Tomorrow is the first of February, and not only will there be a new History Carnival at The Elfin Ethicist, it is also the day that duelling law will change in the Netherlands.

The Dutch duelling law in question was written at the close of the nineteenth century. It was decided at the time that [...]

I just discovered a blog called Academic Coach. It is owned by Mary McKinney, who has created a true treasure trove full of useful advice for dissertation writers and other academics. Check out this stimulating list of tips on “Getting it Written”, with advice on writing basics, rough drafting, and revising.

I did it! I upgraded to Wordpress 2.0 tonight. Do let me know if you find anything amiss, for it was suspiciously easy to do. There are (hopefully) no changes on this side of Wordpress, but on the administrator side many things have changed: it looks very clear and bright, and I’ve already noticed that [...]

No less than 62 Calls for Papers found their way into my mailbox this Sunday morning. Here are three hand-picked early-modern ones:
The Ritual and Rhetoric of Queenship, 1250-1650
An interdisciplinary conference at Canterbury Christ Church University in Kent (24 August 2006) that will explore images and representations of queens, as well as the cultural and political [...]

A post on early modern machines on Peacay’s award-winning blog BibliOdyssey reminded me of an early modern reading machine. It was designed by Agostino Ramelli who published the idea in his Le diverse et artificiose machine del Capitano Agostina Ramelli in 1588. It was apparently never built in the early modern period itself, but [...]

“Now the trouble began,” Virginia Woolf writes in A Room of One’s Own. “The student who has been trained in research at Oxbridge has no doubt some method of shepherding his question past all distractions till it runs into its answer as a sheep runs into its pen. The student by my side, for instance, [...]

This is such a cool idea: bookcrossing! I just found out that there are no less than 395 practising book-crossers living in my city. Who knows, maybe I’ll find a lonely book somewhere in a café this weekend. The idea is so popular that it’s in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary:

bookcrossing
n. the practice of leaving [...]