Serendipities

Stuart Clark’s Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford University Press, 2007) had been waiting for me on my bookshelf for a while, and this week I finally got round to it. It was a great read. Vanities of the Eye is a wonderfully erudite book, teeming with information and original ideas about the changing perception of the sense of vision in early modern culture.

The book argues that contrary to what theories of the rationalization of sight and the invention of perspective suggests, vision came to be characterized by unreliability and uncertainty in the early modern period. As Stuart Clark puts it with a pun: “It is as though European intellectuals lost their optical nerve.” Read the rest of this entry »

This is what’s waiting for me on my desk:

• William Germano, From Dissertation to Book (Chicago University Press, 2005)
• William Germano, Getting It Published (Chicago University Press, 2001)
• Beth Luey, Handbook for Academic Authors (fourth edition, Cambridge UP, 2002)
• Susan Rabiner and Alfred Fortunato, Thinking Like Your Editor (W. W. Norton, 2002)
• William Zinsser, On Writing Well (Collins, 2006)
• Richard A. Lanham, The Longman Guide to Revising Prose (Longman, 2006)

You guessed it — it’s time to revise my dissertation for publication. People at the ESSHC conference in Lissabon kept asking me where my thesis was published. Their interest really motivated me to take some action in that department.

I read Germano’s From Dissertation to Book while I was waiting for my delayed plane on the Lisbon airport, and I decided that I need to do what he calls a “deep revision” to turn my dissertation into a publishable book. I need to make my chapters more lucid, strengthen my line of argument, speak more in my own voice instead of that of other critics, and get rid of excess block quotes.

Germano’s book suggests that I don’t contact a publishing house quite yet. He recommends revising the book first, so that I am ready to send it out if a publisher reacts positively to my book proposal. So that is my plan of action now: revise first, then write a brilliant book proposal to sell my Wild Justice: The Dynamics of Gender and Revenge in Early Modern English Drama to a publisher in England or the United States. Ah yes, I probably need a snappier subtitle too.

All practical advice on how to go about turning a dissertation into a published book is greatly welcome!

Most of you will know Ann Hathaway, whether it be from a biography of Shakespeare, from education, popular literature or the internet. The image most people have of her is based on a few facts. When they married, for example, William was eighteen while Ann was twenty-six and several months pregnant. In his will, William left Ann his second-best bed. In the words of Germaine Greer, she “left a wife-shaped void in the biography of William Shakespeare.”

Shakespeare’s Wife convincingly shows how biographers have filled this void with their own ideas of what Shakespeare’s wife would have been like. In the popular imagination, she or her parents and friends forced the young Shakespeare to marry her after a roll in the hay at Shottery. A few years later, Shakespeare escaped to London and led a wild life among the brothels in Southwark. Here, for example, is a quotation from the page on Ann’s life on the website of Michael Wood’s In Search of Shakespeare:

At 26, Anne knew the way of the world while William was still a troubled youth, unsure of his path and coping with the collapse of his father’s businesses and the uncertainty of the times. After William turned 21, there would be no more children for Anne and him. There would instead be long absences as William later toured the country and set up home amongst the theatrical community in London. There would be extramarital affairs and head-turning passions for the poet, and he would encounter much more of the world than Anne in rural Warwickshire ever could.

The great thing about Germaine Greer’s biography of Ann Hathaway is that she challenges the representations of Ann that are commonly taken for granted, even (or perhaps especially) among academics. In a podcast she says that it was her reading of Stephen Greenblatt’s biography Will in the World that made her want to write this book, but her biography includes revealing quotations from many other works besides Greenblatt’s.

Read the rest of this entry »

My hopes of Apple ever releasing an e-book reader with beautiful software and the same sleek looks as their new MacBook Air were crushed by the New York Times this morning. In an interview, Steve Jobbs declared that the idea of e-books is based on a fundamental mistake:

It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.

On my wish list for when I have more money (just bought too many books on a trip to London): two recently published books on reading in early modern England.

