It’s been a long week. The early bird rate for the Social History Society Conference closes this evening, so I’ve spent a lot of time answering emails and recording bookings – much more than normal. On top of that, I’ve had to teach an extra three-hour session for my Special Subject, because it had to be rescheduled from when I caught covid before Easter. Then there have been several supervision meetings with dissertation students for next year. Beyond work, this morning I had an editorial meeting for the H.A.’s Historian members’ journal. It was a relief to turn the computer off this evening!

The two Special Subject sessions that I taught this week were quite heavy on theory. The rescheduled session was on Intermediality – in general terms, this is to do with the intersection of different media, but the students were looking at more technical definitions and seeing how far they applied to the news materials they have been looking at over the last few months. Such intermediality is hugely important for early modern print culture, as so many forms of news made specific reference other forms of news. For their primary sources, the students looked at some ballads which specifically point to the existence of a pamphlet on a similar subject. This is something I’ve done a little bit of work on, and it’s something that I’m hoping to develop in due course. The second seminar was on censorship, free speech and the public sphere, where we discussed Habermas’s theory, as well as some of the criticisms and developments of it.

On Wednesday afternoon, I went to a training session for Adam Matthew Digital’s primary source collections. I had so much work to do that I didn’t really want to go, but I was really glad that I did. As an early modernist, there are only a limited number of online databases that I find useful, but I was quite pleased to see a couple of collections that could be really useful for my teaching next year. I’m going to have to spend a bit of time looking into them in more depth over the summer. The other bit of good news from work is that we now have access to the State Papers Online, which is going to make it much easier to make progress on my Pilgrimage of Grace project (if, of course, I chance to spend any time on it).

On Thursday evening, I watched episode 4 of Art That Made Us on BBC2, mainly because it covered the Stuart period and I thought it might have something in it I could use for teaching. I was very pleased to see John Gallagher as one of the talking heads, and glad to see them feature Tears of Ireland, the graphic English anti-Catholic propaganda piece, as one of the artworks. I thought I might be able to use the section on Aphra Behn’s The Rover for teaching Hist235, Making Modern Britain, next year. Assuming I’m teaching it, of course. So this evening, I’m writing this while watching episode 3 on the Elizabethan period, and John has been joined by my friend Katherine Butler, which has been really lovely to see. It’s made my week, really.