From SP 94/14 ff. 47-48, Cocks to Wilson as usual: “the news is still confermed that the hollanders haue taken & Sunke all those Spanish gallions, & now is anexed that they haue Carid the Spaniards into Barberry, and Soulde them for Slaues, to say, on[e] Spaniard for 100 of orrenges & 4 or 5 […]
Category Archives: aside
“French news”
Most of the time, Cocks (whose letters I’m working on) includes a disclaimer when he reports on news and rumours of, shall we say, less credibility: “but I doe not beleeve that to be trew / for it is french news” (SP 94/13 f.69r) This made me think of national stereotypes and classic insults, but […]
Demonstration sign palaeography
I’ve been focussing on palaeography quite heavily recently, so naturally that was what attracted me in this image: “Egyptian protesters gather for a demonstration at Tahrir Square in Cairo on the sixth day of angry revolt [AFP]” (Taken from Al Jazeera, © AFP I guess..) Anyway, so questions that interest me are things like “what […]
pig calligraphy
Not depicting pigs, I should say. Look at this example from a calligraphy manual from 1597: Looks like gibberish or code, but then your eye gets accustomed to the nudge in the middle of each letter, and it becomes readable. Voila, ig-pay alligraphy-cay. (The above image was copied from the Digital Scriptorium of Columbia University […]
Rant about code (“MS Office uses XML”)
The new .docx etc formats of the newer versions of Microsoft Office are done in XML. Hence the -x in the extension. The problem with this, however, is something we all know: all MS programs are bloated pieces of shit. Those of you who occasionally fiddle with HTML will probably have experimented with the oh-this-is-convenient […]
“Copious but not compendious”?
I just realised that I haven’t mentioned where the title of my blog comes from. It’s from a letter from George Ball to Richard Cocks in 1617. At the time, Ball was the head (called the “president”) of the East India Company (EIC) merchants in the East Indies, and resided in Bantam (map), where the […]
This is what digital humanities can be
Ok, so this isn’t part of my NaTheWriMo, just something I’d forgotten to post earlier: One of the coolest – if not the coolest presentation I saw in England last spring was given by an art historian and medievalist named Kathryn M. Rudy, and entitled “Dirty Books”. Not dirty as in naughty, but dirty as […]
It’s alive!
I’ve been thinking about resurrecting this blog for some time now. I think I was rather too ambitious originally, and then the lack of highbrow inertia got to me. Maybe I should stick to vignettes? In any case, when Neil recently wrote that blogging is “a nice warm up exercise for the mind and the […]
The blog is dead, long live .. er, something else..?
That really sums it up. Three “blog” entries in a year is hardly satisfactory (not that I’m trying to satisfy anyone per se), so I concede defeat: clearly writing this blog wasn’t as pressing a concern as other things I do with my endlessly bound days.But I might as well leave this here as a reminder […]
dead promises we keep around
Well, this blog has certainly not lived up to its title. But at the same time, I have grown fonder and fonder of the motto of Robert Cecil (Earl Salisbury; 1563-1612), which I think I may adopt for myself: Sero, sed serio – that is, something like “Late, but in earnest”! Anyway. Proper post anon.