Early Print Image / Texts

Monday, January 5, 2015

The Party Planning Committee

Vancouver, here we come!

The "eat your own dogfood" school of research instruction

Professors research and they instruct, and they are evaluated on both. But the evidence for evaluating research is different than the evidence for evaluating teaching.

The evidence of research (a peer-reviewed publication of some sort) is concrete, authoritative (in the humanities, sole authorship is the norm), modular (one publication is understood to be distinct from another), and peer-evaluated by other researchers.
The evidence of teaching (some student evaluations of some kind) is immaterial, dialogical (insofar as the students also participate), interstitial (teaching activities overlap from one activity to another), and evaluated by students in the aggregate.

I believe that the evidence of research enables professors to have clearer and better-defined goals for research than teaching. This is why I believe that professors understand teaching as a rival to research.

Ideally, research can strengthen teaching, and teaching can strengthen research. In my experience, some professors approach teaching as a byproduct of expert research. That is, a professor develops expertise in some niche, and can thereby share this expertise with students. In the "byproduct" approach, the professor is the center of the classroom, and the students are a peripheral contingency. In other words: the research comes first, the students come last.

Alternately, the "eat your own dogfood" approach emphasizes the reciprocal relationship between professors and students, teaching and research. The term comes from investors' jargon, but it can also apply to cases auto-critique: such as when where Apple Computers replaced their typewriters with computerized word processors.

In my case, I've got a clear opportunity to "eat my own dogfood." I'm researching a dissertation; I teach research & composition. I think the things I do and the things I teach are relatively analogous, and I think my students and I can learn from the same things. For example, whenever I run into a research or composition problem in my own dissertation, I write worksheets. These worksheets are typically:

generalized from my immediate problem to the standard methods of humanities research
informed by research published in College English, Pedagogy, etc.
consistent with Writing Center and Writing Across the Curriculum practices (available through blogs, instructional sites, etc.)
coherent with past classes, lessons, and worksheets

Now I find that there are three big advantages to writing these worksheets that allow me to revise my earlier description of teaching output.

Old: The output of teaching is immaterial.
New: My worksheets provide me with a template for solutions in present and future composition & research problems.
Old: The output of teaching is dialogical
New:My worksheets are open to collaboration with students. That is, unlike the "byproduct" approach, my students don't simply internalize the procedures that I've laid out for them. Rather, I can use my students as peer evaluators for my own principles of research and composition.
Old: The output of teaching is interstitial
New: My worksheets emphasize meta-reflection, which is one of the eight habits of mind endorsed by the CPWA framework for success in postsecondary writing

Saturday, January 3, 2015

Early Modernity Today: 4 January

On this date, 4 January:

1553-4: George Ferrers and courtiers perform at city and court.

Ferrers presented himself at court by coming ‘oute of the mone’ (Anglo, 306), and his entourage was extensive. There was a play on Christmas day; on 2 January 1552 the lord of misrule was involved in a ‘dronken Maske’ (ibid.), and on the next evening took part in a mock midsummer-night revel, which probably included jousting on horseback. The visit to the city took place on 4 January, when Ferrers was accompanied by a great number of young knights, many on horses, and all wearing yellow and green baldricks around their necks: among his attendants were ‘Counseilloures’ (ibid., 305), among them Sir Robert Stafford and Thomas Wyndham. They landed at Tower wharf and proceeded by way of Tower Hill to a large scaffold by the cross at Cheapside. The lord was accompanied by music and morris dancers, as well as a guard of a hundred men in red and white. At the scaffold the lord of misrule's office and progeny were proclaimed, wine was distributed, and Ferrers rode to the lord mayor, with whom he had dinner: later they visited the lord treasurer at the Austin Friars, went to Bishopsgate, and returned to Greenwich from Tower wharf. The revels accounts reveal that the entertainment involved gaolers, manacles, locks, stocks, a pillory, a gibbet, an executioner's axe and block, and other items for imprisonment and punishment.