The first is by Katherine A. Craik, Reading Sensations in Early Modern England (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). This book focuses on the bodily effects of reading, a subject that fascinates me. Craik looks at text by Puttenham, Sidney, Donne, Coryat and Brathwait to examine the somatic experience of reading. In a review in The Review of English Studies, Colin Burrow writes that “Her particular theme is the way that the passionate effects of fictions could unman readers, or create turbulence within the ideally controlled masculine body.” I am really interested in this book, particularly in the chapter on Sidney and the literature of choler, because its focus on bodily effects and on the passions resembles things I researched in a theatrical context in my thesis, but also because of a new project that is slowly taking shape in my mind, which will probably unfold itself here in the coming months.

The second is William Sherman’s Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). This is a study of early modern reading habits (earlier posts on this subject here and here). Sherman looks specifically at notes in the margins of books read in the early modern period.

Based on a survey of thousands of early printed books, Used Books describes what readers wrote in and around their books and what we can learn from these marks by using the tools of archaeologists as well as historians and literary critics.

Sherman looks at book-marking in schools and churches, the commonplace books of Sir Julius Caesar and also at one of my favourite signs, the “manicule”.

A paper by William Sherman on the history of this hand-with-pointing-finger symbol is also available online at Lives and Letters. See also the Manicule pool at Flickr; and fists and pointing hands in fonts and on the internet.

Welcome to the 32nd , an early modern edition in the guise of a commonplace book:

A book in which ‘commonplaces’ or passages important for reference were collected, usually under general heads; hence, a book in which one records passages or matters to be especially remembered or referred to, with or without arrangement. (OED)

As many bloggers have argued (see a list of links at the very bottom of this post), the method of interactive reading produced by keeping a commonplace book is very similar to our modern ways of reading on the internet. Indeed, a blog is nothing more than:

Francis Bacon recommends the practice of keeping such a book. He writes: “I hold that the diligence, and pains in collecting common Places, is of great use in certainty and studying.”

I hope that the diligence and pains that went into bringing together the finest of recent blogging on the early modern period will profit many of you! Thanks to all who submitted, and thanks especially to Sharon for all her links and help.

Sharon at Early Modern Notes argues that there are many historians who need to become more savvy about how to make history digital, and offers some important online places to start. For researchers of early modern American history, the Online Education Database published an incredibly useful post with links to 250 killer libraries and databases: libraries and archives that focus mainly on localized, regional, and U.S. history, but it also includes larger collections, eText and eBook repositories, and a short list of directories to help you continue your research efforts.

For the illustrious Holzknecht Redivivus project at Blogging the Renaissance, Spurio wrote an enlightening piece on The Gentleman Usher, or “a fine taste of Chapman at his strangest” as well as one on William Heminge’s (yes, the son of…) The Fatal Contract, a play featuring female revengers disguised as black eunuchs.

Joseph Haughey ponders the subject of textual intervention and early modern publishing, and suggests that, since so many hands were involved in producing Shakespeare’s plays, we should not consider it a sin to intervene creatively in his plays today. (See also this earlier post on the implications of this idea for teaching Shakespeare). Also on Shakespeare, Far Explore presents a set of beautiful photos of the New Globe in Southwark that I would love to use in a lecture! And also on teaching, Bardiac writes on Marlowe’s Edward II and how to get students to think about a play as a theatrical practice.

At Slawkenburgius Tales, Greg Afinogenov looks at Sheridan’s preface to The Rivals from a Habermassian perspective. And at the Valve, Adam Roberts defends Droeshout’s portrait against those who despise it for its simplicity. Droeshout’s image, he posits (with theoretical support from the great Scott McCloud), is just “more real because more cartoony.”

Investigations of a Dog brings you a review of Mark Stoyle’s Soldiers and Strangers: An Ethnic History of the English Civil War (2005), which looks at the role of Welsh and Cornish identities in the Civil War. Mercurius Politicus reviews an article on religious violence by Susan Juster in the online journal Common-Place “What’s “Sacred” about Violence in Early America?” I reviewed Sylvia Bowerbank’s Speaking for Nature: Women and Ecologies of Early Modern England (2005) and Daniel M. Gross’s The Secret History of Emotion (2006).

The Little Professor went to see the latest film on our favourite queen, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, and didn’t really warm to it. Bardiac went, too — did she mention how slow the film was? In honour of the same film, Roy Booth offers a Petrarchan sonnet possibly given by Walter Raleigh to his Queen.

