Martyrs and Mistresses in Restoration London

Just want to point out that we have the product of five years

of a committee that is recommending the one hundred and fifty

books that all students perhaps not should read, but at least be

familiar with before they graduate. And so this will be a poster this size and

we will actually in a couple of weeks be able to distribute them so that everyone can put up a

poster wherever they like on your bathroom door. I don’t know where George Scott, Christian

Plessis is. And we also have this is something that you’ll also find of interest.

This is what it means to be a Churchill scholar. In the words of the Churchill scholars

themselves, if you’re looking for a Churchill scholar, they’re the ones in coats and ties sitting

around around the room like

Paul. Paul Sullivan is a veteran of the British Studies Seminar, has been

on it for years and years. But the point I would like to make about

his career is that he taught for two decades as a teacher

in high school. And this is highly unusual and

commendable given the importance of high school education.

Paul then came back to do his p._h._d in English, and then

he served along with Barbara Carlin and plan

plan one in the dean’s office. And there are many of the planned 1 students

here in the audience this afternoon. He is going to speak with us today

on Masters and Mistresses and Restoration. London. Thank you,

Roger. Thank you for that kind

introduction. Thank you all for coming on a rainy day to

look at some old papers with me. VM

Does everyone have a copy of the letter we’re gonna be transcribing today? Does anyone need a copy?

I have a few more if you need one. The original of this

newsletter is up, which is from sixteen. Seventy six

is in a box upstairs with the other manuscripts from the Ransom Center’s

Fort Timeor collection. We are looking at a digital image from the Ransom Center’s

Web site. Anyone with a computer can read the manuscript

at home or and thousands of others like it.

One aim here today is to think about how such red ready access

to archives changes the way we read the past.

The British Studies seminar seems uniquely placed to provide

ideas on questions like that and ask questions from other perspectives

in mind, which is literary. Essentially, we have a rare assembly of readers

and writers of various outlooks and disciplines gathered in one room and

one of the world’s great archives. Here are some young scholars

who’ve spent their entire research careers using technology

that allows anyone, anywhere to scrutinize documents like this

from a long way away online. There may be others here

who come rather late, as I do to the worldwide digital archive. For

many years I have looked around this room on Friday afternoons

and wondered what the other people in the seminar were up to when they weren’t at

British studies. And today I see a chance. Please help me out

with a sudden survey of what we bring

to this discussion today. First off, who among US studies or teaches

history as your main subject? You need to get your elbow by

your ear. A lot of people here is good. Thank

you. What about politics or government?

Here we are. What about literature and language or language?

Good job. And other disciplines at the university.

What are those, please drink was it. All right. Good

plan, too. I study that, too.

I studied that to anybody else. Law.

Good. Welcome. What about librarians or archivists among

us? Thank you.

How many of your graduate students at the email level?

And how many are dissertation? Good, thanks.

How many undergraduates do we have all told today? If you’d raise your hand.

That’s wonderful. People say this about British studies all the time, but where else do you

get this mix? OK. Now, maybe the most important question, what about interested

members of a larger community beyond or overlapping with the university?

All right. Again, thank you for being here. On a rainy afternoon

now, whom have I left out? I have two more questions. John

oh, John, I’m not interested. He’s

a disinterested outside community. Walter raised his hand.

Good. Two more questions in this survey. How

many of you have used archives on site in a research library

or public record offices? Wonderful.

So you know what that costs in every sense of the term?

And how many of you have used archival materials like this manuscript

in digital form, online transcribed so

we can find much to learn from each other today. My observations along

the way will have a literary flavor, but they’re meant only to prime

a free discussion on the questions I ask. And on any others that

occur to you as we go along. Another of my topics today is archival transcription

to leap right into that. Let’s read it together. Decipher the

first sentence of this letter. Now I have

a very kind draftee from Professor Lewis’s

British history, literature and politics course. And that is

if she would introduce herself. Very

good. So the idea is that Daniella is going to read the first

sentence lines one through seven aloud. You’re gonna follow along closely because

she’s teaching you to read this handwriting as she does this. And

you’re gonna pitch in and help her if she struggles.