Ferrers's role as lord of misrule in the entertainments and in the visit to the city appears to be without precedent, and was sufficiently successful for him to be appointed to the position again the following year. This time he intended to come ‘oute of a place caulled vastum vacuum’ (Anglo, 309), where he was supposed to have been since last year, in a blue costume. On Christmas day an ambassador and interpreter would prepare the king for his arrival with his even more exotic entourage on the next day by ship at Greenwich. Again there was jousting and a mock midsummer show on new year's day and a visit to the city on 4 January: it reprised the theme of imprisonment and execution. (Woudhuysen)

1616: James I gives a large New Year's gift to William Herbert.

Pembroke must have organized the Christmas revels of 1615 well pleased by the events of the year, but the threat to his position represented by his erstwhile client Villiers grew far more quickly than the new lord chamberlain could have expected. James gave the young man a handsome new year's gift on 4 January 1616, making Villiers master of the horse. When, that summer, James visited Wilton, it was with Villiers in tow. Pembroke's appointment as a commissioner to execute the office of earl marshal in September was hardly adequate compensation for the prominence of the newly ennobled Viscount Villiers. (Stater)

1618: James Shirley registers first poem with Stationers.

Soon afterwards, on 4 January 1618, his first known poem ‘Ecco and Narcissus the 2 Unfortunate Lovers’ was entered in the Stationers' register. No copy of this remains, although editors agree that it is probably the poem about Narcissus in the 1646 edition of Shirley's poems. (Clark)

1659: Thomas Gumble gets out of bed.

He, however, was quick to secure comfortable lodgings for himself and, on the morning of 4 January, was observed to have ‘stragled out of his Quarters [on the road between Wooler and Morpeth], and found Christmasse-Pie and strong Beer at a Gentleman's House’ (Price, 77). (Callow)

1690: Richard Stafford presents a tract arguing for the Jacobite cause.

After the revolution of 1688 Stafford devoted his attention to promoting the Jacobite cause. On 4 January 1690, ‘out of burning zeal’, he presented to parliament his A Supplemental Tract of Government (Wood, Ath. Oxon., 2.1124). In this he laid out Christ's laws of government and argued that the revolutionaries had departed ‘from the established and fixed order of things he hath set up’ (Stafford, Supplemental Tract, 1). England, therefore, stood under divine judgment. This action led to his imprisonment at Newgate for four weeks. (Cornwall)

1698: Fleetwood Sheppherd corrects reports of his demise.

Sheppard's last and best joke may have been his death, unmarried and without children, in 1698. In September 1694 Godolphin was informed that Sheppard was dead. Sir Fleetwood was able to deny this report himself, while ‘confessing that he was afflicted with the stone for the last 12 or 14 years’ (Redington, 385). In December 1697 he was again reported to be ‘dead or dying’ (CSP dom., 1697, 538), but on 4 January 1698 the report was denied: ‘Sir Fletw. Shepherd has deceived us, and still lives’ (CSP dom., 1698, 12). (Ellis)

Works Cited

Early Modernity Today: 3 January

On this date, 3 January:

1540: Henry VIII meets Anne of Cleves.

On 3 January, after Henry had greeted her publicly on Blackheath Common, he instructed Cromwell to question her ambassadors about the validity of her Lorraine union. Having requested a day's delay (not two days', as some scholars maintain) to consider their response, they swore on 4 January that she was not the wife of Lorraine and promised to have a copy of the contract forwarded to England. (Warnicke)

1563: William Rastell flees to Louvain from the Elizabethan regime.

Rastell's appointment as a justice of the queen's bench on 27 October 1558, three weeks before the queen's death, was renewed the following month by Elizabeth I, but he was unable to reconcile himself to the new religious settlement and on 3 January 1563 he again fled to Louvain. An inventory of the books seized from his study in Serjeants' Inn included a selection of classical authors. Rastell lived in Louvain until his death on 27 August 1565, when he was buried in the church of St Pierre beside his wife, Winifred. During this second exile Rastell is said to have written a life of More. Only a fragment of it, mostly concerning John Fisher, has survived for certain; though a Latin account of More's condemnation (‘Ordo condemnationis Mori’) has also been attributed to him. (Baker)

1600: William Smith registers "Sonets by W.S." with the Stationer's Company.

Smith, William (fl. 1596), poet, dedicated to Edmund Spenser a sequence of sonnets, entitled Chloris, or, The Complaint of the Passionate Despised Shepheard (1596)... There is no evidence that ‘Sonnets by W. S.’, entered in the Stationers' register on 3 January 1600, was related either to the author of Chloris or to Shakespeare. (Brink)

1614: Ben Jonson's The Irish Masque performed after Frances Howard's marriage to Robert Carr.

