the month, so here are just a few of the highlights:

Shall We Go to the Pictures?: Rachel Freeman on the efforts of the Mothers’ Union to “safeguard the morality of society” in the mid-20th century.

In a post for Ada Lovelace Day on 24 March, Katie Barclay looked at Mary Fairfax Somerville, a 19th-century mathematician.

The International Year of the Nurse: Sue Hawkins reminds us that nursing history isn’t all about Florence Nightingale.

Wars, Revolutions and Soldiers

Jack Le Moine at History Moments Serbian Revolt Begins, spotlights the beginning of the Serbian revolt against Ottoman rule in February 1804.

Kevin Levin has been Looking for Silas Chandler, at Civil War Memory and challenging some of the dubious attempts to rewrite the stories of black people who fought for the Confederate states in the American Civil War.

Soldier’s Mail: Letters Home from a New England Doughboy is a fascinating blog posting the letters home to his family of the First World War US Sgt. Sam Avery. On 15 March 1919, he was at Laigne-en-Belin, France.

Tim Abbott unravelled the mystery of the Revolutionary War Service Record of Jacob Maurice De Hart at Walking the Berkshires.

Medicine, Anatomy and Quackery

Øystein Horgmo at The Sterile Eye explores the amazingly detailed anatomical drawings of Jan van Rymsdyk – Drawer of Wombs, illustrator of William Hunter’s “The Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus” (1774).

In early modern Europe, the modern science of anatomy was largely founded on the dissected corpses of criminals. Executed Today uncovered a similar story in Japan.

At Civil War Medicine and Writing, Jim Schmidt uncovers Quack Medicine Advertising Disguised as Military History.

Caroline Rance at The Quack Doctor has another story of a quack’s misleading claims, with fatal consequences: The Tragic Story of Ching’s Worm Lozenges.

Religion, Culture and Food

Jeremy Dupertuis Bangs guest-blogged at American Creation on his research on early modern ideas of hierarchical authority.

How could I possibly have resisted a post from the Wellcome Library Blog to celebrate National Pie Week? The crust of it!

Got Medieval skewers some risible research in What’s All This about Super-Sized Last Suppers?

Alun Salt reports on archaeologists’ investigation in Australia of a case of 20th-century aboriginal culture and resistance in Preserving a culture in wild honey.

Closing thoughts

At Past is Present, Christine Graham-Ward recounted how a mundane check on the identity of a copyright holder led to a story of scandal, unrequited love and tragedy in Oregon.

And of course, no Carnival should be without a little crime and mayhem, so we have the real story of Dick Turpin from Dainty Ballerina.

And that’s it for this time! The next History Carnival will be at The Vapour Trail on 1 May. See you there!