Between now and September, the site will publish a number of interviews with historians as part of the review process. Two initial discussions, with Edward Muir and Niall Atkinson, have recently been posted. Several more will follow shortly.

Blogging technology has created new opportunities for postgraduate historians to engage with specialist and non-specialist audiences, and to demonstrate the impact of their work by creating and informing new, virtual, public spheres and spaces. While there are a number of for-profit blog training courses in the private sector, there is no training provision in blogging as a method of public engagement for postgraduate historians.

The History Blogging Project aims to fill this gap by developing a set of training resources that will enable postgraduate historians to create, maintain and publicise a blog on their research. The Project tackles issues specific to writing about historical research on a blog, but also includes themes relevant to any postgraduate student in the arts and humanities. Through the development of an online collection of how-to guides, advice and examples taken from current history blogs, the Project aims both to inspire postgraduate historians to blog and to challenge existing bloggers to think about the ways in which they share their research with a range of different audiences.

At the same time, the Project aims to create a forum in which postgraduate historians can network and publicise their blogs.

The Project will culminate in a one-day training workshop on Tuesday 19 April at the History Faculty, University of Oxford. This workshop will aim to train postgraduate historians who are new to blogging in the methods and skills needed to maintain a blog aimed at specialist and non-specialist audiences. Feedback from the workshop will be used to finalise a set of online, free-to-access training resources on blogging as a method of public engagement. If you are interested in attending the workshop, either as a speaker or participant, please get in touch via the Project’s Contact page.

If you are interested in contributing to the project, please see the Contribute to the Project page for details of how to get involved.

You can find out more at http://www.historybloggingproject.org/

JOURNAL OF THE NORTHERN RENAISSANCE 2.1 (Spring 2010)
MEMORY AND THE NORTHERN RENAISSANCE

We are delighted to announce the publication of the Spring 2010 issue of the online, interdisciplinary Journal of the Northern Renaissance, dedicated to the theme of memory. You can view the journal at www.northernrenaissance.org.

Issue 2.1 Contents

❖ Editorial: Imagining the Past, Remembering the Future
R.W. Maslen

❖ Andrew Bairhum. Giovanni Ferrerio and the ‘Lighter Style of Painting’
Michael Bath

❖ Remembering Aemilia Lanyer
Kate Chedgzoy

❖ ‘A memorie nouriched by images’: Reforming the Art of Memory in William Fowler’s Tarantula of Love
Elizabeth Elliott

❖ The Spectral Historiopoetics of the Mirror for Magistrates
Donald Jellerson

❖ Re(-)Membering Women: Protestant Women’s Victim Testimonies during the Irish Rising of 1641
Naomi McAreavey

❖ ‘A good Booke is the pretious life-blood of a master-spirit’: Recollecting Relics in Post-Reformation English Writing
Lucy Razzall

❖ ‘[R]emember, with advantages’: Creating Memory in Shakespeare’s Henry V
Rebecca Warren-Heys

❖ ‘With such a Wife ’tis heaven on earth to dwell’: Memorialising Early Modern Englishwomen
Marion Wynne-Davies

❖ Review Article: The New Globalism’s Bubble
Douglas Bruster

JNR also publishes book reviews on a rolling basis, so do check the site regularly. We are also inviting submissions for issue 3 of the journal. The deadline for submissions is 31 August 2010. You can find the Call for Papers on any aspect of the Northern Renaissance at our homepage, www.northernrenaissance.org.

–
Journal of the Northern Renaissance
(ISSN: 1759-3085)
http://northernrenaissance.org
Northern Renaissance Email
Editors: Patrick Hart and Sebastiaan Verweij

PRESS RELEASE
30 March 2010

British Library successfully stops English naval explorer’s journal from sailing abroad

The British Library has acquired a previously unknown journal of British naval pioneer, Sir John Narbrough, thanks to a £200,000 grant from the National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF) and the generous support of Dr Bernard H Breslauer, the Gosling Foundation and other individual donors.

This rare manuscript provides the fullest known account of Narbrough’s voyage to South America from 1669-71 and contains unrecorded maps and unresearched information on British exploration and social and political history. It also includes an account of Narbrough’s earlier voyage to the Caribbean in the heyday of the buccaneers.

An explorer, navigator and close friend of Samuel Pepys, John Narbrough can be positioned between Francis Drake and Captain Cook. In 1670, John Narbrough became the first Englishman to sail through the Strait of Magellan in both directions. James, Duke of York (later James II) had commissioned Narbrough to sail to South America and discover whether there was gold which could be safely returned to Great Britain. Narbrough’s expedition proved that a profitable trade with South America was possible, with or without Spanish consent, and this set the course of Britain’s foreign policy for the next half century.

