Category: archives
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Performing Reformation Ballads in Manchester
The end of October was very busy, what with several Historical Association meetings in London as well as two public engagements. The first of these was a speaking engagement at Ewecross, but the second was something a bit different – a 45 minute performance of Tudor ballads at the John Rylands Library event to commemorate…
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Archive work in the British Library – the way I work
At the end of September I went down to London to hear a paper by Chris Marsh at the Royal Historical Society, so I took the opportunity to travel down a bit ahead of time and spend the afternoon in the British Library. This is something I haven’t done for a couple of years, for…
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The way we work
I was I was fascinated by this series of posts on Twitter by Bradley Irish… It’s true, I think. I was reminded of some interviews done by the Marine Lives project last year which looked at the way historians carry out research using electronic databases. I wrote a short blog post at the time,…
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Finally, a good week!
After a couple of dodgy days at the beginning, the week has definitely ended on a high. I spent quite a lot of time at the beginning of the week consolidating the ideas that my trip to the British Library generated and I wrote a thousand words in a couple of hours, bringing together my…
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The British Library
I spent this week working in the British Library, looking at lots of old manuscripts and some printed music. I’ve been looking for ballads in commonplace books and found some really interesting stuff. Yesterday I looked at the two oldest known pieces of English sheet music, which was amazing. Highlight of the week, though, had…
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Dread Again
[I’m told that for some people this dangled mid-sentence and never got to the point I wanted to make, so I’m trying it again] It has been a relatively quiet week. I spent two days working on my chapter, determined to get something that vaguely resembled a draft ready before I went to London. …
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Christmas 2013
I’ve been rather unpredictable in my blog posts lately, mainly because I used to write them on Friday evenings as a review of what I’d done during the ‘normal working week’ (Show me a scholar who works a normal working week? No? No, me neither…), but since the summer the whole family has been going…
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A Change is as Good as a Rest?
This week has been rather different to normal. Foolishly, at 8am on Monday morning I was at Preston station in the hope of travelling to London, but the storm rather got in the way. Instead of arriving in London at 10, it was lunchtime when I got there, so I missed a few hours’ work…
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The Way Through the Woods
Yesterday I met my supervisors to Discuss the Chapter. I took a list of questions and comments, a piece of work on some manuscript miscellanies that I’ve been studying and some examples of ballads that fitted some of the categories I’d been working on. Between us, I think we’ve managed to find an approach that…
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The Bog – Part 2
You may have noticed that there wasn’t a blog post on Friday evening. Nor was there one the Friday before. There reason was that I didn’t feel like it; I didn’t want to acknowledge in public that I’m still stuck in the bog, probably waist rather than ankle-deep now. In fact, if truth be told,…
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