Is good. Danielle, a place yesterday?

There might be right on.

I can help you with that. Anybody in the URL? Good.

That’s a V, by the way. It’s not a Y. It’s not you. There’s no such word.

There’s an article in English. It’s a it’s a old letter called A Thorn that

is pronounced Thorn. Here we go. OK.

Yes. Margie could where a young

laughs. Yes. Very important word.

Tell anybody having happened. Good to

green, she herself with

great arts and industry. Pause. Did everyone catch

with. You’ll need it again. Did you see with Debbie t-h?

Danielle. A place.

You know

some things because you know. Well done. Good. And

it’s the cause of it is supposed to be love. Thank you.

They’ve really done. I can see this is going to go swimmingly.

The very first meeting. It is. Thank you very much. We had yesterday

an unlucky accident at Whitehall. Good. Thank you.

We’ll return to this unlucky last throughout the talk today and

we’ll read the rest of the letter together. I bring it here with several purposes. One

is to introduce the Bulstrode newsletters, which are one of the treasures of

the ransom center. I also bring it as an example. What I find to be flashes of

vivid reading that are to be found scattered

through this global archive that I’ve been talking about. In the next half

hour or so. We’ll transcribe the letter together and then we’ll add some explanatory notes

from a single source online. That being the Oxford Dictionary of National

Biography of British Studies Fame. The object of this exercise

is to practice what transcriber does to make manuscripts searchable.

After that, we’ll glance at a variety of crowdsourced transcription projects

going on all over the world just in case you want to try this at home.

And finally, I’ll ask you to talk about your own experiences of this kind

of work as reading. The university acquired

the letter in 1986 as part of the Library of

the Symbol by Karl Fort’s Heimer, who was a New York banker and a major collector

in the first half of the 20th century. The collection comprises eleven hundred

printed books and two thousand manuscripts. The printed books include quartos

and FF. from Shakespeare, several unique imprints. We have the only copies

mostly of English literature. The Ransom Center also has

four times Gutenberg Bible, which she passed on the land today, which was acquired about eight

years earlier than the bulk of the collection. The 2004 TIMEOR manuscripts,

by contrast to the printed material, include almost fifteen

hundred newsletters from this collection sent between sixteen

sixty seven and sixteen eighty nine to Sir Richard Bulstrode,

a British diplomat in Brussels. Throughout the reigns of Charles the second

and James the second. As the Ransom Center Web site notes, the Bulls

drubbed letters make up one of the most extensive collections of early news

reporting in English. The letters give us a mix of gossip, scandal

and political reporting. Often all mixed up together. As you will see,

for the last three years, I’ve been reading and transcribing Bulstrode letters. That means I come into the ransom

center for a few hours a week. Open up the digital image of a letter like

this online place, the original manuscript next to me for double checking.

Then I type a digital copy is true to the original as possible, even

to the point of preserving eccentric spelling and punctuation in the

transcription. I had minimal footnotes. Mostly

to add standard spellings of names otherwise spelled differently

in the letter in order to make electronic searching easier. Well,

we’re going to practice that too. I’ve transcribed about 400 letters so far for the year sixteen

seventy six to eighty and about eight hundred remain to be done to get us to sixteen

eighty nine on the other side of the glorious revolution when

the letters end in the process of transcribing. I have got the feeling

I emphasize that word there. Raw archival material in itself

can be a deeply rewarding kind of reading. That feeling,

however, should be treated with the same skepticism that you reserve for people

who recommend eating raw vegetables or taking long walks in any weather.

Harmless pleasure. Not for everybody. No matter how widely

we distribute documents like these online reading archives will

remain probably for most of us not an end in itself, but a means to other

ends raw material for historical writing. But it also seems probable

now that so many more readers can easily read archives

more. We’ll be doing it. It appears that this is happening already.

Thousands of otherwise outwardly sane people are signing up to help

with online transcription projects that we’ll talk about at the end of this.

Where could these long excursions in unfiltered archives take us

in our thinking about the past or our planning our own reading?

Already, high quality images of all the bolstered letters appear on the Ransom Center’s online

collection, and the first 200 or so of the fifteen hundred

also have searchable transcriptions online. Eventually, they all will.

