thanks for not being a zombie

Friday and Saturday were awesome research days at the British Library. I found some really juicy stuff that's going to be very useful. I was there yesterday from 9:30 until closing at 5:00 yesterday, and I was so excited by what I was finding that I didn't want to leave.

My time has not been filled only with work, however. Friday night I saw a very good production of Henry IV Part 1 with Laurie and her friend Jessica at the National Theatre. Tuesday night we'll catch the second part. Jessica totally kicks ass for landing tickets to supposedly sold-out shows.

Last night my friend Nancy and I headed out to the hip joint of the moment, which goes by the name of the Boogaloo. It's supposed to be the place to see and be seen, but it seemed just like any other pub I've been to in London. Well, there was one difference: the beer was about twice as expensive. Still, it was fun to hang out there, and the way the juke box works is pretty cool. The rumor is that Coldplay went there once to take in (or contribute to) the vibe and got angry when no one recognized them.

Today was an eighteenth-century geek's idea of paradise. Nancy and I shared a delicious lunch at a Thai restaurant, then visited Dennis Severs' House (see photo below), which is one part living history site and two parts happening.

Subsequently, we walked up City Road to John Wesley's chapel, built in the 1760s, and to Bunhill Fields, the Nonconformists' cemetery right across the street.

The Museum of London was our next stop, and coincidentally enough, there is a sculpture next to the entrance that marks the site of John Wesley's conversion experience; Wesley described feeling a "strange warming of the heart" while walking along Aldersgate Street. Not exactly the most dramatic of descriptions given that some of Wesley's evangelical peers were passing out and speaking in tongues.

The Museum of London is a well-done presentation of the history of the city, with artifacts from the last several hundred years. We each bought a reproduction of a 1745 London map, and then headed straight for the Restoration and eighteenth-century sections, which has an exhibit on the Great Fire of 1666, and then several other exhibits organized thematically around themes like "printing" or "prison." Perhaps I'm making it sound too dry, but it really is well done. I especially like this "sermon glass".

Next on the agenda: more walking! We ended up at a pub for a couple of pints of John Courage (produced by a brewery founded in 1787), and capped off the day with dinner at an Indian restaurant of my favorite kind.

Now I'm going to bed...

Continue reading "busy few days" »

Posted by at 5:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Making my work public, dear reader, I provide for your reading pleasure a couple of questions I've just posted to c18-L, the email discussion group for eighteenth-century studies:

Continue reading "18th-C British Religious Periodicals" »

Posted by at 4:38 PM | Permalink

Dang, these things take longer to write than you'd think they would!

Continue reading "rewriting religious history: the case of methodism" »

Posted by at 2:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

I was lucky enough to see the legendary Patti Smith and her band perform on Friday night, and they were absolutely amazing. If that's not enough, Television was the opening act. In other news, yesterday I sustained a small wound to my forehead, and pride, when I walked smack into a pole on the sidewalk. I was walking along when I noticed a poster for an upcoming performance by a band I saw a long time ago, and as I was looking over my shoulder and thinking when that was ... WHAM! stars...pain...blood. Today I'm nursing a swollen eye, but it's not black, thankfully.

My research is going well at the Methodist Archives here in Manchester, if a bit slowly. It always takes longer than I predict it will to work through the material. I could do with a good six months here, frankly. I'd like to share with you, dear reader, some of my research and thinking process:

Last year, towards the end of my trip, I was very excited to happen upon Samuel Bradburn's Bible, a discovery that resulted from blind luck. Bradburn (1751-1816) was an itinerant lay preacher who became so well known for his pulpit performances that he was referred to as the Methodist Demosthenes. He began his itinerancy in 1774 in the Liverpool circuit, travelling and preaching incessantly for the next forty years. I found his Bible while going through a box of his papers. Expecting only handwritten material such as diaries and letters, very valuable resources themselves, I was surprised to discover a fat, leatherbound, printed book. None of the library's finding aids that I had consulted made reference to this Bible. I'm not even sure that any scholars have spent any time looking at it before me.