On 26 December 1613 Frances Howard was married to Robert Carr, newly created earl of Somerset, and was led to the altar by Jonson's old enemy, her great-uncle Henry Howard, the earl of Northampton. Jonson, who had written Hymenaei in celebration of Frances Howard's first marriage in 1606, was now required to help celebrate her dubious second match. A Challenge at Tilt (performed on 27 December 1613 and 1 January 1614) and The Irish Masque (performed on 29 December 1613 and 3 January 1614) were the result. Whether Jonson was aware of the already circulating rumours that the couple had conspired to poison Overbury, it is impossible to say. The precise facts of the situation would at this stage have been far from clear, but the extreme awkwardness of Jonson's position must have been very evident. (Donaldson)

1641: George Coke sent to London.

In December 1641 Coke was one of the twelve bishops who petitioned parliament, for which he was impeached and imprisoned for seventeen weeks. Retiring to his see, he was in Hereford in April 1643 when it fell to the parliament but, under the articles of surrender of the town, escaped molestation. However, when Hereford fell for the second time, in December 1645, he was captured and taken to Gloucester, and on 3 January 1646 the Commons ordered that he and the other prisoners be sent to London. (Atherton)

1661: Samuel Pepys sees women on stage.

Pepys had first seen women on the stage at Killigrew's theatre, on 3 January 1661, as he noted without comment. Davenant's articles of agreement with his players show that he too had decided to use actresses: but he wisely did not deploy them until he opened at the Duke's Playhouse, where he would have rehearsed them with special care. He had recruited eight, and boarded the four principals, mistresses Davenport, Saunderson, Gibbs, and Norris, in his own part of the building. With them too he was fortunate: Mary Saunderson was the first leading English professional actress. (Edmond)

Works Cited

Atherton, Ian. “Coke, George (1570–1646).” Ian AthertonOxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online ed. Ed. Lawrence Goldman. Oxford: OUP, . 3 Jan. 2015 <http://www.oxforddnb.com.proxy.lib.ohio-state.edu/view/article/5827>.

Baker, J. H.. “Rastell, William (1508–1565).” J. H. BakerOxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004. Online ed. Ed. Lawrence Goldman. May 2008. 3 Jan. 2015 <http://www.oxforddnb.com.proxy.lib.ohio-state.edu/view/article/23151>.

Brink, Jean R.. “Smith, William (fl. 1596).” Jean R. BrinkOxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online ed. Ed. Lawrence Goldman. Oxford: OUP, . 3 Jan. 2015 <http://www.oxforddnb.com.proxy.lib.ohio-state.edu/view/article/25921>.

Donaldson, Ian. “Jonson, Benjamin (1572–1637).” Ian DonaldsonOxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004. Online ed. Ed. Lawrence Goldman. Sept. 2013. 3 Jan. 2015 <http://www.oxforddnb.com.proxy.lib.ohio-state.edu/view/article/15116>.

Edmond, Mary. “Davenant , Sir William (1606–1668).” Mary EdmondOxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004. Online ed. Ed. Lawrence Goldman. Oct. 2009. 3 Jan. 2015 <http://www.oxforddnb.com.proxy.lib.ohio-state.edu/view/article/7197>.

Warnicke, Retha M.. “Anne [Anne of Cleves] (1515–1557).” Retha M. WarnickeOxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online ed. Ed. Lawrence Goldman. Oxford: OUP, . 3 Jan. 2015 <http://www.oxforddnb.com.proxy.lib.ohio-state.edu/view/article/558>.

What's in the cards?

What do newspapers, chewing gum, and the SATs have in common? They each raise a different perspective on the development of cards. And each medium highlights a different use of cards: to stack, flip, shuffle, and keep.

Cards have a prominent history in the early modern period. Nicholas Tosney writes in Historical Research that

By the sixteen-eighties over one million packs of playing cards were being produced every year.

Tosney appears mostly interested in the ways that cards helped governments raise revenue. But the article raises other questions about the nature of playing cards. For instance, did balladeers like Autolycus sell playing cards? What is the purpose and design of playing cards?

