February 1742 signalled the end of Sir Robert Walpole’s twenty-year political career. His time in government was characterised by dominance in both domestic and foreign affairs. However, by 1741 this strong hold on the British Parliament was starting to unravel. This makes the period that I am studying, 1739-42, the final years of a long career and a time where parliamentary opposition strengthened and reached its pinnacle. In particular, I will be looking at the Scottish opposition to Walpole’s administration in relation to his fall from power. In addition, I will look to see whether the Scottish opposition was distinct from its southern counterpart and if being Scottish changed individual motivations when operating in Westminster against the Walpole regime.

Walpole had successfully managed a policy of peace abroad, despite tensions with Spain, for several years. Alongside this strategy of peace, Walpole aimed to reduce the national debt, exasperated by the South Sea Bubble Crisis, while reducing taxes for the landed gentry. Yet in October 1739 pressures led to war with Spain, and due to his poor conduct and the growing opposition towards his administration, Walpole won the 1741 general election but with such a reduced majority that in 1742 he resigned from all his positions. This short summary of the man of Walpole is the backdrop to my Laidlaw summer research and enables me to look at specific opposition from Scottish political families.

To begin dissecting these figures, their alliances, and their roles within the parliamentary opposition, my first week of research consisted mainly of background reading from secondary sources. Taking a step back and sifting through the various works on the eighteenth century helped give a broader understanding of the time. Things such as people’s place in society to the inner workings of the Scottish voting system. During my second week of research I moved on to the contemporary sources themselves, concentrating on the Scottish Whig political family, the Hume-Campbell’s, known more commonly as the Earls of Marchmont. Over this short time frame, the Marchmont family held political weight in both Scotland and England conversing with the likes of St John, Henry, first Viscount Bolingbroke, Alexander Pope and the great John Campbell, second Duke of Argyll. My main source due to this was the Collection of Papers of Alexander second Earl of Marchmont and his son Hugh Hume-Campbell, third Earl of Marchmont. Here the task was to pick up upon the main issues of Walpole’s government and in addition, the main ‘players’ in alliances in Scotland and England alike.

Going forward, the next few weeks of my first summer of research will take place at the National Records of Scotland (formerly the National Archives of Scotland) and the National Library of Scotland. Here my job will be to further my reading of contemporary sources, again from great Scottish opposition families, and their dealings with the other groups of anti-Walpole Whigs and Tories alike. When thinking about this part of the research I believe this is where I will be most challenged. The endless mass of sources could keep me occupied for years and years, but I only have two weeks. Therefore, being directive and honing down what I chose to concentrate on will be key. Yet, at the same time, researching in the archives is the aspect I am most looking forward to. To have the chance of studying the sources themselves adds another dimension to these men and women. So far I have loved the research, while overcoming the challenges that have arisen has made the experience more valuable.

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I would first like to thank Lord Laidlaw for this great opportunity. In addition, my sincere thanks to my supervisor Dr Max Skjönsberg for his continued guidance throughout the process. Finally, I wish to thank the CAPOD staff for all their hard work.

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[1] Jean Baptiste van Loo, Robert Walpole, 1st Earl of Orford, Palace of Westminster, 1740.

[2] Unknown, Alexander Hume Campbell, 2nd Earl of Marchmont, Paxton House, c.1710.

My research is called Scots and the Amazon and I aim to research the lives of Scottish people in the Amazon in the 19th century, and how this can inform us of the bigger picture of British presence and relationship with Brazil in the 19th century.

Last summer my research was focused on different British archives, I went to the archives in London, Edinburgh and Glasgow. My aims were many: try to understand what researching meant, what the archives were for and learn how to get around them. It was a great first experience becuase it helped me to understand that research is a slow process, that requires much organisation, having a lot of responsibilities, and in the case of archival research: perseverance and constant decision making.

The amount of information that I could read was huge and I had to make decisions on what to read or not. This let me focus on two big families that lived in Belem, in the north east of Brazil in the XIX, the Campbells and the Henderson. By looking through personal diaries, letters, inventories, I managed to get a glimpse of their lives in Belem as well as the context in which they lived.