Transcriptions help readers decipher old handwriting, but

because they’re machine readable, they also provide the power to search the whole text

for selected words very quickly. Most of us conduct keyword searches every day

just to shop. But for the record, I’ll illustrate by searching for

a name that shows up later in our letter. Suppose that you were writing a study of Louise

Dychtwald, the Duchess of Portsmouth, one of the mistresses of King Charles

the second. That’s the piece that Sarah just did for us. And this is what

I got when I searched for Duchess of Portsmouth on the HRC Web site.

I instantly found seven of the Bowl Strutt letters. These are thumbnails of the letters.

That mentioned at some point the Duchess of Portsmouth in those terms in the text.

In other words. If you were studying the duchess,

you could that quickly find seven primary documents that touched your subject.

What you find in them might be nothing new for you or it might be an unexpected

treasure. The miracle of this for people who know the paper archive

is that this happens so quickly. So

even if that word searches are not going to replace reading anymore

than using an index in the back of a book, did the best bit that I’ve

found so far about the Duchess of Portsmouth, for example, appears in the letter of May 16 76

from the same newsletter office that sent out our letter.

These letters came actually from two or more newsletter offices. More about

that. The Duchess is never mentioned by name, but we get a waspish account

of the waning powers of some unnamed

lady at the core. Many are apt to suspect

that our prime is she favor it is not so

secure in her greatness is to be out of all danger of being shaken. But quite

contrary. Some of our court mimics do begin to be so free with her already

as to represent and personage her something comically

in some company where such jests would not have taken formerly.

This is looked upon by others as a dangerous symptom

of the symptom. Language, I think, refers to the persistent

rumor that she was a spreader of venereal disease. But that’s for a scholar to work out using

the transcription. This report, whether it’s true or false,

whether it’s idle, fabricated gossip or actually true,

I would argue gives us valuable glimpse of what a faltering

power at court would have looked like and felt like in August of

sixteen seventy six. Now to the transcription job

to make sure that anyone studying the duchess could find this passage even though her name’s

not there. A transcriber could and should add

a little footnote. Our prime she favorite probably Louise dickhole,

Duchess of Portsmouth, et cetera. Well, that’s in the electronic record, a search for

the Duchess of Portsmouth without this document to the six that I share, 7:07 that I showed

you, if I’m making sense.

She was the K labels her as a Brit on doesn’t a ton, doesn’t it? Yeah.

Searchable transcriptions are a booming industry these days.

Libraries and archives want to get more eyes on their texts and they’re putting their collections

online in huge numbers. For example, a consortium of research libraries

text creation partnership has produced searchable transcripts of one hundred

and twenty five thousand books printed before seventeen hundred. This is basically the short pile

catalog. Both its iterations and scholars who study the 16th

and 17th centuries rely on the consortium’s database called Early English Books

Online as anyone using Ebo.

You can hardly believe what you have in front of you when you open it. The book itself, which you can turn

image by image and a searchable transcription of most of them, and it’s growing

all the time. When I searched in Ebo for the Duchess of

that’s early English books online for the Duchess of Portsmouth, I found this

document that’s the famous painting of her in the National Gallery in London. The National

Portrait Gallery by Peter Leili. I found this printed document

and its transcription. Sorry.

It is an indictment of the Duchess of Portsmouth

on 22 criminal counts, including exposing the king to

nauseous and contagious dust tempers and acting

as a foreign agent for the king of France and the Pope. As it happened, she probably was doing

those things, at least in effect. This name search

made a fast connection to a printed document that shows Portsmith, among other things,

had survived in power for years after the manuscript

with the court mimics and it was predicting her downfall

for a footnote. The Dictionary of National Biography tells us that the king

suspended parliament, prorogued parliament before the indictment could be brought against

her there. And now, before we wonder anymore into court intrigue. Let’s go back to transcribing

our own letter from the death of our nameless laughs. The news

writer turns to a rich young woman contemplating a marriage all mode.

We will begin at line 7. And who? Thank

you. And it’s Sarah. Thank you.

Thank you. Your first

between. Good job.