"Wageman - Fawcett as Autolycus" by Thomas Charles Wageman (1768-1837) - Shakespeare Illustrated. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

1. Stack

The design of playing cards is especially relevant as people try to make digital substitutes. Like other early modern print genres--including newspapers, almanacs, and horoscopes--cards are adapting to the digital era. Ezra Klein's born-digital news platform, Vox, organizes content around "card stacks." AdAge explains the conceit:

To better explain the news, Vox.com is trying a new way of presenting information on topics in what its calling Card Stacks. The card metaphor came after the founding team started playing with the idea of what it means to provide context to the news. "We had a cool idea that context is a consistent layer of where you are in the site, and card stacks pop up and are easy to flip through," said Vox Media's chief product officer Trei Brundrett.

For Vox, the "card stack" provides a physical model for historical and networked information.

Playing cards can be stacked in categories without losing their efficacy. Books benefit from bookshelves; paintings need wallspace; even newspapers come with their own tidy organization. But cards are the flat-packed, IKEA-approved, hyper-stackable medium. That's what we learn from the way that Vox uses card stacks, and other digital platforms highlight other characteristics of cards.

2. Flip

NPR reports that TOPPS developed an app to simulate baseball card collecting. And this app, like all things digital, has a twitter feed:

You knew @TOPPSMIKE wasn't going to do a World Series Winners set without the Yankees, right? http://t.co/y1fBN4zcgL pic.twitter.com/puAdi0jyL2
— Topps BUNT (@ToppsBUNT) January 2, 2015

Some of the BUNT's features are throwbacks to a dead medium--like their digital bubble gum. The app incorporates an animation of bubble gum that I would call a skeuomorph. And this skeuomorph recreates the process of revealing a card.

Baseball cards, playing cards, even tarot cards rely on the interplay of concealing and revealing. The conceal/reveal emerges from play between "recto" and "verso" sides. One side of the card can obsolesce, enhance, retrieve, or reverse the other side of the card. The other card that benefits from flipping is, of course, the flash card.

3. Shuffle

Whereas those other cards flip to shock, entrance, or delight, flash cards flip to instruct. As Slate reports, the educational flash card probably began with John Stuart Mill:

One of the earliest recorded flashcard success stories appears in the Autobiography of John Stuart Mill. In 1810, James Mill began teaching his three-year-old son Greek using what we would now call flashcards. "My earliest recollection on [learning Greek]," Mill writes, "is that of committing to memory what my father termed vocables, being lists of common Greek words, with their signification in English, which he wrote out for me on cards."

Predating Mill by a few decades was an even more precocious case of card learning, this time by a porcine pupil. In the 1780s, an animal trainer named Samuel Bissett toured Ireland with a pig that he had taught to do math problems and spell, using cards labeled with letters and numbers.

Of course I can't resist including Rowlandson's image of Bissett's larnd pig:

"Rowlandson, The Wonderful Pig, 1785" by Thomas Rowlandson - http://georgianaduchessofdevonshire.blogspot.com/2008_09_01_archive.html. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The flash card combines the flip with the technique of the shuffle. According to Spaced Repetition or the Leitner system,the complex sortation of the cards works against the memory's normal systems of forgetting. In other words, flash cards mostly work because they're shuffled.

"Leitner system animation" by Zirguezi - Own work. Licensed under CC0 via Wikimedia Commons.

4. Keep

Of course every other use of cards depends on the durability of cards. Cards were made of cardstock, and so were ideally conditioned for preservation and re-use. Therefore we have postcard preservation in Boston, Chicago, South Jersey, New York, and Illinois, just to name the first page of Google results. Likewise, we have playing card museums around the world, and too many baseball card collectors to name.

And the card itself is a miniature museum. A flash card promises that it can force an association between two ideas. A baseball card promises to distill a player's career into a set of facts that can fit into your pocket. A postcard or a greeting card resembles a fragment of a vacation: often nothing more than a collage of bright colors and strange sights, compounded into the shape of the word "WISCONSIN" or "HAWAII." And throughout these, the tarot deck offers to unveil the history of the cosmos to anyone with the patience to keep the deck, shuffle, stack, and flip the cards.

Thursday, January 1, 2015

Early Modernity Today: 2 January

On this date, 2 January:

1596: Roger Goad reports William Covell for offense against nobility.

