My day has a pretty
fixed routine. When I get up, I normally check my incoming e-mail and then go
on to look at my google alerts to see what has been post online since the
preceding day. There are some blogs dealing with early modern history that I
normally look at as well.
In recent years, I have
developed a database covering the local history societies in my native county
and letting the officers of those societies have information about the
activities - lectures, meetings and
trips - being organised elsewhere. Most but not all such local history
societies have websites but some do not give full details of their events or
their locations. I have been surprised to discover that a few people do not
wish to receive such information and ask to be struck off my list of contacts. One such request reached
me this morning from the son of one of the officers of a nearby society to
which I have spoken in the past: no reason was given. More cheerfully, I met
the chairman of my own village history society in the local chemist’s premises
this morning.
I was pleased too to see
on Sandy Solomon’s Facebook page a picture of two of my friends, Richard Cust
and Peter Lake, on a visit to Canons Ashby, a house built by Erasmus Dryden, in
Northamptonshire. I first met them both in the former Public Record Office in
Chancery Lane, London in about 1980. Peter had by then completed his Ph.D.
thesis at the University of Cambridge and taken a lecturing post at Bedford
College, in the University of London. Richard, to the best of my recollection,
was engaged in his research into the Forced Loan of 1626-1628. They were both
highly interesting to talk to and engaging companions in the tea/coffee room of
the P.R.O. I should add that the tea or coffee on sale there was pretty
horrible. Ann Hughes was also about at that time.
The rest of my morning
was spent looking for a piece by Penelope Corfield that I saw a couple of days
ago but can no longer find. I remember her from the time when she beat me to a
lecturing job at what was then Bedford College in the University of London.
I was more successful in reading a piece by Lorina P. Repina, a Russian historian, on the academic.edu site. She is based in the Institute of World History in the Russian Academy of Sciences and considered the ‘Writing practices in the space of intercultural interaction’. I am sorry to say that I did not find it particularly enlightening but, in general terms, I am interested in the historiographical products of eastern European countries, especially when they touch upon the history of the British Isles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
It is a mistake to underestimate the intelligence of historians working there or their ingenuity in re-working the conclusions of scholars able to access the major documentary repositories here or in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, the Baltic states and Spain. Partly because of an apparent lack of personal contact with historians in these countries or in North America, there seems in some cases to be a time lag with a consequent reliance on figures like Tawney, Hill, Stone and others as if their works still commanded the fields they were interested in. One can find historians in south America - in Brazil, for example, where Christopher Hill enjoys a kind of cult following - who share their concerns but who are much better acquainted with more recent studies. I am not sure what can be done about this situation but it does make reading the works of eastern European historians challenging, interesting and often puzzling.