      Me at the Archivo Público of Belém looking at consuls dispatches. 

This summer, I decided that to know more about their lives, I should go where they used to live, especially since a lot of the records actually never left Brazil. Brazil has been a very interesting experience, especially because while I speak Spanish I do not speak Portuguese, so that has make the process more difficult. In addition the archives in Brazil unfortunately are not in great conditions and a lot of the records are inaccessible, the reason: bureaucracy, different priorities and a lack of funding. In turn, this had lead me to take decisions regarding where to go, what material to read and learn how to be flexible with the information available for my project.

In Rio I have visited the national archives, a big beautiful building, where I found the migration records in the XIX, which painted a picture of British movement at the time. Moreover, I have also visited the historical and geographic institution and the national library, which has different rooms depending on what you looking for – rare books, journals and newspaper, maps, manuscripts and general books. The national library was one of my favourite places, it had a lot of information and it is one of the few buildings where there is actually government input. There I found mostly, information about Campbell involvement with slave ownership and records of his company’s imports and exports. 

     Archibald Campbell’s inventory at the Centro memoria da Amazonia – Belém. 

In my last weeks here, I have decided to come to Belem, to the actual city these families used to live. Here I have visited the public archive, in which I looked at records regarding consul dispatches, and the centro memoria histórica da Amazonia, a new archive opened through the university of Para, where I found the actual inventory of Archibald Campbell, written after his death regarding the inheritance he was leaving behind. This was one of greatest “discoveries” for me, making this experience incredibly rewarding.

I have also meet with academics here in Belem through the help of my supervisor DR.  Mark Harris, which has helped me a lot. Finally, I have been able to go to the British cemetery still in Brazil and look for these peoples tombs, making the whole experience feel more real.

In sum, being in Brazil was an incredible experience, It taught me a lot about independence, autonomy, organisation, perseverance, flexibility, and cooperation, and allowed me to see some records which I would have never been able to see, had I missed this wonderful experience.

For this I would like to thank lord Laidlaw for his generous funding of this programme, the CAPOD team for its support and dedication towards us, Laidlaw scholars and my supervisor DR. Mark Harris for his constant and complete guidance.

There are many things the Laidlaw Scholarship allows its scholars to do: improve their leadership skills, research interesting topics, travel around the world, meet new friends. What it did for me, however, was slightly more magical. How many of us, whether art history students, researchers or simply fans, can say to have had access to the archives of one of the most important art museums in the world? Well, this is exactly what the Laidlaw programme, with its travel fund, allowed me to do. But let me give you some context.

Last year my research project focused on the life of impressionist painter Giuseppe De Nittis, an artist born and raised in my hometown – Barletta, Apulia, Southern Italy – who moved to Paris in 1867 to join the Impressionist circle, showing his works in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874 in the studio of the photographer Nadar. He gained wide artistic and personal success throughout his life, certainly aided by his charismatic personality, which won him a place among the brightest intellectuals and wealthiest social elite of the Belle Époque Paris. As a result, his paintings became real documents of a society that was living its most glorious time before an inevitable fall, a real-life testimony of the most popular seasonal events and aristocratic salons, witnessed by the artist with his own eyes. Portraying the uses and costumes of a social class De Nittis and his wife Léontine made every effort to be identified with, for my second year of research I decided to focus precisely on the paintings that presented these social events with the incredible details that distinguished De Nittis’ painting.