On 2 January 1596 Roger Goad, provost of King's and vice-chancellor of the university, reported to Lord Burghley and Archbishop Whitgift that Covell's remarks had been directed ‘offensively and extraordinarily, to charge the noblemen of this realm especially; and in sort also the bishops’ (Strype, Whitgift, 2.319–20). The furious archbishop sought to bring Covell before the ecclesiastical commissioners, but Goad, fearing that the college fellows would interpret this as a threat to their privileges, won Whitgift's consent to deal with the matter himself. Covell, however, was unimpressed by the rebukes of Goad and the other college heads, and seems to have refused to apologize or retract. (Wright)

1618: Walter Raleigh arrives at San Thomé.

Ralegh was released on 19 March 1616, and at once set about planning his expedition. The planning was, of course, extensive, and little he said or did comforted those at court who were determined on a lasting peace with Spain. He discussed with Sir Francis Bacon, attorney-general, the possibility of seizing the silver fleet, brushing aside the latter's remarks that this would amount to an act of piracy: had Bacon, he asked rhetorically, ever heard ‘of men being pirates for millions?’ The Guiana fleet sailed from Plymouth on 12 June 1617, but storms and adverse winds detained it off the southern coast of Ireland for nearly two months. Finally, on 19 August, a fair wind allowed the ships to make their way south from Cork. It was to be a laborious voyage, with illness taking its usual toll. Never comfortable at sea, Ralegh himself succumbed to fever, and was unable to face solid food for nearly a month. The fleet did not arrive in harbour, at the mouth of the Cayenne River, until 14 November. An expedition under Lawrence Keymis, with Ralegh's nephew George Ralegh in command of the land forces, sailed up the Orinoco in five ships on 10 December. Carrying provisions for one month, the three vessels that survived the shoals of the delta battled against strong currents and arrived at the Spanish settlement San Thomé on 2 January 1618. (Nicholls and Williams)

1624: Henry Herbert licenses Palsgrave's men to play The History of the Dutchess of Suffolk.

Though he appears to have given up acting after receiving his freedom [Thomas] Drewe stayed involved in the theatre by writing plays. On 2 January 1624 Sir Henry Herbert licensed a play for the Palsgrave's Men, called The History of the Dutchess of Suffolk, ‘written by Mr. Drew’. This play was entered in the Stationers' register on 13 November 1629, with a fuller attribution to ‘Thomas Drue’, and it was printed anonymously in 1631. Herbert noted in his licence that the play ‘being full of dangerous matter was much reformed’ (Bentley, 3.284) and it is difficult to tell, from the reasonably innocuous extant text, what that dangerous matter might have been. It concerns the popular story (also told by Hall, Holinshed, and balladeer Thomas Deloney) of Katherine, the sixteenth-century duchess of Suffolk, her flight from religious persecution, and her return to England under Queen Elizabeth. (Kathman)

1646: George Thomason buys Poems of Mr John Milton.

In 1645 Milton decided to collect his youthful poems. The edition was published as Poems of Mr John Milton, both English and Latin; the edition is dated 1645, but may have been published on 2 January 1646, which is the date that George Thomason inscribed on his copy, which is now in the British Library. The English section was a miscellany consisting of early poems and translations, Milton's first ten sonnets (including the Italian sonnets), and Comus, which Milton had revised since its last publication. The Latin section (which included a few Greek poems) had a separate title-page, Joannis Miltoni Londoniensis poemata. Quorum pleraque intra annum aetatis vigesimum conscripsit (‘Poems by John Milton of London, most of which were Written before he was Twenty’); this section was paginated separately, and was divided into a book of poems in elegiac couplets (Elegiarum liber) and a collection of poems in various metres (Sylvarum liber). The publisher, Humphrey Moseley, commissioned a portrait of Milton from the engraver William Marshall. The portrait is unflattering, and when Milton was shown it, he sought a cruel revenge by composing a few lines of Greek verse, which the hapless (and Greekless) Marshall engraved beneath the portrait; the verses invite the reader to laugh at the portrait, which Milton says is not a picture of him but of the incompetence of the engraver. It seems possible that the cruel humour of the God of Paradise Lost has its origins in the personality of his creator. (Campbell)

1649: The House of Lords rejects Commons' resolution for Charles I's trial.

