Category: ballads
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2015: Happy New Year
New Year’s Day, and I am back at my desk for the first time in several months, mainly in a late attempt to put together a panel for the Reading Early Modern Studies conference in July, for which the call for papers closes very soon. It’s galvanised me into thinking properly about ballads again for…
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Autumn Break
As we didn’t get much of a summer holiday, what with the small matter of a thesis to finish, we’ve just enjoyed a few wet and windy days in Dumfries. We got completely soaked through at Caerlaverock Castle, the only triangular castle in Britain, went on a boat trip to Threave Castle and saw red…
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“And what are your conclusions so far?”
“And what are your conclusions so far?” I was asked that a couple of weeks ago, and I was slightly taken off guard. It was because I couldn’t immediately come up with an answer that I decided I needed to take stock! I am convinced that the ballad music has more links with…
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Easter vacation
With the children on their Easter break, work over the last couple of weeks has been rather hit and miss. Mainly miss, to be honest. But I have spent some time working on a short historiographical piece about the relationship between ballads and news, which I’m happy to say is nearly finished. In the…
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Easter holidays
This week is the first week of my children’s Easter holiday, so I am juggling childcare with work. Cramming little bits of work into wherever it will fit isn’t easy and it certainly doesn’t allow for extended research or writing, for example. But there are little things that I can do. I went through a…
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Lyndal Roper and news
I’ve spent a lot of time in the company of Luther in the last few days, courtesy of Professor Lyndal Roper and Manchester’s Dr Jenny Spinks. Prof Roper’s seminar on Thursday evening described Luther’s polemical writing as an expression of his masculinity, but surprised many of the audience with his scatology and lewdness. On Friday…
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Musical musings
Last week, during my panel meeting, one of my supervisors pointed out that my use of the phrase ‘based on the tonic, sub-dominant and dominant chords’ to describe a seventeenth-century tune was anachronistic, but conceded that finding terms to describe Renaissance music was difficult. We arranged to discuss it further next week, but in the…
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Panel and Paper
This week has been half term, so I’ve spent quite a bit of time playing with my children. We’ve been on a couple of walks, one round Tarn Hows in the Lake District and one from Wrea Green on the Fylde, close to where I grew up. But this has also been the week…
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It’s gone!
I have finally sent off my commonwealth chapter to my panel, ahead of my meeting with them next week. I’m in a slightly different position to normal in that I was able to send it with a message telling them where I wanted help and where I hoped to expand it when I come to…
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Rebel without a clue
This afternoon’s job is to re-read a couple of articles by Ethan Shagan, because I suddenly realised that I have my 1549 rebels all mixed up together in my chapter and I don’t know which ones are which. This opening up of the ground under my commonwealth chapter’s feet occurred yesterday afternoon and left me…
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