So, what has Philadelphia to do with all of this? Why this American city, you might be wondering? The answer lies precisely in an artwork. In particular, an 1875 version of Return From The Races, donated to the museum in 1906. The last time this painting was exhibited in Europe was in 2010, during the biggest exhibition on this artist held at the Petit Palais in Paris, titled “Giuseppe De Nittis: La modernité élégante”. Indeed, this painting perfectly shows how, in one of the most important social events of the season – the horse races at the Bois de Boulogne – the Parisian high class flaunted clothes and accessories representing a modern concept of elegance and style, captured by the careful eye of De Nittis who masterfully depicted every frill, lace and shiny jewel. For the purpose of my research, which this year focuses on the artist’s depiction of Parisian high society’s fashion, womenswear in particular, this painting was just essential. Thanks to the incredible kindness of the European Painting department of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, I had access to the storage room where the artwork is kept, among many, many others. I was escorted into the room by the Departmental Coordinator, whose badge and fingerprint were used to magically open the door. A gigantic Robert Motherwell welcomed us inside, probably ready to be taken upstairs for an upcoming exhibition. Behind it, two paintings of Italian manufacture belonging to the Catholic tradition, probably dated somewhere in the 1300s. The artwork I was going to study, however, was in the back of the room, in the last rack on the left. Slowly approaching it, the feeling of being in the presence of so much art most people do not have access to was almost overwhelming.

To have been able to look at it so closely, without glasses or barriers, to appreciate every single detail and brushstroke on the canvas, is something I still cannot quite believe. I have tried to process it in the past few days, trying to find similarities to other emotions I might have experienced, and the only thing that came to my mind was looking at a new-born baby for the first time. The feelings of wonder, excitement, fear were all the same. I stood there staring at each little dot and line for almost an hour, and only when I moved away from the painting, I realised that art, as life, is a series of extremely fortunate or unfortunate events, as the causes that bring an artist to fame, or oblivion.

After 1884, the year of the premature death of Peppino, a nickname De Nittis reserved to his closest friends, the city of Paris, the home that the artist had chosen for himself and his family, slowly let his memory vanish. It took over a century for them to acknowledge his importance once again. The very fortunate events that brought me to that storage room, made clear that no matter what happens in the future, De Nittis’ work will never be forgotten, at least in my mind. It will always be part of my heritage, and many others’ as well, as long as there will be people willing to share their memories with the world.

 

What better way to develop as a leader than to lead a new society? This was my supervisor’s idea early in the scholarship. After learning to jump through bureaucratic hoops, keep a cashbook, and hustling membership from friends, I have certainly built leadership skills.

After over a year, however, The Mackenzie General Practice Society itself is still being constructed. My co-founder Emma and I encountered many challenges in affiliating, running events, and forming a meaningful committee. Personally, I’ve learned:

• to be much earlier and more aggressive with advertising events and committee positions. I was under the illusion that, once we were founded, enough people would come to us. In fact, a small society should actively seek out interested individuals (who just don’t know how interested they are yet!)
• unless an action is initiated, great ideas will never happen. During meetings, many ideas would be met with praise and agreement; some would even get written down! However, when we’d look at that idea a month later, it was no longer fresh enough for me to know what physical action needs to be taken to achieve it
• don’t fight bureaucracy, it just makes life more difficult. When I was reading through the requirements for affiliation, I kept seeing things I thought were implausible for our society, and so would pretend I could ignore them or ask to be exempt. But they always came back to bite me, even if we were given a semi-exemption. It would have been much easier in the long run to just roll my eyes, and immediately figure out what needs to be done to tick the box.

Eventually we did succeed in completing the foundations– we’ve affiliated, hosted a pub-quiz (without the pub, but with pizza!) and facilitated buses to events, re-affiliated, and have a functional committee. These are all successes I am proud of, but despite ticking all the boxes, I can tell there’s much more to complete that isn’t included on the “run a society” checklist. I believe it’s the same with personal development – as you grow, you see more and more opportunities for self-improvement.

On June 1st 1909, two women began work at the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh. While not the first women to work at an observatory in the UK, they would be the first employed in any permanent capacity at the ROE, working on a project that would span the majority of the 20th century and at least 18 different women.

The two sisters, Sarah and Isabella Falconer, were employed at the direction of the Astronomer Royal for Scotland, Frank Dyson. The work they were engaged upon was part of a global effort to map the heavens, the Carte du Ciel project. Initially employed as measurers, the women would go on to compute plate constants, perform reductions and conversions, and other work such as library and general assistance. They would be joined by others – some women with degrees, some without, some working for only a few months, others for close to a decade. Their work was menial, straightforward, and at times practically algorithmic – so where is the academic interest in their endeavours?