The king's trial was the turning point for North. On 28 December 1648 he joined a delegation of several other peers to Cromwell pleading against such a drastic step, and was one of the peers present on 2 January 1649 when the Lords rejected the Commons' resolution for Charles's trial. He returned to Kirtling after the regicide, where he remained throughout the interregnum, living as ‘a retired old fantastical courtier’ and avoiding politics, pursuing his private interests (North, Lives, 3.67). (Stater)

1660: George Monck's army crosses the River Coldstream.

It is possible, though hotly contested, that by 21 August 1659 Gumble had drafted for Monck a manifesto that supported the Cheshire rising of Sir George Booth. Only the spectacular collapse of the rebellion, so Gumble later claimed, prevented the document from becoming public. Accompanying the army on its decisive march south in January 1660, Gumble was at the crossing of the River Coldstream, on 2 January, and recorded that ‘the poor redcoats wad[ed] through the Snow knee-deep, and through the Ice and Waters’ (Gumble, 187–96). (Callow)

1664: Edward Howard stages The Usurper at the Theatre Royal.

Howard's works suffered at the hands of contemporary critics. His heroic poemThe British Princes (1669) was ridiculed by the earl of Rochester among others; Howard himself was caricatured as Poet Ninny in Shadwell's Sullen Lovers(1668); and his plays proved rather unsuccessful. The Usurper, a tragedy probably first staged at the Theatre Royal on 2 January 1664, was a scarcely veiled attack on the regicides. Pepys, who went to see it on 2 December 1668, judged it ‘a pretty good play, in all but what is designed to resemble Cromwell and Hugh Peters, which is mighty silly’ (Pepys, 9.381) (Motten)

1711: The Tatler closes.

It was chiefly through Richard Steele that Addison was able to devote himself to periodical literature, the department of writing on which his fame has subsequently rested. Steele had founded The Tatler on 12 April 1709; it ran for 271 issues, appearing every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday until 2 January 1711... After the closure of The Tatler, a yawning gap in the market must have been as obvious to Addison and Steele as it was to the reading public at large. They responded by initiating The Spectator on 1 March 1711, thus embarking on one of the most triumphant literary projects of the age. (Rogers)

Works Cited

Callow, John. “Gumble, Thomas (bap. 1626, d.1676).” John CallowOxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004. Online ed. Ed. Lawrence Goldman. Jan. 2008. 1 Jan. 2015 <http://www.oxforddnb.com.proxy.lib.ohio-state.edu/view/article/11735>.

Campbell, Gordon. “Milton, John (1608–1674).” Gordon CampbellOxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004. Online ed. Ed. Lawrence Goldman. Jan. 2009. 1 Jan. 2015 <http://www.oxforddnb.com.proxy.lib.ohio-state.edu/view/article/18800>.

Kathman, David. “Drewe , Thomas (c.1586–1627).” David KathmanOxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004. Online ed. Ed. Lawrence Goldman. Jan. 2008. 1 Jan. 2015 <http://www.oxforddnb.com.proxy.lib.ohio-state.edu/view/article/8060>.

Motten, J. P. Vander. “Howard, Edward (bap. 1624,d. 1712).” J. P. Vander MottenOxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004. Online ed. Ed. Lawrence Goldman. Jan. 2008. 1 Jan. 2015 <http://www.oxforddnb.com.proxy.lib.ohio-state.edu/view/article/13892>.

Nicholls, Mark and Penry Williams. “Ralegh, Sir Walter (1554–1618).” Mark NichollsOxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004. Online ed. Ed. Lawrence Goldman. Jan. 2008. 1 Jan. 2015 <http://www.oxforddnb.com.proxy.lib.ohio-state.edu/view/article/23039>.

Rogers, Pat. “Addison, Joseph (1672–1719).” Pat RogersOxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004. Online ed. Ed. Lawrence Goldman. Jan. 2008. 1 Jan. 2015 <http://www.oxforddnb.com.proxy.lib.ohio-state.edu/view/article/156>.

Stater, Victor. “North, Dudley, third Baron North (bap.1582, d. 1666).” Victor StaterOxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online ed. Ed. Lawrence Goldman. Oxford: OUP, . 1 Jan. 2015 <http://www.oxforddnb.com.proxy.lib.ohio-state.edu/view/article/20295>.