Good job. I can read that line. Anybody?

Lord Harry Herrod is good and that is an open paran sell cheap. This

much to tell you. That’s an open Perens.

Bureau marshal. So the Earl Marshal, Sun and

lady in the Yetta Wentworth’s

now quite often the

young lady refusing currency is said.

Nice to meet you. He said

he said to keep up on this case. So I did.

Which which is which is which show affection in our

age. Maybe patient. It’s so odd and

exception. It has actually occurred. And now everybody pay attention in our age. The next word

is yes, that actually this is a clerk.

We convenience an abbreviation. The Y just takes the

place of t-h. You fill in the vowels yourself. So so in our age

that back to you that

that means leadership

and you see the ship syncopated. Almost lost her credit

card and is looked upon as somewhat

unreasonable not to say worse

for effecting or.

Anybody for concider good expecting

or desiring, expecting to have

a.

Oh man to herself.

So in these first two reports, the unlucky last,

the unreasonable lady, we hear notes of cynicism and even debauchery

that are typical of restoration Reik. And we might make some assumptions

about our newsreader. But because of the slippery nature of tone

in any language, especially in the letters from this particular office, the coalman office.

The effects of the report really remain unclear, I think. Could the Wentworth

episode that we just read just as easily be an ironic comment

by a conservative observer on the state of modern

marriage? So odd and exception in our day.

Is there a fixed answer to that? In the absence of a verifiable historical

answer, I ask a literary question. How can factual

ambiguity add truth to historical narrative?

What could be the value of dwelling for a time? Say the time it takes to read a letter

inside the bafflement that prevails at any moment in history.

How do these reports about two young women have no apparent political importance?

Move us closer to the way things were in August 16 76 without

knowing yes or no about this questions Graney

and even Grimey. As the letters may be, they can’t precisely be bunched with

history from below. The bulk of the news letters came to Sir Richard Bulstrode from the

office, from an office at Whitehall, a center of British state power.

Then and now, many of the letters report on treaties, military operations,

promotions in the Navy, promotions in the church. A venture to find a north east.

Passage to the Americas. Acts of Parliament limiting the import

of Irish cattle or requiring that English woolen goods be

used in burial wrappings. The waxing and waning of favorites

at court is a favorite subject, but the letters occasionally report from

a lower social register that was of a nameless class

or the drowning of an old woman in the ditch. The old woman, it’s true, turns out to be Nell Gwyn

mother now Grennan, another royal mistress. In these old letters,

the personal and the peculiar infuse the public and the public

in the political at every moment. Now back to transcribing

third and final report in our letter goes to the troubles of the Queen of England.

And so I think we need a little more context up front for this one. The recipient, Sir

Richard Bulstrode, was a staunch royalist, but he was also a Catholic,

more or less secret. Secretly, after the Tests Act of 16 73, his religion

would have actually cost him his government job. An important subset

of his newsletters come from

not Whitehall, but other well-placed informants in our letter

and also the earlier letter about the XI favorite court. Both come from the office

of one Edward Coleman, who is a secretary in the household of the Duchess of

York, wife of James, the much embattled heir apparent.

The King’s brother, and the two hundred and thirty five letters that we have from

Coleman’s office tend to insinuation,

sensation and news concerning Catholics.

They are much more fun than the ones from Whitehall and certainly more stylish as a writing

Coleman. Edward Coleman, like his subscriber Bulstrode and their patron James,

was a Catholic convert. His newsletter business may have provided a Catholic

news feed. To supplement JM Bulstrode more orthodox

sources as at Whitehall at the time of our letter, anti-Catholic sentiment was causing

particular trouble for the Queen, Catherine and Berganza. Her isolation as

a foreigner and a Catholic was aggravated by the fact that she had failed to

produce even one heir to the throne. Moreover, the King,

under pressure from Parliament, felt compelled now and then to expel conspicuous

Catholics from court. That explains the main event reported here.

The Portugal ambassador mentioned in the first sentence is actually the queen’s beloved

godfather, who also served as her Chamberlain. That is

running her household for a time. And you will recognize our dear old friend,

the Duchess of Portsmouth, still a prize she favorite promoting

her own interests at court. Who is leading the way here? Thanks.

