Sloane was one of the great networkers of his age. He was a secretary of the Royal Society of London and he revived the publication of their Philosophical Transactions. He counted among his many friends, colleagues, and patients Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, Samuel Pepys, John Locke, and Henry Morgan.

Sloane was hugely successful in his profession and with his hobbies. He became both the President of the Royal College of Physicians and the President of the Royal Society – at the same time! His medical practice (and his marriage to a rich widow) ensured that he was able to indulge his taste for collecting. He collected books, natural history specimens, ethonographic material, prints, fossils, coins, manuscripts to name just a few of his interests. He was one of the richest people in London and was eventually able to buy the Manor at Chelsea.

Sloane was also popularised the use of chocolate as a medicine so it is clear that he was also a genius who was far ahead of his time! This also means that lots of events commemorating Sloane involve chocolate in some way. So if he wasn’t worth celebrating enough already there’s an excuse to dose yourself with some healthy chocolate while enjoying his legacies!

There are a lot of events to celebrate the life and many achievements of the enterprising Dr Sloane this year. Here are just a few.

Sloane’s hometown of Killyleagh in Northern Ireland has a series of concerts and events starting this week to honour their favourite native son. See http://hanssloane.com for details. The Killyleagh birthday party continues in September with a Chocolate Ball at Killyleagh Castle ‘(dress: Milk, Dark or White Tie of course!)’ and a Chocolate Festival. See http://hanssloane.com/events.php.

London will also play host to a variety of events celebrating Sloane.

The British Library will host a conference on 7-8 June 2010 entitled ‘From Books to Bezoars’ which will include the latest news about the Sloane Printed Books Project. Thousands of Sloane’s 40,000 books have already been identified.

The British Museum is also offering a series of events including a concert and talks. See their Events Page for all the details. Meanwhile the British Museum also has on online exhibition of some of the objects Sloane collected. See them at Sloane Objects. There is also a page giving a biography of Sloane and the history of the British Museum at Sir Hans Sloane.

The Royal College of Physicians, the Chelsea Physic Garden and The Old Operating Theatre Museum and Herb Garret are joining forces to present a series of events for the rest of the year. The RCP will host an exhibition called ‘Sir Hans Sloane: Discoveries, Travels and Chocolate’ from 5 July-24 December 2010. The Physic Garden has a series of events including chocolate tastings througout the spring and summer. The Old Operting Theatre is holding ‘Odyssey of Chocolate’ workshops and Sloane walks in Chelsea and Bloomsburgy will be led by its director, Kevin Flude. For a full list of events see Hans Sloane Our Local Hero Events (pdf).

The Natural History Museum holds Sloane’s famous and important Herbarium which includes specimens from his Voyage to Jamaica in the late 1680s. The Museum will also host a series of Sloane350 events.

Hans Town in Chelsea was named for Sloane (as, of course, was Sloane Square!) – he once owned the land it stands on. Find out more at Hidden London Hans Town.

Why not celebrate Sloane’s birthday with some chocolate and his very own Rum Punch Recipe? Or make some Rum Chocolate Truffles. I know I’m tempted!

The primary purpose of this user engagement exercise will be to gauge responses to the bpi1700 website and database, thus making it possible to assess its effectiveness and plan further work on it. No preparation on your part will be required and it does not matter if you are not familiar with the bpi1700 website already. Lunch will be provided for all those who participate in the appraisal!

The exercise will comprise one-to-one interviews and a small focus group, and volunteers will be divided between these two activities. It will take place over a few hours on a single day. The date has yet to be decided, and will depend on volunteers’ availability. It could be on either the morning or the afternoon on Friday, 26th, Monday, 29th, or Tuesday, 30th March. At present, it appears that Monday 29 March is the most popular day, so the appraisal might well happen on that day, but this isn’t set in stone yet!

If you would like to be involved, please contact Paul Vetch at the Centre for Computing in Humanities, King’s College: this is located at 26-9 Drury Lane, WC2, which is where the exercise will take place. Paul’s email address is paul.vetch@kcl.ac.uk. When emailing him, please indicate which of the dates given above you could manage, and whether morning or afternoon or both. It would also be helpful if you could briefly indicate your status, viz., student (taught or research; part-time or full-time); lecturer; or other [please specify]. Please contact him by Monday, 8 March, so as to allow time for detailed arrangements to be made.

The bpi1700 website is an important, pioneering project and I do hope that you will be able to consider helping the team with their work.

Best wishes,

Stephen Brogan

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)

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!)

It will meet a few times each semester to hear a seminar-like presentation about a given project, followed by questions and discussion, and aims to attract participants from across a range of disciplines who are involved in the different aspects of digital humanities production (content development, web design, database programming, etc). Postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers currently involved in implementing digital projects are particularly welcome.

The first meeting will take place in the Lock-keepers Cottage, Mile End Campus, Queen Mary, University of London on Tuesday 19 January 2010 at 5pm. Tim Hitchcock (University of Hertfordshire) and Robert Shoemaker (University of Sheffield), the directors of the Old Bailey Proceedings Online, will talk about:

Connected Histories: New Methodologies for Searching Distributed Electronic Sources

This paper will introduce two new projects which will facilitate integrated searching of diverse datasets. The first, Plebeian Lives and the Making of Modern London, incorporates manuscript records from several London archives, the Old Bailey Proceedings, and historical datasets from the former AHDS, while the second, in partnership with the Institute of Historical Research, will create a federated search engine for over a dozen major electronic resources in British History, 1500-1900, including British History Online, EEBO, ECCO, the Burney Collection, and the Parliamentary Papers.