Wright, Stephen. “Covell, William (d. 1613).” Stephen WrightOxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online ed. Ed. Lawrence Goldman. Oxford: OUP, . 1 Jan. 2015 <http://www.oxforddnb.com.proxy.lib.ohio-state.edu/view/article/6472>.

Early Modernity Today: 1 January

On this date, 1 January:

1579: Gabriel Harvey is due to give Edmund Spenser four volumes of Lucian.

Gabriel Harvey records that he and Spenser met in London on 20 December 1578. Spenser presented Harvey with four ‘foolish bookes’ that he had to read before 1 January 1579 or give Spenser his four volumes of Lucian. The four volumes were Till Eulenspiegel's A Merye Jest of a Man that was called Howleglas (c.1528), Andrew Borde's Jests of Scoggin (c.1566), Merie Tales … by Master Skelton(1567), and The Pleasaunt Historie of Lazarillo de Tormes (trans. D. Rowland,c.1569). The outcome of the contest is not recorded. Harvey also noted in hisLetter Book that Spenser looked like a ‘young Italianate signor and French monsieur’, a description that gives a sense of the humorous banter established between the two friends. (Hadfield)

1582: Richard Madox begins his diary and his voyage to Wolverhampton.

While Tudor diaries are rare, Madox's, for 1 January to 31 December 1582 (now in the British Library), is unusually informative. It chronicles part of Fenton's voyage, as do three other contemporary diaries; but Madox's superior status enabled him, while at sea, to go to other ships. Moreover, his diary shows his earlier movements, noting places he saw and persons he met. On 1 January 1582 he went to Wolverhampton to visit his brother Thomas, who was headmaster of the grammar school, when Thomas's wife, Anne, gave birth to a daughter, Katherine. (Bennell)

1611: Ben Jonson's Oberon appears at court.

[In Jonson's masques] a rabble of threatening or grotesque antimasquers would miraculously vanish at the entry of the principal masquers; as vice, in an ideal world, might be conquered by the very sight of virtue. This glitteringly optimistic view of the power and majesty of the court was further elaborated in The Speeches at Prince Henry's Barriers (6 January 1610), Oberon (1 January 1611), and Love Restored(6 January 1612). It was a court superbly endowed—so the latter masque asserts—with the ten ornaments of Honour, Courtesy, Valour, Urbanity, Confidence, Alacrity, Promptness, Industry, Ability, and Reality. (Donaldson)

1618: Francis Kynaston knighted by James.

Kynaston, Sir Francis (1586/7–1642), writer and founder of an academy of learning, was born in Oteley, Shropshire, the eldest son of Sir Edward Kynaston (d. after 1638), gentleman, and his wife, Isabel, daughter of Sir Nicholas Bagenall. He matriculated at Oriel College, Oxford, on 11 December 1601, aged fourteen, and graduated BA from St Mary Hall on 14 June 1604. Admitted to Lincoln's Inn on 9 October 1604, he was called to the bar in 1611. He was awarded an MA degree from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1609. His marriage in 1613 to Margaret, daughter of Sir Humphrey Lee, bt, produced one son. Knighted by James I on 1 January 1618, he represented Shropshire in the parliament of 1621. Named taxor of Cambridge University in 1623, he was proctor in 1634. In 1625 he became esquire of the body to Charles I. (Smuts)

1620: John Donne returns to London after a frustrated embassy to end the Thirty Years' War.

Having sought some form of diplomatic employment during the years before his ordination, Donne was finally sent in 1619 on an embassy in the capacity of chaplain to Viscount Doncaster... The embassy travelled from Calais to Antwerp, Brussels, and then Mariemont, where they met the archduke. After this they went on to Heidelberg to meet Frederick, the elector palatine, and Princess Elizabeth (James I's son-in-law and daughter), before whom Donne preached a sermon. Doncaster then proceeded to meetings with allies of the emperor, travelling to Ulm, Augsburg, and Munich, where he met the duke of Bavaria. In Salzburg he met Ferdinand himself, and attempted to put the case for treating with the Bohemians, but to little avail... . Finally, the party reached London on 1 January 1620: James's ambitions as peacebroker had been disappointed, and Donne and his companions had experienced the frustration of seeing their embassy exploited as a delaying tactic by the emperor while the protestant forces suffered and remained unassisted by the English. (Colclough)

1625: Shakespeare's 1 Henry IV performed at court.