If you would introduce yourself again. That’s very nice. Yeah,

the person as she is now,

Portugal remembers

her against. No more again.

And and no more and more for the thinking

as this day is.

And his or her case, anybody

care? His other care. That’s the word that I mentioned to you, that it was case

until this morning. Someone immediately saw it was care. Get care in the sense of duty.

Yes. Change care and

charge in the sense of a job. Lord Chamberlain

to the queen has taken

from him and given

right. Has taken it from him and given it to

the Earl of Sunderland’s.

Yes. Which I believe

will be a double

action flick, affection or affliction. Good

luck to her. And who what is Ma

to Her Majesty? Good. Thank you. And

you drew a short straw. Who’s taking it up there?

Thank you, Shane. Shane, I’m a fourth year philosophy major.

Let’s do this. All right. First to lose. Good

man. She herself chose. And secondly, to have one. She

of all men. Least the light. Yep. A favorite

Duchess of Portsmouth. Short one. Who? Me.

Who? Who? Many. Many.

What’s next? Good. Who? Many think he will

take the liberty to take the liberty to refuse. Thank you

so much, sir. These are bold transcribers if you haven’t.

This part of the report stands out from the two others. He takes the queen’s part so feelingly,

after gazing so coldly at those two other women.

The irony that he would look so coldly at the festivities, lady who didn’t want to tolerate

a husband’s mistress. And then the way I hear it

cheer for the queen to resist when it’s her turn to do the same, reading back from

that sense of cheering, do you feel it? Is the writer hoping that

she’ll refuse? There’s no yes no answer, it’s not there in the text,

but reading back from that, I wonder how he feels about the resistance of of Lady Henrietta Wentworth

or even of the girl who hanged herself. It turns out to look like an act

of resistance rather than just scandal in the light of this. But

there’s an English teacher talking. Now we have a transcription, but it’s full of

questions like the ones I ask and I hope some that you’ve thought of. Maybe some context

will help. As we’ve seen the Dictionary of National Biography here, after the D and B

can help a transcriber, answer contexts, questions efficiently and on good

authority. I don’t limit myself to it by any means when I’m doing this transcribing

and filling in notes. But I want to demonstrate today just how efficient it

is as a single source online. The articles on the DMB, as you know,

are signed and they all have bibliographies and the bibliographies common li include

primary sources. Archival sources they’ve read means several cases

where Colman’s on papers are, for example, and.

Using the DMB to look up names from the letter we get, first of all, a healthy reminder

that news reports are not always fact. The URL of Sanderlin,

the Duchess’s favorite, never got the job as Chamberlain.

Maybe she took the liberty to refuse to have the Duchess’s favorite running her household.

Yet the DMV records that two days later, sorry. Two years

later, under pressure, the Queen renewed the appointment of her rival,

the Duchess, as one of her own ladies in waiting. These rivals

were closing ranks when both suffered real danger from Catholic

haters. At the height of the exclusion crisis, the queen and her servants

were actually I’m sorry, at the height of the popish plot. The Queen, her servants were accused of conspiring

to poison the king. The Duchess. As we have seen, was indicted

in 60, maybe the same year. The King defended them both.

They both survived. The King now about Henrietta Wentworth.

We learned from the DMB that she was 16 years old when she refused

the Duke of Norfolk son Harry Howard. And her tale turns out to be not

a tale of chaste propriety, but of romance when she was

only 14. Lady Henrietta, already a baroness in her own right with a large

fortune, had met the king’s illegitimate son, James Scott, Duke

of Monmouth, when they both performed in a Masket court. Monmouth, who’d been married

off at age 14, had a string of mistresses,

a wife and far flung children of his own. By the time he was 21

years old, then he ran into Henry out of Wentworth again.

Soon after, he left his wife and lived openly with Henry Hyde of

Wentworth for the rest of his short life. By all accounts, he was a reformed man,

though never a wise one. After the death of his father, King Monmouth

was persuaded to lead a rebellion against his uncle James, hoping to land on the throne as a Protestant

monarch. He helped finance the rebellion

with a Dutch loan guaranteed by the jewels of Lady Henrietta

Wentworth. The DMB reports on his last hour before his execution.