I chose to research these women as the focus of my Laidlaw project because, in the history of mathematics and astronomy, women take a backseat. These fields were dominated by men for thousands of years, and the direction and culture of their study guided by patriarchal society throughout. When we do learn about women in mathematics, we tend to focus only on the pioneers, the revolutionaries, the extraordinary. Of course, the idea that only exceptional women were involved in mathematics up to the 20th century is a blatant falsehood. Working women have used mathematics just as much as working men; however, there has indeed been a distinction in that far fewer women have worked in explicitly mathematical professions. Hence, the need to shine a light on those that have, such as the ‘female computers’ of the ROE.

Researching these women is challenging, or so I have found. In my first week, I spent a significant amount of time simply reading anything that I could find that I considered relevant. There is a good degree of literature in this area broadly, but it focuses, as I said, on the exceptional. While I found it fascinating to learn about the interactions of well-educated middle-class women with the study of mathematics at the University of Cambridge in the late 19th century, the path followed by these women to the first experiment with female computers at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, bears little resemblance to that of the female computers at the ROE.

Reading widely around the topic does provide a good historical context for the women at the ROE, however. When the first attempt to employ women at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, failed, it did so largely because not enough women of sufficient education and of the ‘right class’ could be found willing to work at such low pay. A major concern for these women was quite simply the safety of walking to and from the observatory late at night. When the Astronomer Royal for Scotland employed the female computers at the ROE, these issues were well known to him, and accounted for. The women worked ‘in the forenoons only’, were supported by a grant from the ‘Committee which allots the Government Grant for Scientific Investigations’ which allowed for pay rates to rise minimally, and were of a lower level of education than those at the Greenwich Observatory. These factors, alongside the changing societal norms of the time, surely led to the success in Edinburgh where there had been failure in Greenwich.

The details of the women’s work, some of which I have given above, came not from wider reading, but from an in-depth study of the archives at the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh. I spent my second week commuting to and from Edinburgh, and although the buses and trains were a bit of a nightmare, it was worth it for the research achieved. Lots of simple information, such as names and dates and pay, was well recorded. This allowed me to build up a picture of who these women were, what they did, and how they did it. However, it did not provide me with everything I wished to know. Many decades of letters to and from the Astronomer Royal for Scotland and his staff are well-preserved, but the women who worked alongside him are scarcely mentioned. Following a common theme in the history of scientific women, they are noticed more for their absence than not. Even when referring explicitly to their work, they are often mentioned only in passing, with a ‘we’ in the place of an ‘I’. This is the challenge I now face.

The future of my research is still to be determined, but I believe that I will need to broaden the scope of this project if it is going to last 10 weeks. Already, I am finished with the archives, when I hoped they would last for 2 weeks. The women, conspicuous in their lack of records, are hard to research. I plan to continue studying their path into the ROE, and the wider context of their work, for the next while. One area of research will be feminist theory, another perhaps epistemic injustice. Next summer, it might be necessary to research women at a sister observatory, such as those in Perth, W. Australia, where women were similarly employed. Another direction could be to contrast the education and work of these ‘working women’ with their more elite counterparts from the south. This will be decided in the coming days, but for now, it is something to consider further.

 

I would like to thank a number of people for their assistance in this project. First, thanks to Lord Laidlaw and the Laidlaw team for their generous support; this would be impossible without them. Second, thanks to my advisor, Dr Isobel Falconer, for her indubitable assistance in not only my research, but in providing me with a subject matter to study at all. And finally, thanks to Ms Karen Moran, the archivist at the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh, and Ms Fiona Hooper, the archivist at George Watson’s College, for allowing me access to their records.

The first image used above is from the photo lab at the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh. The other two are my own photography.

“When it was announced that the Library contained all books, the first reaction was unbounded joy” wrote Borges in “The Library of Babel”. Borges describes an infinite world, a cosmic library, containing every conceivable book and all possible information. “There was no personal problem, no world problem, whose eloquent solution did not exist”, all one had to do was find the right book. The library’s inhabitants soon realised the futility of their predicament. Even the most voracious amongst them, working without pause, would never make it past the beginning of their reading list. Some celestial reader could consume an infinite number of books, and still they would have an infinite number left to read. The paradoxes of mathematical infinity drive many of Borges’ bibliophiles to despair. Others embrace it, only an infinite library can sate an endless appetite for knowledge.

