This is just a quick roundup of some online resources that I’ve found recently.
Greenwit at Blogging the Renaissance linked to People In Place, the website of a major research project about families and households in early-modern London. As well as background information and details of their methodology, they have made some of the raw data available, including lists of people who lent money to the parliamentarians during the civil war. This is a really exciting development and I hope more projects will be doing this kind of thing in future.
Edward Vallance has compiled a list of online Protestation Returns.
Adam Roberts at The Valve pointed out The Medieval Bestiary, a site devoted to representations of animals in the middle ages. There is a huge amount of interesting information here and the site is also really nice to look at. From this I discovered that the idea that horses actively and enthusiastically take part in war goes back to the 7th century, and that Pliny mentions horses defending their riders in battles.
[Edit: And you can see a selected Weird Medieval Animal from the bestiary every Monday at Per Omnia Saecula]
I went to London yesterday to visit the Public Records Office and the Institute of Historical Research. There was no service record for William A. Wenham, but the battalion war diary mentioned him by name, confirming that he was the missing man from the patrol on 6th December. I also got a copy of his medal card (20p to print it at the PRO, £3.50 to download it at home!) which shows that he was in the French theatre of war from 1st March 1915 and was therefore lucky to have survived some extremely bloody battles. Meanwhile, back in the seventeenth century I looked at some wills of London saddlers, including the original will of John Gower. I had to check it to see if it differed from the probate court’s copy, but in the end it didn’t. Maybe it wasn’t worth getting them to bring it all the way down from a salt mine in Cheshire, but it was interesting to see John Gower’s signature (he didn’t write the rest of the will himself). It would be even better to have Jane Gower’s signature, not least to see if she could write, but she wasn’t one of the witnesses.
After that I went to the Philosophy of History seminar at the IHR to hear Wulf Kansteiner talking about computer games and historical consciousness. I can’t give a full account of it because I missed the start and had to leave before the end of the discussion, but he raised lots of interesting points. He’s definitely among those of us who realise that gaming culture is becoming increasingly hard for historians to ignore, and that it creates both new opportunities and new methodological problems. I sensed that a lot of people in the audience just didn’t get it. I was particularly amused by someone who laid into Wulf for not mentioning gender, but then proceeded to perpetuate some very out of date and ignorant gender stereotypes (apparently women don’t play games!), and also had a right go at bloggers (we’re anti-social egomaniacs!).
Anyway, the whole thing has given me plenty of ideas for future blog posts, so I won’t give too much away now. I’ll just make two quick points. First, the experience removed my doubts that my interest in studying games is a sudden and cynical jump onto a fashionable bandwagon. This is far from something that everyone is doing. It’s still a niche, and still a long way ahead of the academic mainstream with too many people thinking it isn’t proper history because “it isn’t real” (er, religion anyone?).
Second, Timothy Burke at Cliopatria mentioned that it’s very difficult to study and understand the history of virtual worlds unless you were there. Last night it struck me that gaming is largely incomprehensible to non-gamers. This is one more nail in the coffin of objectivity and neutrality, because gaming culture might have to be studied from the inside more than from the outside. But for me that’s more of an opportunity than a problem.
Some observations on two bestiality cases in the Old Bailey Proceedings.
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This is a brief look at some of my work in progress about women in the London saddlery trade in the English Civil War. It’s based on part of my PhD research, but I’m taking it further now. I’ve tried to make this post as accessible as possible, so it goes into background information about London history and explains some basic things. I’ve also included links to the map of early modern London where I know a saddler’s address (if you follow the link, the place will be marked by a blue star on the map). The map dates from the 1560s, but the City inside the walls hadn’t changed too much by the 1640s.
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