The Nonist presents a wonderful post on Bernard de Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la Pluralité des Mondes, or, Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, dating from 1686: a theory on life on other planets addressed to an imaginary woman philosopher.

The Conventicle presents a list of grievances against Essex preachers drawn up by Puritan ministers in 1568. Most are accused of specific crimes such as drinking, popery, sleeping with their sister or maid, but perhaps the most intriguing person listed is Mr Glibberie, v. of Halesteed: “a verie ridiculous preacher.”

Roy at Early Modern Whale shows us what seventeenth-century Londoners did when the Thames froze over. In EEBO, he found a wonderful map of the iced-over Thames, with its temporary roads, shopping mall, and diversions (live cock-throwing among them). And if you would like to read more of Roy’s work, he proudly presents his (online and free) article on the flight of witches in EMLS.

Roy Booth also wrote some wonderful entries on duelling that I do not want to keep from you. He discovered a handwritten note that spells revenge in a duelling manual, and presents as “ephemera at its most priceless” a bill to advertise a duel to be fought at the Red Bull by two men who each represent different schools in the noble ‘Science of Defence’. Also, he writes about Joseph Swetnam (known to us all as the woman-hater) who, as it turns out, really does seem to know what he is talking about when he writes about duelling. If you do not have EEBO, you will be pleased to learn (as I was a couple of years ago) that Stuart Huntley made a facsimile of The Schoole of the Noble and Worthy Science of Defence available online.

Does this image look familiar? Gavin Robinson used to think of it as a cliché. When he looked closely at the image and pamphlet, it defied his expectations.

Something fishy going on at BibliOdyssey, and by that I certainly do not mean the publication of his very own book — congratulations, Peacay! This recent post is a must-see: a German physician’s cabinet of curiosities immortalized by a Polish baroque painter (if you read Spanish, see also this entry on the anatomical work of that very same physician at De Mal en Peor). BibliOdyssey also presented images of Polish Renaissance knights (and athletic putti), from the very first museum catalogue ever. Giornale Nuovo wrote an erudite and lavishly illustrated post about the printmaker Giorgio Ghisi.

Sadly, that post on Ghisi will go into history as one of misteraitch’s last posts, for he has decided to stop blogging. After five years of wonderful posts (and those famous book give-aways), I will miss his beautiful site, and I know I am not the only one (more goodbyes here, here, here, here, here, and in many, many more places in the blogosphere). Fortunately, the blog is still online for a while.

Thank you, misteraitch, and goodnight!

On blogs and commonplace books:

• The eighteenth century online: commonplace book or coffeehouse?
• Blog beginnings
• Blogs, definitions and commonplace books
• Commonplace books at Metafilter
• Notebooks and commonplace books
• Interactive reading in the early modern period
• The Book of Brome at the Beinecke Library online collections. Sorry, that link didn’t work. This is the search engine for the collection, if you search for “Brome”, it’s the first entry. The book of Brome is a fifteenth-century common-place book containing a religious play and poetry, legal forms, and local accounts.

In an earlier post I wrote about (and disagreed with) Neil Forsyth’s view of revenge as a universal human emotion. I think that, although the urge to retaliate may be found in many cultures, and reciprocity is seen as the basis of our social organization by sociobiologists like Matt Ridley, ways of thinking about revenge, the rhetoric and images of revenge, reasons for taking and ways of executing revenge are so much culturally and historically specific, that vindictiveness just cannot be seen as a universal emotion, because emotions are so culturally specific. I will write a longer post on this issue sometime, but I just found an ally in Daniel M. Gross’s The Secret History of Emotion (2006), a book in which early modern conceptions of the passions play a central role in the argument for cultural specificity rather than universality of the emotions.

The Secret History of Emotion pits itself against an essential biological (psycho-physiological) interpretation of the emotions by presenting a fascinating rhetorical history. One of Daniel Gross’s recurrent sparring partners in the book is Antonio Damasio, a neurobiologist and author of several best-selling books on emotions and the mind. His main objection to scientific analysis of the emotions is that it often reduces or neglects social phenomena in order to be able to conduct the experiment. Read the rest of this entry »