Early Modern Notes

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!

(Where did the last three months go?!?)

The latest early modern Carnivalesque has been posted at the Quack Doctor.

The next History Carnival will be right here at Early Modern Notes, on about 2 April. Email nominations to sharon {at} earlymodernweb.org(.)uk, use the nomination form, or tweet @sharon_howard using the hashtag #historycarnival. Easter-themed nominations will be particularly welcome.

The Digging into Data challenge is an international grant competition (UK, US, Canada), which announced its first eight winners yesterday.

What is the “challenge” we speak of? The idea behind the Digging into Data Challenge is to answer the question “what do you do with a million books?” Or a million pages of newspaper? Or a million photographs of artwork? That is, how does the notion of scale affect humanities and social science research? Now that scholars have access to huge repositories of digitized data — far more than they could read in a lifetime — what does that mean for research?

The most exciting bit for historians of crime and fans of the Old Bailey Proceedings Online, and of Zotero and TAPoR, is that the Old Bailey Online is one of the eight:

Using Zotero and TAPoR on the Old Bailey Proceedings: Data Mining with Criminal Intent

Awardees: Dan Cohen, George Mason University, NEH; Tim Hitchcock, University of Hertfordshire, JISC; Geoffrey Rockwell, University of Alberta, SSHRC.

Additional Key Participants: The National Archives (United Kingdom), McMaster University, the Open University, Amherst College, University of Sheffield, Trent University, and the University of Western Ontario.

Description: This project will create an intellectual exemplar for the role of data mining in an important historical discipline – the history of crime – and illustrate how the tools of digital humanities can be used to wrest new knowledge from one of the largest humanities data sets currently available: the Old Bailey Online.

Seems it’s official: we have funding for our new project, Connected Histories.

Connected Histories will create a federated search facility for a wide range of distributed electronic resources relating to early modern and nineteenth-century British History. …

Using metadata and other available background information, the project will create a search facility that can adapt to each resource to allow searching across a range of chosen sources for names, places and dates as well as keywords and dates. Background information about search results and a facility to save and export search results for further analysis will also be provided. An online collaborative workspace will allow users to document connections between resources.

It’s going to be interesting.

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!