Sir John Narbrough’s naval journal has direct importance for the history of English mapmaking. A skilled mapmaker himself, he was assisted by Greenvile Collins – who later became the first Englishman to create detailed charts of all the coasts of Britain. Their description of the Strait of Magellan provided the basis for British charts of the Strait until the time of Captain Cook. The manuscript charts in the Journal are amongst the earliest English large-scale maps of Spanish America, with those of Valdivia and Port St Julian being especially important for their ethnographical and wild life illustrations. The drawings illustrating the charts include naïve and charming depictions of the peoples and animals of South America

Peter Barber, Head of Map Collections at the British Library, said:

“We are thrilled that Sir John Narbrough’s Naval Journal – a real hidden treasure – has been saved for the nation’s seafaring heritage. It is arguably the first English modern nautical journal and shows that Narbrough was a much more significant figure than previously thought. The charts that accompany the journal correspond to every child’s idea of what a buccaneer’s map looks like yet their artistic naivety is accompanied by technical sophistication of a high order, as well as important ethnographical, zoological and political information which can now be discovered by all at the British Library.”

Carole Souter, Chief Executive of the NHMF, said:

“As the National Heritage Memorial Fund marks 30 years of safeguarding the nation’s most important heritage, we are delighted that our grant has helped save these fascinating papers for the nation. Naval exploration is such an important part of our national story and Sir John Narbrough’s journal and manuscripts shine a light on a key moment in Britain’s sea-faring history.”

Sir John Narbrough’s naval journal will be displayed in the Sir John Ritblat Gallery: Treasures of the British Library from May. The draught of Magellan Straits, drawn by Captain John Narbrough in 1670, will be displayed in the British Library’s new exhibition: Magnificent Maps: Power, Propaganda and Art which opens on 30 April (free admission). See: www.bl.uk/magnificentmaps

The total cost to purchase the naval journal of Sir John Narbrough was £310,000. This acquisition complements the British Library’s existing map collections of 4½ million atlases, maps, globes and books on cartography, dating from the fifteenth century to the present day. Once catalogued, Sir John Narbrough’s naval journal will be readily accessible to researchers through the Library’s Reading Rooms at St Pancras.

The acquisition was made possible due to a temporary export bar which was placed on the journal by the Culture Minister. The Minister’s ruling followed a recommendation by the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest, administered by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA).

Ends

For more information please contact
Julie Yau, Arts Press Officer, British Library
020 7412 7237 / Julie Yau

See Help Save John Narbrough’s Journal for information about the original appeal.

Since September 2008, the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project team at Queen Mary has been making a comprehensive study of the membership of the English convents in exile. That is, the period between the opening of the first English convent in Brussels to the nuns’ return to England as a result of the French Revolution and associated violence. Most were enclosed convents, in theory cut off from the outside world. However in practice the nuns were not isolated and their contacts and networks spread widely.

As well as studying the members and their families the project is collecting data on sponsors and patrons on both sides of the Channel.

This website will provide a range of materials for the history of the convents, including edited texts as they are finished and ultimately a fully searchable database of members.

Visit the homepage at http://www.history.qmul.ac.uk/wwtn/index.html for more information about the project. And see http://www.history.qmul.ac.uk/wwtn/links.html for some links to monastic connections.

On 29 June 2010 Dr Caroline Bowden, project manager, Dr Katharine Keats-Rohan, research fellow, and Dr Katrien Daemen DeGelder, research officer, will be giving a joint paper at the Institute of Historical Research’s ‘Religious History of Britain 1500-1800′ seminar entitled ‘Free Will and Enclosure: Recruitment and Motivation in the English Convents in Exile 1600-1700′. (International Relations Room, IHR, 5 pm)

The history and historical culture of the French-speaking world is a major field of interest among English-speaking scholars. The purpose of this series is to publish a range of shorter monographs and studies, between 25,000 and 50,000 words long, which illuminate the history of this community of peoples between the end of the Middle Ages and the late twentieth century. This series of midigraphs covers the full span of historical themes relating to France: from political history, through military/naval, diplomatic, religious, social, financial, cultural and intellectual history, art and architectural history, to literary culture. Titles in the series are rigorously peer-reviewed through the editorial board and external assessors, and are published as both e-books and paperbacks.

The first title, now available, is: “The New enfant du siècle: Joseph de Maistre as a Writer”, edited by Carolina Armenteros and Richard A. Lebrun (St Andrews, 2010: ISBN 978-1-907548-00-0 [paperback]; ISBN 978-1-907548-01-7 [e-book])

The titles in this series are FREE, and libraries are warmly invited to establish an e-book link in their catalogue systems to this series. To link your webbrowser or your university library to the series and its titles see here.

For further details on this series, and on how to publish in it, please contact the editor-in-chief, Dr Guy Rowlands, at the University of St Andrews.

You can find out more about the day at http://www.followamuseum.com/. A list of Twittering museums is available at http://www.followamuseum.com/countries.html.

Or you can follow some museums already listed at http://twitter.com/BirkbeckEMS/museums-galleries. (I’ll be adding to this throughout February so if you know of any museums that are likely to offer items of early modern interest do let me know!)

Highlights include William Stukeley’s ‘Life of Newton’ which has been in the news this week, ‘The Constitutions of Carolina’, Richard Waller’s watercolours of English flowers and grasses, and samples of calligraphy and natural history drawings.

The Turning the Pages homepage is here: http://www.royalsociety.org/Turning-the-Pages/#.

Thanks go to Robin Rowles for this link. (I’ve not had a chance to try it out myself!)

H-Albion is an H-Net discussion group for British and Irish History.

Please send a cover letter and CV to Jason M. Kelly.

The application deadline is 20 December 2009.