Over the last five years nearly sixty spots surfaced in the month of March. One fourth of those looked at current news. A dozen topics come from the diarist Marin Sanudo or revolve around his curious Venetian outlook. Another twelve posts review the early Spanish in Mexico from primary sources, also in translation. Six more stories that can be found from or about different women spring into view, as well as a general introduction to the concept. Seems a shame the very topic needs to be re-introduced. Another half dozen look at some of Columbus' troubles on his first and second voyages to the Caribbean. Only a couple are shorter collections or excerpts of other, different, longer strands, or, placemarkers for some organizational habit.
There are stories of marches and wars, of Feasts, fires, captures, shipwrecks, schoolgirls, beer brewers, pilgrims. Famous people, failures, baldface lies. And that's just March. Go find it here, or here, here, and here.
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For more examples of what I've done here, there are also drafts of posts that look like the following clump, spilling hyperlink goo for its own connective webbiness. And in this example, all links to quotes are cited from Sanudo's Diaries, which were translated and then published by Johns Hopkins at long last in the current century not ten years ago. It was this book in 2011 that was such an encouragement in that I might learn so much more about the period.
wed to the sea: reference info for fleet to Syria and eastern grain shipments, April 12, 18, 1499
recruiting captain Grimani during Ottoman war April 21, 1499
story of Captain Calbo April, 1505
Ambassador Stella returns from France October 21, 1498
death of a corsair: 1500; birth of a map
Gritti In Constantinople July, 1499
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I have turned more attention to my blog. It may not be to your liking, that is, it may not be compelling enough for you/your interests, or even, a wider contemporary audience. I'm quite ok with that. I also have no delusion that I am really doing anything new with it, as in, furthering these studies, like graduate/phd theses, etc.
Instead, I am merely linking various at-hand rennaisance history stories to the calendar, but providing context for them along the way, and this from primary sources as well, as understood by today's accepted western scholarship. I don't go after the academic controversies at all, really, just report what seems the present consensus, mostly. The only subtext that runs throughout is the curious paralells between the responses people had in those times and in ours. I know that's controversial enough. And while it is not systematic, chronological, let alone, exhaustive by any stretch, it satisfies a need for me to have 'something' to show for my compulsion to know more about pasttimes and human nature, etc. I have always done this sort of thing, with different times, places. This time I write down my investigative journey online and approach it more like an evolving piece of art. A history mosaic. I also put news blogs 3-4 times a month there, providing more context of the observer, almost in situ.
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Last year in a summary some other decent bits surfaced.
As a present-day news junkie, perhaps, the daily happenings of the premier maritime, mercantile city, at the center of geopolitics, with new technologies, publishings and word of everything else coming through town, in rapid-fire serial fashion, struck me as immensely rich in particular. The simplistic idea of what was happening in Venice on this day, begs the additional questions of which year and regarding what. These scratchings soon sprout and blossom before the eyes in arboreal splendour. For me this source was an easy way into that world, one which was already so well-documented and an easy one to get a sense of their relation to the ebbs and flow of time. ...
The sources are numerous, I wanted the recent ones and with so many sources I get lots of input as to what was happening all over Europe, how the war and everything else effected everything else, if not day to day at least week to week. But I can't keep up on everything, so I try to hit the high points of that topic, while simultaneously trying to get the larger and smaller perspectives from several places, authors or lenses. I see it as a bunch of meshing gears, the city-states, powers, motives, people, perspectives all engaging or disengaging, falling apart and coming together.
I also want to show in the blog as many aspects of the whole research project as possible. If some modern scholar gives excellent notes, or bibliographic info, I'll give direct example. If the flow of their narrative over chapters or paragraphs, seems artful or particularly clear, or helpful, I like to give example of that. If a description or elucidation of complex ideas strikes me as revealing in an author, that goes in. Variety in expression of form, style and substance regularly gets highlighted. Sometimes there's just notes. Less often are there sections that follow strict review patterns, but there are many summaries. There are innumerable, but light, seemingly parallel references to modern expressions, attitudes or news bits and trends, because there just are so many. People and circumstances remain what they are.
ἔργῳ δ᾽ ἐστὶ μεῖζον ἢ λόγῳ. - Euripides
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