For a while now, I’ve been preparing for the MedRen conference in Maynooth in the summer.  The research has been slotted in between my various teaching sessions and all the commuting, and it very quickly progressed beyond the conference paper itself.  I’ve nearly finished the first draft of an article, which I hope will be ready for submission to a music journal in the summer. I’ve got some finishing touches to put to the article this week, then I am going to put it to one side for a few weeks before I read it through again, in the hope that by then, I’ll be able to look at it more dispassionately.  Then I should be able to see where some of the problems are before someone else points them out to me.

It’s meant really getting stuck in to sixteenth-century English music printing and, in particular, the sort of  metrical psalms that, up to now, I’ve only looked at in passing.  I’m enjoying re-reading Beth Quitslund’s The Reformation in Rhyme, as well as Timothy Duguid’s Metrical Psalmody in Print and Practice.  All of this also forms essential background reading for my epitaphs project too, so it’s great that for once I am able to kill two birds with one stone, so to speak.  I’m looking forward to reading some works on domestic devotions and probably even the history of emotions over the summer, so if anyone has any suggestions, please let me know.