In the real world, despite our finite libraries, we face a similar problem. Probably not long after humankind created writing there was more to read than any person could hope to manage. In times when the manuscript reigned, the problem was less acute. True, you couldn’t read everything, but you could read everything that mattered. The medieval physician scarcely needed more than the texts of Galen to be considered an expert. The proliferation of the printing press brought an end to this situation. Whilst books were now easier to obtain and read, the rate of production skyrocketed. In an illuminating article on the history of book production in western Europe, Buringh and van Zanden inform us that “Whereas during the sixth and seventh centuries on average only about 120 books were produced annually in Western Europe, in the peak year [of the 18th century] of 1790 total production was more than 20 million books” [1].

Ramelli’s Bookwheel [2]

Faced with an overwhelming number of valuable books and articles to read, people began inventing new ways of organising and accessing books. One of the earliest innovations in information retrieval was Ramelli’s bookwheel, a Kindle for the 16th century. It allowed the user to consult multiple texts at once in a single location. Slowly, the obstacles preventing people from obtaining, reading, and transporting knowledge stored in text began to disappear. In the modern world access to information, including information stored in books, is immediate. Our digital bookwheels hold more volumes than a library, each of which can be retrieved in a matter of seconds from anywhere in the world.

Despite these meteoric advancements, a crucial question remains unanswered: what should I read? Nowhere is this question more pertinent than in academic research. Number of citations or more convoluted metrics are often offered as solutions. Simply pick the paper with the greatest relevance and the highest ‘impact’ and proceed from there. These measures fail to account for important but unquantifiable factors that a reader might consider when deciding if something is worth reading. One factor is interest, does what I’m about to read sound compelling? There are occasions when asking this isn’t an option and one must read something regardless of its quality. But sometimes we’re lucky and have the freedom to choose. Marie Kondo, the now world-famous organisation expert, offers some sage advice on tidying-up which readily applies to the problem of choosing what to read. Gather together all of your books and papers, one category at a time, and keep only those that “spark joy” – the word in Japanese is tokimeku. From Oscar Wilde to Richard Feynman, the virtues of a reading diet based on interest have been widely extolled. In academia, reading is often done as a means to some end. It’s all too easy to forget that reading can be an enjoyable end in itself. Personally, I think there’s only one book worth looking for in Borges’ library. The one that tells you what to read.

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All Borges quotes from: “The Library of Babel.” Collected Fictions. Trans. Andrew Hurley. New York: Penguin, 1998.

[1] Buringh, E., & Van Zanden, J. (2009). Charting the “Rise of the West”: Manuscripts and Printed Books in Europe, A Long-Term Perspective from the Sixth through Eighteenth Centuries. The Journal of Economic History, 69(2), 409-445. doi:10.1017/S0022050709000837

[2] Figure CLXXXVIII in Le diverse et artificiose machine del Capitano Agostino Ramelli, an illustration of a bookwheel. Accessed from Wikimedia Commons.

When you picture a cool night out on the town in Edinburgh I’m almost certain that poetry comes into the equation. However, spoken word and slam poetry have gained a significant degree of popularity over the past few years, with queues forming outside of pubs, cafes and bookshops as people crowd towards their nearest open-mic night for a pint and a poem.

This summer I am researching the connection between sociopolitical issues and spoken word poetry in Edinburgh. To do this I am going to be interviewing poets about their poetry as well as how they think that the scene more generally is concerned with politics. My main questions are on why people use this forum to express such issues, to what extent it is a natural by-product of the personal nature of performance poetry, and whether spoken word events can become a bit of an echo-chamber for young, generally left-leaning artists?