The plays continued to be performed through the years before the theatres were closed in 1642... Sir Edward Dering's library contained an adaptation of the two parts of Henry IV into a single play, probably for a private performance. Some characters were already dominating their plays: a court performance of 1 Henry IV on 1 January 1625 was referred to as Sir John Falstaff. (Holland)

1651: Charles II crowned at Scone in Perthshire.

The coronation sermon was given by Robert Douglas—the leading resolutioner minister and moderator of the commission of the kirk—who harangued the king over his personal sins and those of his father, grandfather, and other members of the royal family. It was [Archibald Campbell, first marquis of] Argyll, as leader of the kirk party regime, who placed the crown on Charles's head. (Young)

1660: Samuel Pepys begins his diary.

It was certainly with some sense that his own life, as well as the nation's history, was at a pivotal point, that on 1 January 1660 Pepys began the diary which has made him famous. He opens with a self-conscious summary of his domestic circumstances and the political background; thereafter his writing takes on the structures and rhythms which are sustained for the nine and a half years which the diary fills. He had kept no previous journal, though his dispatches to Mountagu may have been his apprenticeship in reporting. A ‘Romance’ written at Cambridge (and destroyed along with other juvenilia in 1664) was the only previous literary effort he recalled (Pepys, Diary, 5.31). The extant manuscript of the diary is a fair copy, written up (in shorthand) every few days from a scribbled draft, collated with other private papers or printed sources to hand. Pepys undoubtedly improved on his text in this process, though without compromising the authenticity of the daily record. The result is properly acclaimed as an astonishingly vivid and disciplined exercise in self-analysis, a historical document of the first rank, and a literary classic. The diary is naturally the single most important source of knowledge about Pepys himself and his relationships, and his public reputation derives largely from the image he projects of himself during the diary years, 1660–69. As it happened these were all the years that remained of his married life, and the period in which his professional apprenticeship was completed. (Knighton)

1684: Daniel Defoe marries Mary Tuffley.

After leaving Morton's academy, Defoe established a home and business in Freeman's Yard, Cornhill, and became a wholesale hosier. On 1 January 1684 he married Mary Tuffley (1665–1732), who brought him a dowry of £3700; they had six daughters (Mary, Maria, Hannah, Henrietta, Sophia, and Martha) and two sons (Benjamin and Daniel), all but two of whom, Mary and Martha, lived into adulthood. Defoe shared the persecution of the nonconformists and was a lifelong supporter of freedom of religion and the press. He had joined Monmouth's revolt in June 1685, fought at Sedgemoor under the banner ‘Fear nothing but God’, and managed to escape capture after the defeat. In January 1686 he made bail for two widows arrested at a conventicle meeting and soon began to write political essays. He was pardoned for taking part in the uprising in May 1687 (Backscheider)

1695: Anthony Alsop graduates BA at Christ Church, Oxford.

Alsop must have begun to write Latin verse at school: the art was highly prized at both Westminster and Christ Church. At Oxford he established a reputation as one of the most accomplished of a group of poets. His long alcaic ode ‘Britannia’ was sung at the encaenia in 1693, and printed in the programme. He contributed to the university collection on the death of Queen Mary (1695; ode 1.2). These early poems focus on the horror of war, as does a hexameter dialogue for public recitation, ‘Givetta ardens’ (1696; poem 3.8), which also injects some black humour and exploding Frenchmen. (Money)

Works Cited:

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Knighton, C. S.. “Pepys, Samuel (1633–1703).” C. S. KnightonOxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004. Online ed. Ed. Lawrence Goldman. Jan. 2008. 1 Jan. 2015 <http://www.oxforddnb.com.proxy.lib.ohio-state.edu/view/article/21906>

Money, D. K.. “Alsop, Anthony (bap. 1670, d. 1726).” D. K. MoneyOxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004. Online ed. Ed. Lawrence Goldman. Jan. 2008. 1 Jan. 2015 <http://www.oxforddnb.com.proxy.lib.ohio-state.edu/view/article/423>

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