Tag Archives: the craft

Huntington Library Treasures

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Mark Hailwood

Days before I boarded a plane to Los Angeles to spend my summer as a research fellow here at the Huntington Library, I came across this article in the Times Higher Education supplement. Needless to say, the following quote only added to my sense of anticipation: ‘One of my friends said that if she died and went to Heaven, she would expect St Peter to ask for her Huntington reader’s card at the pearly gates.’ Six weeks later, and I can see where she was coming from.

But there was something else from that article that I carried with me across the Atlantic – a question mark about the relative merits of (cheap, easy and efficient) access to digitised primary sources on one hand, and to (often expensive, labour intensive and time-consuming) hands-on access to original materials on the other. The article echoed a sentiment I have often heard expressed at an academic conference or seminar series: historical research may be a lot easier today due to advances in digital technology, but as a result something valuable has undoubtedly been lost. But what?

Too often, the arguments deployed here reach for an intangible, almost mystical quality to doing good old-fashioned grubbing in dusty archives. That handling original sources is somehow more righteous; it allows us to ‘get a better feel’ for our sources; in some way by touching centuries old parchment we can almost touch the past itself. I often find myself thinking in these ways after a day in the archives, but as a historian who is trained to judge arguments in a detached and ‘rational’ manner, I have to admit that they don’t add up to a very concrete or convincing case. As a historian that has done a reasonable amount of work on both digitised print material, and on fusty manuscript legal records, I can’t honestly put my finger on a tangible difference in the quality of research I produce from each. Even if exploring one does contain a greater sense of adventure than the other.

It was with this jumble of thoughts on my mind that I bunked off from the library for a few hours to take a look at a new exhibition of ‘Huntington Treasures’. It’s hard to imagine a more star-studded collection of early modern books together in one place: an original Gutenberg Bible, which was the first major book produced on a printing press anywhere in the world; the Ellesmere Chaucer, one of the earliest collections of the Canterbury Tales produced around the turn of the 15th century; a first folio edition of Shakespeare’s collected plays from 1623; first editions of works by Hobbes, Locke, Ben Jonson… I could go on. I was, of course, appropriately impressed

There was something exhilarating about seeing original editions of these landmark texts, but I wasn’t prepared to let that steamroller my lingering uncertainty about the innate superiority of consulting originals over reproductions. What as a historian had I really gained from seeing these texts up close and personal? I wasn’t convinced that it brought me any closer to how contemporaries would have connected with these works: venerated in an exhibition hall, in a glass case, as a ‘treasure’ rather than as reading material. There were aspects of the ‘materiality’ of these books that could provide more tangible insights for the historian to take away: the sheer size of a Gutenberg or King James bible meant that reading it would have required some supporting apparatus, whereas a single sheet broadside ballad could be read on the move or in any position (think hefty hard-back versus kindle, perhaps). The act of reading one or the other would have been very physically different, and would have therefore been experienced, approached and understood as a distinct type of reading activity. Sure, but I didn’t really need to travel 5000 miles to see the originals to figure that out.

I am, admittedly, trying to be provocative here. I wouldn’t disagree that there is value in consulting original materials rather than relying exclusively on digital reproductions. That said, I do think that historians should be asking themselves to come up with far more rigorous explanations as to why that’s true.

It was a dark and stormy night…

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Brodie Waddell

Beginnings are tricky. Coming up with an opening sentence for a great big pile of paper is never easy, especially if it’s the first great big pile of paper you’ve written. When you’ve invested at least several years of your life in a project, it can be very difficult to find some way to introduce it to your reader.

It’s customary to start with a quotation or short vignette. One of the most famous of these is Foucault’s introduction to Discipline and Punish:

On 1 March 1757 Damiens the regicide was condemned “to make the amende honorable before the main door of the Church of Paris”, where he was to be “taken and conveyed in a cart, wearing nothing but a shirt, holding a torch of burning wax weighing two pounds”; then, “in the said cart, to the Place de Grève, where, on a scaffold that will be erected there, the flesh will be torn from his breasts, arms, thighs and claves with red-hot pincers, his right hand, holding the knife with which he committed the said parricide, burnt with sulphur, and, on those places where the flesh will be torn away, poured molten lead, boiling oil, burning resin, wax and sulphur melted together and then his body drawn and quartered by four horses and his limbs and body consumed by fire, reduced to ashes and his ashes thrown to the winds” …

This leads Foucault into a minutely description of the gory process which then shifts abruptly to the highly-regimented daily schedule laid down for ‘for the House of young prisoners in Paris’ in the early nineteenth century. These examples, he says, epitomise ‘a time when, in Europe and in the United States, the entire economy of punishment was redistributed … It was a new age for penal justice’. Although I disagree with much of Faucault’s argument here, as an introduction this is a brilliant example of the form.

Despite a strong temptation to buck this tradition, I started my PhD thesis with a quote from John Bunyan, the peripatetic Baptist preacher and allegorist. Although I stuck with that for the book, the first few paragraphs needed a lot of work. I’ll let you judge for yourself whether the result was successful. The point is: beginnings are tricky.

So, it was with great interest that I read a post by Dave Hitchcock (yet another Hindlite, or should it be ‘Hindleite’?) on the opening for his own PhD.

We begin with a stone. … Yes, with a stone. With a stone flying through the air, in the late 1690s, and hitting the head, the confident, ‘middling sort’, noggin of Thomas Smith, who at that present moment, was atop his horse, riding blithely down a road in Warwickshire, England. I think he was close to Warwick town, the county capital. But as I say, our friend Thomas was struck on the head by a stone, while atop his horse, a powerful symbol of his social status might I add, in the late 1690s.

Not bad at all. He goes on to introduce us to an ‘un-named, possibly scottish, vagrant woman who might have had an incredible fastball and a grudge against authority’. She alone is reason enough for me to want to read the thesis.

Is this tendency to open with a story confined mostly to historians and other humanists? Or is this something that social scientists do too?

Do I have to kill the snake?

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Brodie Waddell

From McSweeney’s via The Edge:

FAQ: The “Snake Fight” Portion Of Your Thesis Defense

Q: Do I have to kill the snake?

A: University guidelines state that you have to “defeat” the snake. There are many ways to accomplish this. Lots of students choose to wrestle the snake. Some construct decoys and elaborate traps to confuse and then ensnare the snake. One student brought a flute and played a song to lull the snake to sleep. Then he threw the snake out a window.

I’m very grateful to my doctoral examiners, who told me at the start of my viva that the snake I would be fighting was rather small and hinted that it had a blindspot on its left side. That made the whole process much less stressful.