Blogs and the Early Modern World?

  13th July 2012

---

I hope to use this space to offer a semi-regular round-up of early modern goings-on across the web and blogosphere – the spirit of Gutenberg is very much alive online, and though as early modernists we may spend inordinate amounts of time pouring over old broadsides and treatises (or digital reproductions thereof!), many have taken to their blogs likes humanists to the vulgate.

One of the best things about this activity is that it allows historians and students alike to draw attention to oddities they come across amongst bigger projects. Early Modern Whale is particularly good at this: take this post about a text from 1650s Berkshire about the imminent apocalypse – fascinating reading.

Likewise, Mercurius Politicus wrote some weeks ago about stumbling upon a collection of sermons from around the same period. Students reading this might be interested to know that EEBO – Early English Books Online, the compendious archive of early modern texts which the blogger uses to find these documents – is now available to undergraduates at Gloucestershire.

Even more intriguing is this document – which on first glance looks like an early comic book! Uncovered at the 1640s Picturebook blog, it purports to describe a Royalist conspiracy to make London a base for Charles I in 1643. Students taking HS342 take note!

On the subject of hidden things, and early in the early modern period, the writers of a forthcoming new book, In The Footsteps of Anne Boleyn, blogged about a visit they made to ‘my Lord’s manor of Langley’ at On The Tudor Trail. Well worth a look, if only for the lovely photos!

More where all those came from semi-soon, I promise …