Term Begins

And so term begins and from hereon in I won't be able to post every day.  Although my duties are now only honorary ones, I do take them very seriously, being well aware of the privilege that it is to hold a fellowship such as mine.  In practice, what it means is that I spend Tuesdays with our English Language postgrads and Thursdays with those doing their research in the Shakespeare field.  On both those days I'll crawl in too late to be able to write here, although the seminar sessions we have, with expert speakers from all over the world, will furnish me with a lot to think about and to write about  as well.  This week we have talks on 'Business English' and 'Performing Despair on the Early Modern Page and Stage'.  On paper I can't say that the first topic exactly thrills me, but I know from long experience that something which sounds as though it's going to be as dry as dust can turn out to be the most insightful lecture of the entire term.


Some Wednesday's might be a problem too as occasionally I creep into the seminars presented by the Centre for Reformation and Early Modern Studies to catch up with the latest thinking in the historical world of Shakespeare's time.  Just before Christmas we had a brilliant paper on the gynaecological text books published in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.  With Pictures!  I bet you didn't even know those existed?  If anything like that turns up this term then I promise that I will scan the relevant documents and let you see them.  Although I have to say that some of the notions of a woman's anatomy doing the rounds in seventeenth century London would have turned your stomach over and made you very glad indeed that you weren't depending on their accuracy for your survival.