*adds to reading list immediately* https://t.co/8GywiCNBD2
— Claire Smith (@eternalmagpie) August 5, 2020
Phenomenal labour
(Click through to read the thread)
Colouring in
Gerard!
“Son of a blacksmith”
Not yet a blog post…
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It’s been a while!
Hello! I’ve been away a little longer than I’d planned…
It turns out that doing a Master’s, even part time, is more intensive than I’d expected. It took me two full terms to properly get the hang of it – and then the third one was forcibly rearranged by the COVID-19 lockdown.
I’m still volunteering at the Herbarium, and now actually working as a Project Officer at the Cole Museum.
The museum work is of course on hold for now, although it’s possible that a few of us will be able to go in and at least check on the collections very soon. There’s a new website in progress and I recently wrote a blog post for it, about the work that I do with the fluid-preserved collections. There’s also a children’s activity in the works, for which I need to film myself giving a Blue Peter-style demonstration. Yes, of course I’ll be using the phrase “here’s one I prepared earlier”!
I have been able to continue with the volunteering I do for the Herbarium, and I also wrote a blog post for NatSCA about what I’ve been up to during the lockdown. (Leaving the difficult bits until last, as it turns out, which wasn’t very clever of me! The spreadsheets are making me go a bit cross-eyed this week.)
Because I’m nothing if not a sucker for punishment very keen to learn new things, last term I took an additional undergraduate module about Medieval Magic. I wrote an essay on the links between Astrology and Medieval Medicine, and promised faithfully that I would write some blog posts on the parts of my research that I couldn’t manage to squash into the word count. That obviously hasn’t happened yet, but it’s definitely going to bump into my dissertation research in places – which is why I was keen to take the module. Learning about the Medieval education system in the universities has been fundamental in understanding why early modern herbals are packed so full of astrological information.
I think I’m just about at the point where I can get back to the blog, and inflict some of my thoughts upon you. And if I get the chance, I might even do a bit of sewing, too!