Investigations of a Dog

Yesterday I went to the Institute of Historical Research to hear Peter Burke talking about “Strengths and Weaknesses of Cultural History 1980-2006″. Judging by how full the Pollard room was this was a major event. I thought I might be out of my depth there, but as it turned out I didn’t hear anything that surprised me or that I couldn’t understand. The paper was a very general overview of cultural history which did pretty much what the title suggests. I can’t remember all the points because I wasn’t taking notes, but most of the suggested strengths and weaknesses were fairly obvious. I didn’t take part in the discussion at the time because it was already going on long enough and I wanted to get away (and also didn’t want to embarrass myself by asking stupid questions of course!), but other people asked some interesting questions. This post was going to be an attempt to summarise the paper, but it went off on various tangents.

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Yesterday I went to that London. I spent the afternoon in the Public Records Office (it will never be the National Archives!) looking at seventeenth century wills and more First World War stuff. The most exciting discovery is that the PRO has started a wiki in which readers can contribute their knowledge of the documents. This is a fantastic idea, as some classes are very poorly catalogued and barely documented at all outside the class lists. I’m thinking particularly of SP28, which is a very important source for the English/British Civil Wars and Interregnum, and which I know an awful lot about (probably more than most PRO staff), so I’m looking forward to contributing. At present it’s in beta and only seems to be available at Kew, but I hope they’ll put it on their website soon.

Afterwards I went up to the IHR to hear Patrick Little’s paper on Cromwellian studs. It was interesting to find out more about horses in the 1650s as my thesis stopped in 1646. Patrick pointed out that whereas most histories of the period ignore Cromwell’s interest in breeding and racing horses, or put it down to the utilitarian aim of breeding cavalry horses, there is a lot of evidence that a common interest in horses was an important aspect of social and political networks during the protectorate. The paper also got me thinking about bloodlines and heredity, which I’d like to look into a bit more as it has possible implications for patriarchy and masculinity.

I hope it wasn’t too intimidating for Patrick to be asked questions by Peter Edwards and me. Peter knows more than anyone about horses in early-modern Britain. He was an unofficial mentor to me during my PhD and has given me all kinds of help, but this was the first time I’d seen him in person since I came back from my career break so it was good to catch up.

Expect some proper posts next week, if I survive the upgrade to WordPress 2.1. It seems to be going wrong for other people, but it hasn’t caused any problems on my test blog on localhost.

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.