Spoken word/slam poetry was one of the main things which made me want to study English at university. I don’t think I would be as fascinated by poetry if it weren’t for hearing it aloud and performed more than I read it in school. In my opinion, poetry comes alive when it is performed in a way that it is hard to convey in print. There is a massive variety of styles within performance poetry, from rhythmic performances which border on rap, to dramatic monologues which would rival Shakespeare. But despite these differences, poems often share themes of social and political issues and how they affect the writer/performer.

At the time of writing this, I have been researching for two weeks and am starting to form a clearer idea of the route which I am going to take. I am starting to interview next week and a lot of my time has been spent tailoring my interview questions to the individual poets and making sure that I know their material and central concerns. I think that the project is going well and I’m pleased with the progress I’ve made.

However, I’ve also spent much of my research dealing with imposter syndrome; feeling like I have accidentally conned my way into this research and that I am not as qualified as those around me. This has become more and more apparent as I near the stage of interviewing poets. While it is probably entirely irrational, my brain insists that my interviewees will be instantly aware of my complete lack of experience and storm out dramatically!

I am getting better at dealing with these feelings as the weeks go on. Talking to my fellow Laidlaw scholars has been enormously helpful in this matter. We are all experiencing research for the first or second time together and figuring it out as we go. Meeting with my supervisor to plan out what my project will look like at completion has also been invaluable, and made the project look less daunting as it was broken down into smaller parts.

Another thing which has helped me greatly was remembering why I wanted to be a part of Laidlaw in the first place. My project is something that I am excited about, rather than I should look at as something which I am bound to fail in. I am so lucky to have this opportunity to grow my confidence in research and so many other areas of my life.

I would like to sincerely thank Lord Laidlaw for the opportunity to develop these skills and Capod for all of their support. I would also like to thank Dr Peter Mackay for his guidance as a supervisor. I would finally like to thank my fellow Laidlaw scholars, without whom this project would seem insurmountable and terribly lonely!

In 1373 an ordinary lay woman lay dying in a bedroom in Norwich, as the last rites were delivered a priest held a crucifix before her eyes and the woman received 16 visions from God, not only surviving but making a full recovery. This woman was Julian of Norwich and her experience, imagined or not, led her to become a hermitic anchoress and theologian, locking herself away for 40 years to grow closer to God. Spurred on by her visions Julian wrote them down, elucidating upon them with a theology that was radical and dangerous for the time she was writing in. Bucking against Church trends, Julian described God in feminine terms, preached that there was no hell and that above all things God was all loving.
During this five-week research period this summer, I will be diving deeper into the three earliest manuscript copies we have of Julian’s magnum opus trying to discover what changes in their composition can tell us about the changing reception to her work. I’m particularly keen to find out what role women have had in preserving and changing the reception of Julian’s work and how far this piece can be considered an early (E A R L Y) feminist text. This week I have been reading the Amherst Manuscript, held in the British Library. This florilegium from the mid 15th century is an anthology of Carthusian texts which was likely intended for the spiritual education of women, possibly another later anchoress. An early version of Julian’s text – the manuscript was scribed in a Grantham dialect, placing it quite close to Norwich. This illustrates Marotti’s argument that manuscripts were primarily for personal collections and close social circles likely to share similar social views. Symptomatic of its period is the fact that the manuscript does not contain the biblical translations included in the later long text by Julian – indicating her initial nervousness in the radicalness of her ideas and the suppression of translation of the Bible into the Vernacular by the Catholic Church.
The Amherst manuscript is the earliest surviving copy we have of Julian’s work. Generally, it is accepted that she wrote this shorter version more immediately after her visions before elaborating on it in further versions. After it’s stint as a manuscript for women’s guidance this piece passed from private library to private library, eventually ending up in the collection of Baron Amherst, from which it now gets its name. Notably, for my research, the manuscript contains interesting notes and additions in the margins which give insights into the theological ideas being expressed and make clear how important certain passages are in the overall manuscript.
This manuscript lays the foundations for later editions of Julian’s work that are ever more radical and trailblazing. In the next few weeks, I will be focusing on these later manuscripts and comparing them to see how they’ve changed. It’s been an exciting project to work on and I’d like to express my thanks to Dr. Harriet Archer, Lord Laidlaw and the Capod team for this opportunity.