The first thing I noticed was the handwriting on the pages throughout the entire book. Marginalia is not uncommon, of course, but this is really something else. These marks are often very useful for reconstructing the practice of reading, a central concern of my larger research project and of many scholars in the fields of book history and critical literacy studies. Like many readers, Bradburn did write a few comments related to the content of what he was reading; for example, next to Exodus 8.14, he wrote, "The frogs were only dead, not removed! This was to convince Pharaoh of their being real ones, that he might truly repent. Such are thy dealings, Lord, in many afflictions towards thy people!" But compared to the other kinds of marginalia to be found in the book, such comments are fairly rare. More noticeably, Bradburn also drew distinctive symbols next to individual verses, more than a thousand of them, in fact. I am cautiously interpreting these symbols as markers for verses that he used for his sermons. In order to confirm this hypothesis, I need to consult his sermon memoranda. Incredibly, Bradburn recorded a few brief details about every single sermon he preached for 40 years: over 13,000 sermons. Each one lists which Bible verse he used, so if I cross reference the Bible and the memoranda, I'll have a good idea of what the iron crosses were for. This will provide us with some valuable clues about the practice of preaching and the ways in which it was interwoven with reading. This cross reference will have to wait until I return to American, however, where the memoranda are available on microfilm. I'm using my time to focus on material only available here.

Most impressively, to me, Bradburn sketched out on the endpapers what I originally took to be an elaborate reading schedule for the entire year, a schedule of study broken down day by day such that in twelve months he would have read most of the Old Testament once and five books of the New Testament three times. Until relatively recently, I thought this was an example of the Methodists' obsessive concern with regular and disciplined reading habits. John Wesley, for example, advised followers and preachers, in particular, to set aside time in the morning and evening for study. Jeff, however, suggested I consult the Church of England lectionary to see how Bradburn's study might compare. Now, I will humbly admit that I had never even heard the term "lectionary" before. In the words of the Oxford Companion to the Bible, "A lectionary is a set selection of passages from the Bible to be read aloud in public worship over a fixed period of time." The Church of England lectionary is to be found in their Book of Common Prayer, and a quick comparison of the BCP and Bradburn's Bible reveals that there is not a significant difference between the two. A more detailed examination might uncover something, but for now, I'm just recording his reading schedule. When I get back to American, I'll undertake a detailed comparison.

So what do I do with the fact that this reading schedule is not, in fact, evidence of the characteristically obsessive reading habits of Methodists? Well, for one thing, it's a bit of evidence that they were not as different from establishment churchgoers as outsiders feared they were. Although the Methodists did not split from the Church of England until 1796, they were long the target of suspicion as radical religious nuts. Bradburn's Bible, admittedly one piece of evidence among thousands, is evidence of an adherence to the state church schedule of worship.

But really, I need to gather more information in order to make any informed conclusions. I need to avoid making too many generalizations based on limited data. Here are some as yet unanswered questions:

• How does Bradburn's Bible, with its detailed marginalia, compare to other Bibles from the same period?
• Did other preachers use a similar system of marking their sermon verses?
• Did lay people make the same kinds of notes in their Bibles?
• Do Bibles owned by members of different sects have significantly different marginalia?
• Was there any taboo associated with writing on the pages of a sacred text?
• How unusual was it for someone outside of the Church of England to follow the official lectionary?

The challenge, of course, is relatively limited time. I could research until the end of time, always finding a need for new information. But the fact is that I am here in England for only so long, and I only have so many years to work before I have to have produced enough published material to make tenure.

Like many assistant professors, I need to cut out reasonably-sized slices to publish as articles while I work on the book. I try to have patience, but it's not easy.

Posted by at 10:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

There's a moment when you're crossing all the time zones at 625 miles per hour, when the light in the sky no longer looks normal, when flight attendants have brought you a meal and you're not sure if you're supposed to be hungry or not but you eat it anyway. There's a moment when the hands just fall off the face of the clock, the gears slip loose from the spring, and you have no idea what time it is. I started thinking of this as "zero time." The passage of time eludes your senses. I kept doing the math, and it didn't seem to help. The inside of the Boeing 777 offered no usual indicators of time, and the trip here to England seemed to be over before I knew it. I managed only about 2 hours of fitful sleep.

