Yesterday, Debora Shuger from UCLA gave a small talk on the start of a new project. I still need to read her book on censorship, but hopefully I’ll be able to get to that soon. It was an interesting talk. She was using the case of a tract by Sir Thomas Browne and a few [...]
Entries from October 2008
October 25, 2008
Property and Patronage
Sorry it has been this long since the last post. I guess I just didn’t have too much to report. I’ve been looking into Mabbott’s property a bit more. It would seem he moved up the social scale quite a bit. Frances Henderson thinks he was the son of a cordwainer. I think Williams says [...]
October 18, 2008
The Huntington
I do like going down to the Huntington Library to do some work. If you’ve never been and get the chance, I highly recommend it. My girlfriend and I were there, and at lunch we took a break to explore the old Huntington mansion, which has been brilliantly renovated, and we looked at the Gainsborough [...]
October 13, 2008
A little more of the who and why of news
So I followed up a footnote in Alastair Bellany’s The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England, a reference which I later discovered was also in Joad Raymond’s Invention of the Newspaper. In 1637, John Taylor published a list of where the carriers from a number of cities and areas stayed while in London. He [...]
October 11, 2008
More and more newsletters
I guess I have something of an answer to my question of how good of an agent Mabbott was. I found another letter with no news, just an update on the response to one of Hull’s petitions. It sounded fairly positive; Hull was getting some extra security for its shipping.
More fighting with the Dutch, news [...]
October 6, 2008
Poor Hugh Peters
I found this in one of Mabbott’s newsletters:
“Mr Peters is now growne soe distracted that hee hath severall persons watching with him day & night whoe are some times necessitated to use all the strength they have to keepe him in Bed. hee raves much of the divell, his lookes are very wild and his discourse many times end with halfe [...]
October 5, 2008
More newsletters
So I’ve been looking at more of Mabbott’s newsletters. There isn’t anything terribly groundbreaking in them, but if anyone is looking at the Anglo-Dutch War or is interested in accounts of what the Nominated Assembly was up to, it’s worth a look. I’ve been cross-checking the newsletters with ones in the Clarke Papers, volume 3. [...]