As a trader, quote, This is the prose writer in the DMB

on the scaffold. After the rebellion’s defeat, Monmouth renewed his pledges

of devotion to Henrietta. When the two bishops present badgered him over his conduct

with her, he broke in angrily that he’d been married to his wife when only a child

that Henrietta had reclaimed him from a licentious life and

he had been faithful to her, and she was a religious, godly

lady as someone to set off another rebel. Nothing in his life

so became like the leaving it. Even the mighty, mighty DMB

cannot provide a redemptive afterlife for the lass whose death

began her letter, the Earl of Peterborough and his lodgings. She hanged herself, was

then a man in his early fifties and another loyal partisan,

James. So the report of a suicide, putting all the

titillation aside, the effect of love, might have alerted

Bulstrode to trouble for a powerful man of his own faction.

The DMB does not mention the incident in its account of Peterborough,

and I’ve not found other accounts of it in my searches elsewhere so far.

Where is the archive that has this girl’s name and story?

If we take this letter as an example of early news reporting business, we

see that from the inception, the business retailed news as entertainment

and factional rumor as fact. And that brings us to the story of Edward

kohlman himself. In August of 16 76, one week

before our letter went out, his newsletter reports

that he had been accused of publishing a popish book, though he denied

it. The newsletter reports in the third person, by the way, Mr. Coleman, the duchess’s secretary,

in December. His newsletters report more of the same trouble.

And by early January, he had lost his job in

James’s household. The report

of that dismissal recalls the sacking of the Portugal ambassador,

and both were, of course, conspicuous Catholics being thrown overboard under pressure.

The line is the general talk of the town. He always wrote of himself

that way, but the way he thought he was, the general talk of the town is that Mr. Cole and by the

way, there’s no reason to believe he was the author. His office always spoke of him that way. We don’t know if he offered these or

not. And Mr. Coleman, her royal highness is secretary,

is eased of his employment. And that one, Mr.

TIFU, a FLEMING-GINN, has succeeded him. Coleman’s office

continued to publish newsletters, raising money, presumably for an unemployed man for two more years.

But in September of 78, 60, 78, the series ends

abruptly. At that time, exactly a stupendously

bold charlatan, Titus Oates, claimed to have uncovered

a vast Catholic plot to kill the king and put the Catholic James on

the throne in his place. Other accusers smelling profit in this

chimed in and started to sing. In the spiral of frenzy that followed,

three dozen alleged popish plotters were executed for treason.

Dozens more, including the solidly Protestant Sam peeps, were jailed,

some of them for years. One of the first votes as victims was Edward

Coleman. We learned from the DMB that Oates got lucky in

going after Coleman, who seemed probably to be an easy mark.

He was a known Catholic and a member of James’s household. So

as it happened when James when Coleman’s house was searched, letters were

found that showed he’d been secretly working to get the French crown

to subsidize King Charles. So that Charles would not have to depend

on parliament or even call parliament. And such collusion with a foreign power

and a Catholic one was enough. There’s a long gap

in the Bulstrode letters after Coleman’s arrest. Even the letters from Whitehall are missing for

several months. But the Folger Library in Washington, part of this worldwide

archive, has a comparable collection, the Newdegate newsletters that include

an account of Coleman’s trial there, a witness claim that he’d heard Coleman declare,

quote, If he had a thousand lives in the sea of blood,

he would spend them for his design to kill the king and for destroying

all heretical princes, unquote. Again, we don’t know if

it’s true or not. What we get is. Words from the time

they’re true or not. Another Newdegate letter a week later

her.

Notes as an afterthought, scrawled in the margin that

Coleman had died a trader’s death. This day,

Coleman was according.

To his sentence.

Good. Drop it in opposite order. Drawn hand,

well and quarter.

Well, it’s been a day, hasn’t it?

Sorry. For a

time after the popish plot broke, the news

was just wildly popular. And

a year later, this deck of playing cards was published with engraved

engravings of crimes and executions

and capture some cases of the popish plotters who’d been killed

so far. There are plenty left to go. One of the cards, the six

of Hearts, carries this image of coalman

drawn to his execution. Sorry.

In a sled of some sort or a tub.

Some of those executed like Coleman must have been, and he was obnoxious

and imprudent and conniving, many of them were clearly

Catholic zealots. But not one.

According to all of the archival research that’s been done since then, seems to have been guilty as

charged. The Dictionary of National

Biography reports that in 1929,

Coleman was beatified by Pope Pius the 11th. Along with

other martyrs of the English Reformation and persecutions

afterlife, Sir Richard Bulstrode sat tight in Brussels. He continued to get newsletters

from an office at Whitehall for more than a decade after the revolution of 16 88.

He joined the deposed King James in exile in St. Germain outside Paris.

He survived his royal master by a decade, dying at the age of 101.

Historians of the period have to filter out mountains of archival

material to make sense of the quagmire of religious faction, royal bumbling

and political conflict. They have to put emphasis where they believe it belongs.

By contrast, the Bulstrode letters sometimes report shocking, even epochal

events. Almost incidentally, the enormous Teys of the Popish

plot are mixed in with prattle about horse racing at Newmarket

about some major events. The letters are silent or missing.

So what can you learn from such unreliable sources? The bolstered letters

in archives generally seem to me to give the experience of muddle

as if we need more of that muddle that inevitably surrounds epochal moments.

That muddle cannot furnish an orderly narrative or tidy arguments

for cause and effect or change or continuity. But

it’s very incoherence can produce for readers

who sometimes like their vegetables raw, a poetic experience of truth.

Mostly subjective, hopelessly personal and intractably

embedded in the fugitive curlicues of words. Stephen

Greenblatt, the reigning dean of American Shakespeare, said he speaks of writing that can provide

a powerful hallucination of presence. The vivid

sensation of lived life, they set the dad

in motion and make them speak. I am not a stick figure in a textbook.

I was once alive, emotionally complex, beset with fears

and daydreams, just as you are now. But Greenblatt is

writing there about historical fiction novels like Hillary Mantel’s

Wolf Hall. Maybe that’s the proper end for all this

grainy archival detail. W.H. Auden celebrates the kind of archival

inclusiveness he found in paintings of the old masters who never, he says,

give us the sublime without the grubby, he writes.

They never forget that even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course. Anyhow, in

a corner, some untidy spot where the doll go

with their doggie life and the torturers horse scratches its

innocence. Behind on a tree. I suggest that reading old newsletters and foals

history in much that way, and not just newsletters and conclusion.

I want you to consider the sampling of online archives from Prime Primary Materials.

Many still need a transcription to make them fully useful to readers.

The British Library invites volunteer transcribers to put its

old card catalog into digital form. More

than eighteen hundred transcribers have responded. The National Archives

in Washington run a similar program, enlisting what they call citizen archivists

for online transcription. New York Public Library is putting its vast collection of

restaurant menus online with help from

volunteer transcribers. Boston Public Libraries doing the same with its collection of

anti-slavery documents. The Huntington Library is crowdsourcing transcription of civil

war telegrams and the Newberry Library. Its archive of letters

and diaries of ordinary Americans in the 19th century.

These projects prompt us to ask how reliable volunteer transcribers

can be, and there seems to be good news on that as well.

Since 2010, University College London has run a crowdsourced turns

discription project on its mountain of papers of Jeremy Bentham.

So far, volunteers have transcribed twenty thousand pages

at a very high level of accuracy, as checked by a professional staff

and reported in juried study only last month.

Online. So what difference does all this make?

There’s a real risk in confusing the archival record with history. Let me be clear.

Even historians who quote lavishly from primary documents will avoid being accused of mere

antiquarian ism redolent of the amateur and the Billiton.

And nobody believes that reading archives online is going to replace either the academic discipline of history

or popular reading about the past. But how could it change those kinds of

reading and produced nuance? Now over to you. As a way of starting the discussion, I’ll ask a specific

question about your experience of teaching or taking a class. What’s

the place of archival materials in courses you’ve taken or

taught at U.T., Austin or elsewhere? Thank you kindly.