This is the Centre’s 300th blog! To mark this splendid milestone, I thought I would reflect on the Centre’s achievements since the blog started almost six years ago in October 2014 when I highlighted Dr Martin Watt’s forthcoming lecture on the WWI War Memorial in what had been St Gregory’s church (now CCCU’s St Gregory’s Centre): https://blogs.canterbury.ac.uk/kenthistory/war-memorial-lecture/
TAG: University of Wales Press
Virtual ‘Becket’ Pavement – celebrating medieval animals
As this is the last blog before its 2-week ‘vacacion’, I thought I would remind readers about the great opportunity for a part-funded MA by Research on a project based around the St Albans Library inventory. Due to the generosity of a local benefactor, this is a chance for someone interested in Book History and Material Culture to investigate a substantial gentry family library collected in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which covers a very wide range of fascinating subjects. Annotations cover the period up to the auction of the library books in 1938 and the inventory also includes silver and plate, jewels, statues, objects of worth and paintings. This project will draw on comparable ‘great house’ libraries to explore, for example, ideas about collecting and reading habits, as well as the presence of book-sharing networks among this group in Hanoverian and Victorian society. The successful applicant will be offered a bursary of £1000, with the possibility of applying for a further £1000 from the Ian Coulson Award fund. If this sounds exciting and you would like to find out more about the opportunity, please do contact Dr Claire Bartram who will be one of the supervisors: claire.bartram@canterbury.ac.uk
Maritime Matters – Kent and over seas
As a follow up to last week, I thought I would just mention that my hard copy of The Routledge Companion to Marine and Maritime Worlds 1400–1800, edited by Claire Jowitt, Craig Lambert and Steve Mentz, has now arrived. There look to be lots of fascinating chapters from ‘Global Networks’ to ‘Piracy and Privateering’, ‘Sea Music’, ‘Ottoman Seafarers’ Tales’ and ‘Nautical Manuals’. If anyone is interested, please see further details at: https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Companion-to-Marine-and-Maritime-Worlds-1400-1800-1st-Edition/Jowitt-Lambert-Mentz/p/book/9780367471842 and in due course it is hoped there will be a paperback edition.
Maritime Kent and other research topics
This week I thought I would catch up with what Dr Diane Heath has been doing recently, as well as where I and my fellow editors are with Maritime Kent. In some ways the later stages towards publication are more feasible at the moment, compared to the earlier part of completing research and writing where access to archives and libraries is extremely important. However, before I come to these developments, the CCCU Kent History Postgraduates met again this week.