All are welcome to attend. If you are interested in joining the group please contact Simon Dixon. It would be helpful if you could outline your area of interest, and indicate if you are involved in a digital project you would like to present to the group. Participants are encouraged to join the group’s online forum. The London Digital Humanities Group is supported by the Graduate School, Queen Mary, University of London, and the convenors are Rosemary Dixon, Simon Dixon, Kyle Roberts (all Queen Mary, University of London), Inga Jones (Sussex)

A call for papers and short presentations (due 28 February 2010) for a two-day conference to mark the launch of: www.londonlives.org.

This new website will provide access, using an integrated search facility, to primary sources containing 240,000 pages of manuscripts sources, and 3.2 million names, reflecting the history of eighteenth-century London. It includes the 18th century material from the Old Bailey Online; the manuscript records of quarter sessions, three London parishes, Bridewell, St Thomas’s Hospital, and the Carpenter’s Company; datasets from the Westminster Pauper Biographies Project; and several datasets formerly deposited with the Arts and Humanities Data Service.

For further details and submission requirements, go to: http://londonlives18th.wordpress.com/ or contact Tim Hitchcock.

From the website:

The Archive of Dulwich College in London, England, holds thousands of pages of manuscripts left to the College by its founder, the eminent actor Edward Alleyn (1566-1626). This archive includes his personal and professional papers and those he inherited from his father-in-law Philip Henslowe (d. 1616). As a group, these manuscripts comprise the largest and most important single extant archive of material on the professional theatre and dramatic performance in early modern England, the age of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, Middleton, Heywood, Dekker, Chettle, and so many of their contemporaries and colleagues.

The homepage is here: http://www.henslowe-alleyn.org.uk/index.html

The Henslowe-Alleyn Digitisation Project has two aims and objectives: first, to protect and conserve these increasingly fragile manuscripts, and, second, to make their contents much more widely available in a free electronic archive and website, not only to specialist scholars but to all those interested in early modern English drama and theatre history, as well as social, economic, regional, architectural, and legal history, and palaeography and manuscript studies. It is the hope of the Henslowe Alleyn Digitisation Project members that the use of these manuscripts in electronic and digital form will not be confined to students and scholars but to a wide-ranging and ever-changing community of readers in a variety of ways.

The catalogue is available here: http://www.henslowe-alleyn.org.uk/catalogue/catalogue.html

Found via @mercpol at Twitter.

The website introduction says:

Hollar was born in 1607, the son of an upper middle-class civic official. Very little is known about his early life, but he evidently learned the rudiments of his craft by age eighteen, left his native Prague at age twenty, and likely studied in Frankfurt under Matthaus Merian. His first book of etchings was published in 1635 in Cologne when Hollar was twenty-eight. The following year he came to the attention of the renowned art collector the Earl of Arundel who was making an official visit to the continent, and Hollar subsequently became a part of his household, settling in England early in 1637. He remained in England during the beginning of the English Civil War period, but left London for Antwerp in 1642, where he continued to work on a variety of projects. In 1652 he returned to England, working on a number of large projects for the publisher John Ogilby and for the antiquary Sir William Dugdale. Hollar was in London during the Great Fire of 1666, and remains most famous for his scenes of the city before and after the fire. He was one of the most skilled etchers of his or any other time, which is all the more remarkable given that he was almost blind in one eye. Hollar died in London on 25 March 1677. By his life’s end, he had produced some 2700 separate etchings.

The digital archive is fully searchable and features Hollar’s book illustrations, maps, and prints. You can visit it here: http://link.library.utoronto.ca/hollar/

Beautiful and innovative, the V&A’s new Medieval & Renaissance Galleries are home to one of the world’s most remarkable collections of treasures from the period. These range from delicately carved ivories and intricate metalwork to Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks and powerful sculptures by the leading masters of the Italian Renaissance.

Find out more here: http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/periods_styles/medieval/new_med_ren_galleries/index.html

And if you can’t get there in person, check the website for an online selection of objects in the galleries here:
http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/periods_styles/medieval/new_med_ren_galleries/objects/index.html.

The V&A’s links page is also well worth a visit. Find it here, http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/periods_styles/medieval/Medieval_Renaissance_Links/index.html, to find out more about medieval and renaissance resources on the web.

The V&A is also hosting a blog to highlight objects and events related to the galleries. Read it here:
http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/1265_frost/

The Bavarian State library acquired two manuscripts relating to the Fuggers this year. They have digitised them and made them available online.

The Secret Book of Honour of the Fugger (1545-1549) is a rightly illustrated book of family propaganda. It can be viewed and searched here: http://daten.digitale-sammlungen.de/~db/0004/bsb00042105/images/.

Fuggerorum et Fuggerarum… imagines was published for family members in 1593 and 1618. You can see the portraits from the 1618 version at http://daten.digitale-sammlungen.de/~db/0004/bsb00042106/images/.

An exhibition of the two books in the Schatzkammer (treasure vault) of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek will take place from 10 March to 16 May 2010. An exhibition catalogue will also be published.