I'm researching Methodist communications networks in eighteenth-century Britain: preaching, letter writing, diaries, publishing, reading, writing, listening, sharing. The first day in the library was pretty spacey due to lack of sleep, but I managed to get some good work done, returning to the inventory of books that was completed upon John Wesley's death in 1791. It's a very detailed snapshot of Methodist publishing activity in the late eighteenth-century.

Next, I returned to the Bible of Methodist lay preacher Samuel Bradburn, obsessively recording as many details from it as possible. This book is filled with marginalia, most of it in the form of fat "iron crosses" next to particular verses, which I take to be his system for reminding himself which texts to use when he preaches. Over a thousand of them are spread throughout just about every book in both the Old and New Testament. As far as I know, no one has ever written about the ways in which preachers customize their Bibles to improve their use as tools like this. I don't know how many Bibles that look like this survive from the eighteenth century, and I did not expect to find it: I just opened what I thought would be a box of Bradburn's personal papers and there it was.

I also got a tour of the boxes and boxes of manuscript material downstairs. Librarians and archivists are wonderful people, listening to what you're interested in and then pointing you towards what you need. And each box seemed to contain something unexpected. There are dozens of boxes containing thousands of pages, and as with most special collections, the level of cataloguing with most of the material is relatively general: you know the box contains the papers of so-and-so, but you don't necessarily know what those papers are. Diary? Receipt book? Letters? It's a treasure hunt. Fun and scary at the same time. What if I miss the best stuff? What if what I hope to find isn't here? What if it doesn't exist?

If you want to see something silly and fun, Manchester is currently doing the CowParade.

And just for yucks, here's a brief playlist of Manchester music in roughly chronological order:

• Buzzcocks, "Just Lust"
• Joy Division, "Digital"
• New Order, "Blue Monday"
• The Smiths, "Boy With the Thorn in His Side"
• Badly Drawn Boy, "Pissing in the Wind"

Note: last year's Manchester Adventure starts here.

Posted by at 10:47 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

I've decided to try to cut back on the blogging for the rest of the summer, limiting myself to no more than one entry a week. I need to finish up some writing of a different sort before classes kick back in this fall. Specifically, as I mentioned on my task list:

• A book proposal.
• An article on eighteenth-century Methodist periodicals.
• An article on eighteenth-century Methodist preaching nope, I'm going to focus on my article on eighteenth-century Methodist reading habits
• an article on authorship attribution concerning a particular preacher's sermons. Well, this one I'm going to get started, at least.
• Revising a few grant applications for resubmission and mapping out grant deadlines. This i can surely get done.

Here's the thing: I am untenured, and the path to tenure is lined with publications. I go up for tenure in 3 years (yikes!). Blogging is very rewarding to me, and I do not intend to give it up. The contacts I've made and maintained through this medium are wonderful. But I do need to consider how many words I put out there into the blogosphere versus how many I am putting down on the page leading toward scholarly publication (and thus an ongoing academic career).

One thing I'm going to try to do to get the most out of my writing is to blog what I'm working on. My book project is a significant expansion of my dissertation; my focus is on Methodist communication networks in eighteenth-century Britain, a time and place of new technologies and habits of communication triggering significant cultural change. This is a topic that has particular relevance now as we find ourselves in what is often termed the "late age of print," electronic communication technologies triggering another series of significant cultural change. More details as my writing progresses this summer.

Next Sunday I leave for a month in Europe. I'll be mostly in the Methodist Archives and Research Centre (MARC) in Manchester, but also at the British Library in London. Additionally, I'll spend five days in France at the 2004 meeting of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing.

In Manchester, I plan to continue work I started last summer, reading the diaries, letters, and administrative records of preachers and lay people. Conversing, preaching, listening, reading, writing, publishing, exchanging books, recommending books, selling books, giving books away. Combing through personal papers looking for references to these very basic, but very important, activities is a slow and painstaking process, but it's also very rewarding. I found some remarkable evidence last year, and I am confident that more remains to be uncovered.

