A True Copy of the Journal of the High Court of Justice, for the Trial of K. Charles I.
This full-page frontispiece is prefaced by the following poem: These lines speak for themselves, describing "Albion" as "Three Nations doom'd t'eternal slavery", symbolized by the figures crushed under the wheels of the hellish chariot that represents the Interregnum and Cromwell's Protectorate. That gives a pretty clear idea of where this book is …
A 15th-century manuscript book of hours
Go straight to the scanned PDFs This week's book scan is a bit different from my usual fare. It's a manuscript, it's from the 15th century, it's not primarily related to suffering and - because of the limitations of OCR (optical character reader) software - it's not text-searchable. But if you have any interest in…
Upcoming conference
The Moment of Death in Early Modern Europe, c. 1450-1800. Contested Ideals, Controversial Spaces, and Suspicious Objects. In: H-Soz-Kult, 21.02.2021, . The conference runs from August 26-28, 2021.…
MAURUS SCOTT, CATHOLIC MARTYR (SCANNED DOCUMENT)
It's a common enough tale, I suppose. Young man goes to Cambridge, studies law, goes to the inner Temple to complete his training, gets converted to Catholicism and ends up being hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn. Maurus Scott was one of some 355 Catholics who were either put to death or died in prison…
Digitizing Early Modern Suffering
I finally splashed out on a CZUR overhead scanner, which I picked up at a substantial discount from the regular market price. I strongly recommend anyyone to get one of these. Forget that dishwasher you were saving up for, or the new hairdryer you've been promising yourself; for real consumer satori nothing beats an overhead…
Eating Nasty Things (reposted)
[This is a reposting of a post from 2014 that seems to have spirited itself away. Fortunately I had a copy of the content tucked safely away...] This post is inspired partly by a paper written in 1976, but which I have only just come across (Frank Paul Bowman, “Suffering,Madness and Literary Creation in Seventeenth-Century…
Enough of suffering, here’s some Shakespeare stuff!
I'll no doubt be back in gear with more insights into early modern suffering sometime during 2021, but for now I'm working on a series of videos on "Shakespeare the man". Here's the first one, just giving a general overview. This next one is the first of several I'll be doing on Shakespeare's Stratford friends.…
Rejoice! for eebo tcp phase 2 is now in the public domain
Here it is! Something tangible and irrefutable, something that makes 2021 better than 2020 (not that that would be hard!), something to cheer the spirit and warm the cocckles of the heart. Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership Phase 2 is now in the public domain, bringing 60,331 early modern works in text-searchable form…
Early Modern Medicine: A new online resource
The Centre for the Study of Medicine and the Body in the Renaissance (CSMBR) is starting a new series of digital material. The first video in the series, Vegetable Harmonies, a short video with the Illuminations by Gherardo Cybo (1512-1600) on Mattioli's Discorsi sopra la Materia Medica di Dioscoride Pedacio (BL Ms Additional 22333) accompanied by …
Protestant Polemic and the Japanese Martyrs
This is my first post for a while, partly because I've been focusing on other things, and partly because, when I did turn my attention in this direction and tried to post, the blog had disappeared! It took a while, but eventually I managed to sort out the problems and get it back, so here…