Author: ICH

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Under the surface: SHARP, LDNA and sundry sources

Hits and records ratios from EEBO TCP

When I drafted my abstract for SHARP, I recall a keen sense that my doctoral work was very closely tied to the conference theme, and that—being then in an early stage of the Linguistic DNA project—it was harder to anticipate what LDNA outputs might best speak to the 2016 theme “Languages of the Book”. As others will recognise, a 20-minute conference paper often skims over details of process in favour of content. In this post then I want to reflect on how I brought together LDNA with my own prior research. Continue reading “Under the surface: SHARP, LDNA and sundry sources”

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Friendship by correspondence

As you may or may not know, I’m an old fashioned, traditional kind of guy who rejects not only 1990s culture, but also that of most of the twentieth century with discernible vehemence–my use of letters and telegrams rather than telephones, quill pens and ink instead of biros or word processors, and my incessant ramblings pertaining to how things were when everything was fields and you could hang your key outside your front door without a single worry–those were the days!

[M.F.E. Bruce. From a letter postmarked 3 August 1997; in response to my writing ‘having just read a Jane Austen novel’.] Continue reading “Friendship by correspondence”

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Lost books and Archbishop Parker

“Keeping printers busy and rich was a far more effective assurance of loyalty than any regime of censorship. [. . .] To understand the economy of print is not to turn one’s back on the world of ideas. It is a necessary prerequisite to understanding that world.” 1

As the past tense of that first sentence suggests, in this post I’m moving away from contemporary politics and back into the world of book history. Yet reading these words from the close of Pettegree’s “Legion of the Lost”, I found myself translating his remarks to the present. Continue reading “Lost books and Archbishop Parker”

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Sheffield’s Brexit, Hard Evidence and Anecdotes

Vote remain: placard on window sill

For weeks I’ve been feeling an inarticulate kind of anger. No one cared to canvas in the former heartlands.

The current post is prompted specifically by the “anecdotal evidence” in Charles Pattie’s contribution to The Conversation. In the footnotes to what follows, you will find some additional information Sheffield’s demographic extremes. The main post provides direct anecdotal evidence from someone who works for the University of Sheffield (like Pattie), but lives on the city’s north eastern fringes.

Continue reading “Sheffield’s Brexit, Hard Evidence and Anecdotes”

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One year on

22 April 2015: It was a bright sunny morning and the taxi driver was keen to impart his tricks for the best route into town. (Look, no traffic lights!) It was also the day I was offered the job on Linguistic DNA.

Before Linguistic DNA, I looked to EEBO-TCP to provide context for shifts in the language of bible translation. It was quantifiable language data, enabling me to work out a loose comparison between the first century of English print (-1569) and the fifty years that followed (-1619) and so sample language change between Continue reading “One year on”

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Ruth as deserving stranger

A case study of translation serving ideology in Reformation Europe

Paper to be presented at the Sixteenth Century Society Conference in Bruges, 18-20 August, 2016; session 244, “The Vagaries of Translation in the Early Modern World”
(chaired by Paul Arblaster).

ABSTRACT
Did sixteenth-century bible translation and commentary contribute to debate about social issues? What differences occur between vernacular and Latin translations of the Bible, and what is their significance?

Reading the biblical book of Ruth, sixteenth-century commentators address the protagonist’s question, Continue reading “Ruth as deserving stranger”

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In debt to sundry sources

European borrowings in 16th & 17th century English translations of ‘the Book of Books’

Paper to be delivered at the Meeting of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publication (SHARP) in Paris, 18-22 July 2016.
The conference theme is “Languages of the Book / Les Langues du Livre”.
A French translation of this abstract is appended.

ABSTRACT
Five years have elapsed since the quatercentenary of King James’ Bible, 481 since the editio princeps of the English bible, a translation assembled “out of five sundry interpreters” by Miles Coverdale. In the years between Continue reading “In debt to sundry sources”

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Postgraduate, Part I

After my first degree, I studied at the then Centre for the study of Jewish-Christian Relations (CJCR), now a part of the Woolf Institute, Cambridge. Before graduation, I had taken a paper on Responses to the Holocaust; it is an odd thing to say, but I wrote well on the subject. A combination of that, my acquisition of Biblical Hebrew, and an earlier study visit to Israel-Palestine (with the Council of Christians and Jews) took me onto postgraduate study.

“we were more The Choir than Great British Bake-Off.”

It was a formative year. Continue reading “Postgraduate, Part I”

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Early modern pin-up girls

Lessons learned from the Bible’s “virtuous women”

Presented to the Society for Reformation Studies, Westminster College, Cambridge, 5-7 April 2016. (Abstract slightly amended.) The conference theme was “The Bible in the Reformation”.

Seek a virtuous woman in Coverdale’s 1535 Bible and you will find only Ruth. By 1611, the only “virtuous” people in the English Bible are women. Continue reading “Early modern pin-up girls”