At the British Library, I'll be examining The Gospel Magazine, one of the periodicals that inspired John Wesley to begin publishing his competing project The Arminian Magazine. As you can see from this entry in the English Short Title Catalogue, the British Library is the only place in the world with a complete run of this publication. I am particularly interested in The Gospel Magazine because it was edited by Wesley antagonist Augustus Toplady, about whom I wrote last summer. To be able to make the most of my time in London, I spent today reading volume one (1774) of TGM at KU's Spencer Research Library, which has a world-class collection of rare eighteenth-century British materials and is only a forty-minute drive from my apartment.

Last year, I paid a very reasonable 40 pounds a night to stay at a bed and breakfast in Manchester (At least I think I did. The site lists a lower rate right now.). This year, I'll be staying in university accommodations for an incredibly affordable 75 pounds a week, and I believe the walk from my room to the library will take me all of about 5 minutes.

As I was last year, I'm nervous about travelling. But this year I know my ATM card will work, I have a brand new credit card, I know where my passport is, I know my plug adaptors will fit the plugs, I know how to get from the airport to where I'm going, and most importantly, I know my way around the collection at the MARC. Once I get to London, I know two or three people there already, so I'm less nervous about that aspect of the trip. As for France, well it's been a very long time since I've been there, but back when we lived in Belgium, we went to Paris all the time, so I guess I'll find my way.

This will be my longest trip to Europe since (pre-EU) 1988, when I went home to visit my parents and stayed pretty much the whole summer. Heck, I've never even seen a Euro.

Posted by at 10:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Reminder for GHW: check out this entry by H. G. Aldis in the Cambridge History of English and American Literature (1907-1921) at Bartleby.com. I certainly need to learn more about James Lackington, one of the most successful booksellers of eighteenth-century Britain and an ex-Methodist. Megan Benton first told me about Lackington when I met her at SHARP 2003. He published his Memoirs in 1791, and it looks like they've been reprinted in a modern edition. Amazon.com also lets me know that Lackington gets a mention by James Raven on page 180 of The Practice and Representation of Reading in England.

Posted by at 10:00 PM | Permalink

My standard disclaimer: I'm not a Methodist, but I research and write about eighteenth-century Methodism.

My Aunt Donna forwarded me the following info from the Thursday, December 18 edition of an email newsletter sent out by The Writer's Almanac at Minnesota Public Radio.

It's the birthday of hymn writer Charles Wesley, born in Epworth, England (1708). He went to Oxford University, where he formed a small religious study group that included his brother John and a few other friends. They were nicknamed "the holy club" and later "the Methodists" because of their methodical worship and strict discipline. The group eventually broke up, but a few years later John and Charles Wesley founded the first official Methodist Society, laying the foundations for modern-day Methodism.

Continue reading "charles wesley's birthday" »

Posted by at 9:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

What's that? Oh, yeah. My work. Let's see. This past week I submitted an application for a grant to cover travel expenses to England this summer. I'm planning to do some research that will go a long way towards turning my dissertation -- on eighteenth-century Methodism, print culture, and oratory -- into a book. The Methodists were uncanny in their exploitation of the print medium, and I'd like to uncover unexamined details about how they produced and distributed their printed material. Also, I'm still trying to work out exactly the contours of their preaching, for which they earned from their contemporaries a reputation as fanatics. My hunch is that they didn't deserve this reputation, but that something interesting is going on with their oral practice. From the application:

The world’s largest collection of rare printed and manuscript materials related to eighteenth-century British Methodism is kept at the Methodist Archives and Research Centre (MARC), located at John Rylands University Library (JRUL) at the University of Manchester in England. The MARC is generally considered one of the most valuable repositories of primary materials in the world for evangelical studies. Most importantly for my purposes, the MARC has singularly important personal papers of not only the founders of Methodism, John and Charles Wesley, but also the personal papers of many prominent Methodist laypeople of this period as well as detailed administrative records of the Methodist Conference, the national policymaking body of the Methodist Church of England, Wales and Scotland. The vast majority of this material is unavailable in printed form or in microfilm collections; research at the MARC is thus the only avenue of access to this material.

I didn't write this part into the grant application, but depending on the timing of my trip, I might even be able to catch a Radiohead show. Alas, all sold out.

Posted by at 8:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)