Work in progress
The past few weeks have been busy with preparations for the launch of 500 Reformations. This week, I received links to videos of two of the three public talks I gave earlier in the year. I’ve just found the necessary ten minutes to watch myself back. Ignoring the note of mild stress in the voice (I have to get through all this in 10 minutes!) I was pleased to find I could watch it through without cringing. Continue reading “Luther & Language (video)”
Two years ago, Richard Wistreich gave a lecture and masterclass as part of a Visiting Speaker series at the University of Sheffield. This was during my stint as Coordinator for the Sheffield Centre for Early Modern Studies (SCEMS). At dinner after the lecture, I discovered Richard’s son-in-law is a fellow biblical scholar (and friend).* Richard quizzed me over the absence of biblical studies in the Society for Renaissance Studies (of which he is Vice Chair). Where, he wanted to know, are all the early modern biblical studies scholars? And how do we get them to RenSoc?
Continue reading “EMBerS: Glowing prospects for network in Early Modern Biblical Studies”
Did Luther really change the world? What was reformation? How are the effects felt today?
Kicking off in October, researchers at the University of Sheffield are putting ourselves on the menu for public consumption. In part a response to the question, “What did Martin Luther ever do for Sheffield?” (asked in the run-up to my 2 minutes on BBC Radio Sheffield this Spring), 500 Reformations volunteers are talking about different aspects of Luther and reformation impact. Continue reading “Calling speakers, calling hosts”
Anyone who has heard me speak about Luther’s bible translation will know that he was not the first person to translate the Bible into German. Bringing together Germanic languages, including the variants found in the territories we now know as Switzerland, Austria, and the Low Countries, we might count as many as 18 different bible texts in circulation before Luther’s first complete Bible (and this is without counting variant editions of Luther’s own interim work). The following discussion highlights some significant printed bibles whose translations pre-date Luther’s first published version of the book of Ruth (published in Der Ander Teyl, 1524). Continue reading “Before Luther: Germanic Bibles on the net”
As one whose university career began in the 1990s, I cannot fail to appreciate the ways in which digital resources are constantly evolving and extending. The breadth of data collated within this study would have been impossible without the many digitisation projects, and the growth of Open Access collections.
When I wrote Continue reading “Early Modern Bibles on the net”
The following abstract has been [Edit: March 2017:] accepted for SHARP 2017: Technologies of the Book (9-12 June, Victoria, BC). It will be part of a panel under the common title “Reading and writing to disk: Sheffield and Books in the Digital Humanities”. Continue reading “SHARP 2017: Technologies of the Book”
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”
I am currently a postdoctoral research associate for Linguistic DNA, modelling concepts and conceptual change in early modern English (1500–1800). This is a three-year research project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, based in the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Sheffield.
Update to this post coming soon.
In the first half of 2015, I worked as a research associate on the AHRC and ESRC-funded project Intoxicants and Early Modernity. My work coincided with the transcription and modelling of intoxicant-linked events from consistory (church) court records.
Archived documents from the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries included repeated accusations of illicit brewing, alcohol-fuelled adultery, and other extra-marital deviance (including some unpleasant tales of sexual assault). Continue reading “Drunkenness and naughty vicars”
The early days of my doctoral research were quickly disrupted: I arrived in the Department of Biblical Studies just as the University announced its intent to close it. That step was forestalled, and I had a small role in shaping what became the new Sheffield Institute for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies (SIIBS). Continue reading “Towards a doctorate”