Where doth time fly? That is the question. Although here are two answers to where some of my time this month has gone (to my shame). – the other day, I spent most of the afternoon chasing after an obscure geographical location on the coast of the Bay of Biscay, only to realize in the […]
Author Archives: klai
anecdotal evidence
I must tell you a ridiculous Incident, perhaps you have not heard it. One Mrs Mapp, a famous she Bone:setter and Mountebank, coming to Town in a coach with six horses on the Kentish Road, was met by a Rabble of People, who seeing her very oddly and tawdrily dress’d, took her for a Foreigner, and concluded she must be a […]
Another post-it found in a drawer
(I’m moving office in January – well, the entire research unit is – hence more on finding random things in drawers:) Here’s another one: “We had a Parson who was as bad as reading Homer.” – Martha, Lady Giffard to Lady Portland, July 14, 1700 (I must’ve written this down when proofreading for our corpus.) […]
everything I love gets lost in drawers
Doing a tiny bit of cleaning at th’office, I come across small sticky piles of old post-it notes with, for the most part, cryptic messages or references scribbled on them. But there is also the occasional gem: “I am a philologist and all my work is philological. I avoid hobbies because I am a very […]
Rabble of Mac Rebels
Thomas Wilson, writing to Sir Robert Cecil in March 1604 from Spain, describes the Irishmen in Spain (spelling and punctuation modernised): “Besides this Mac Williams here is a great sort of other Macs and macaques as Mac Sweeny, Mac Shannon (or ‘Mac a shame on him’), Maurice Mac-I-know-not-who, Mac an Earl, Mac a devil, & […]
Why am I doing this again?
I cannot claim to be an organized person who follows through agendas to their logical conclusions. Instead, more often than not, I find myself running down tangential paths, chasing unicorns or lemurs or hunches of inklings of ticklings of possibilities. Pots of gold at the end of rainbows, that kind of thing. Recently, as part […]
Wise words
“If you only write when inspired you may be a fairly decent poet but you’ll never be a novelist.” – Neil Gaiman ..argh. *sigh*
Woo, palaeography! (argh)
So, I’m transcribing bits of documents I photographed at the Staffordshire Record Office and the William Salt Library in Stafford last September. Most of the docs are older than the ones I usually deal with, which means I have to struggle a bit to read the handwriting. Today’s post is a celebration of the idiocy […]
more on the vexing matter of assigning dates to documents
TNA SP 94/12 ff.144-147 is a 4-page document entitled: “Note of my letters of aduertisments from spayne, Italy & other parts from Jan 1605 vntill [missing]” In other words, it is a list of letters received during 1605. It was compiled by Thomas Wilson, secretary to Sir Robert Cecil, in charge of intelligencing relating to […]
online presence
I still get a kick out of seeing myself on Google Books: