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Putting down the books: when is research ‘complete’?
By Jess Hope When I was an undergraduate, I wrote a history essay where my main primary source was an ‘eyewitness account’ of the events I was describing. It was detailed and colourful, full of vivid descriptions, quotes and recollections. It was great fun both to read and to write about. It was only later…
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Bringing archives back to life
By Alex Wakelam | @A_Wakelam Archives can be peculiar places. Each comes with its own personal variety of watchful archivists, identification requirements, seating regulations and occasionally (for those who’ve tried to enter the almost impenetrable fortress that is the Bodleian) oaths to swear. They sometimes seem like sacred historical spaces (Cathedral archives often literally are)…
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Revisiting Kipling’s Kim
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Obituary: John Bossy (1933-2015)
By Fred Smith | @Fred_E_Smith ‘John Bossy, where are you when we need you?’ So wrote Christopher Haigh over a decade ago, expressing the need for ‘big ideas’ to ‘shake up the field’ of early-modern English Catholicism, just as John Bossy had done twenty-five years previously.[1] His words have never rung so true. It was with…
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A Story about Exploding Bowels: The Bible, Hagiography, Monastic Foundation Documents and the Use of Historical Exemplars
By Fraser McNair Fraser is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of History. His thesis is entitled ‘The development of territorial principalities between the Loire and the Scheldt, 893-99′. When I originally wrote these words, on the 19th November, it was (so Wikipedia informed me) World Toilet Day. Yet the question of human faeces is not only a…
doinghistoryinpublic.org 