PhD Vlog: Episode One

I’m continuing my experiments on YouTube with the first of what will hopefully turn into a series of PhD-related Vlogs – if I can get the technology working smoothly!

If you can’t be doing with videos, there is a transcription on YouTube of the closed captions, and I’ve also included an edited version below:

Hello! I’m Claire Smith, and welcome back to  Eternal Magpie. This is going to be my first PhD  “vlog”, if you want to call it that.

The  first thing I want to say is just that I’m really, really tired.

I should have followed  everybody’s advice and taken a break after finishing my MA dissertation, which was a very  intense process, and before starting my PhD.  For various reasons that didn’t happen, and I had a grand total of six days – all of which  were filled with admin – in between finishing my  dissertation and going back to campus and starting  the whole process of the PhD. So far I’m two weeks in, and the hardest part has in fact been the admin! So many things to fill in, so many websites not working, so many hoops to jump through to make sure that all of my information is correct and everything is in the right place, and that I can be in the right place at the right time. (Which I’ve already failed at, by missing an online seminar that I’d been planning to attend. Good start there, Claire.) Fingers crossed though, I think I’m nearly sorted out now, which is a relief.

To keep myself organised, I treated myself to a beautiful leather  handmade notebook cover from a company called HORD on Etsy. It’s hand-painted gold leather, it’s engraved with some of my favourite things (it’s got swords, which are always good), and on the  inside they can engrave something personalised for you. I’ve got a diary cover, also by HORD, which has my name on it. This one I’ve had engraved with the beginning of the title of my PhD thesis. It’s based on a quote from Gerard’s Herball where he says that certain benefits of medicines performed by witches and alchemists are just “drowsie dreames and illusions”, and that you shouldn’t trust them. So I can keep  that with me, it’s a removable cover, so when I fill up this notebook I can get a new one to pop inside, but I’ve always got the lovely cover with me. The stationery nerd in me is very, very pleased  with that! 

I’ve also had my first supervision meeting, and I think  it went well!

Again, a lot of admin, and making sure that I know what I’m doing in terms of training and professional development, which is something that the university is really hot on providing. There’s a huge training program for postgraduates, so I’ve signed up to a few  collections-based courses already, which happen throughout this term. Next term there’s a session on writing your literature review, which  I’m definitely going to go to, because my first two important tasks are literature review-related.

The first one is to set myself up with an annotated bibliography, which I’m going to do in EndNote, because I got used to using that throughout my MA. It has its issues, like any  piece of software, but most of the time it’s been really useful, not least  for making the referencing process a whole lot quicker. Once you’ve got it set up right in  EndNote you can just pop it into Word, and you’re done. Except when, right before your dissertation is due, it completely betrays you and refuses to format the references in the style that you’ve selected, which was extremely distressing, it’s really useful. You can put not only the details of the book into it, but there’s also a section for your own notes, so that’s going to be quite a good way of keeping everything in one place, staying organised, and also for having my own mini notes about each book. So, I’m going to set up my bibliography in EndNote; next term I’ll go and do the literature review training, and hopefully that will sort me out.

My other important task, which is the biggie, is basically to decide what I’m doing.

Frankly this is not something I’m good at, with any subject at all. I hate deciding what I’m doing. I like seeing where things take me, seeing where the research goes, following it down rabbit holes, and thinking, “oh I didn’t know that before, let’s compare this thing to that  thing, and oh how does this impact on that?” I am not good at deciding right at the beginning  what I’m doing.

That has to change now.  

I’m thinking about two tracks for my thesis at the moment. They’re both about early modern witches, so that’s a start, but my first track is: am I going to follow the folklore and magical thinking and superstition and cultural beliefs that were prevalent during the early modern period, and place witches and medicine into that, or am I going to follow the history of  medicine, and try and carve out a place for witches as legitimate medical practitioners in that sphere. That makes me slightly nervous, because the history of medicine is an  increasingly well studied area, there are a lot of really top-notch experts, and it makes me feel slightly nervous as a brand new researcher, just finding my way, trying to make a place in that. The folklore and superstition part of things is really appealing to me just because it’s a fascinatingly huge subject, and going  through the primary sources will be a really interesting way of seeing what people thought at the time, what people believed about witches, in material that has nothing to do with the witch trials. Obviously I’ll read up on the witch trials, but that’s not going to be my main focus of research.

My main focus is going to be: what did people think about witches? What were their fears about witches?  When a witch turns up in a book like a herbal, or an almanac, or a husbandry manual, what did people think witches were going to  do? How did they feel the need to protect themselves against witches? Why did they feel the need to withhold information from witches? What did they expect the difference in outcome to be between, for example, a nice middle class, upper class, gentlewoman, somebody further up the social hierarchy, using a herbal recipe, versus what would happen if a witch read  the same book, used the same ingredients, performed the same processes? How did they expect the witch  to use that same information in a different way? 

Again, I’m  very aware that I don’t have all of the background knowledge. Most of my knowledge at the moment is directly  from primary sources. It’s from reading primarily Gerard’s Herball, and a small group of husbandry manuals, so there’s a lot of secondary literature that I need to delve into. The first thing I’m doing about that is auditing a  second year undergraduate module which is about “Belief and Unbelief” in the early modern period, looking at the processes and the structures of the church; looking at lay people and what they believed at the time; and also the  importance of these beliefs to the the culture as a  whole, and to the processes of state. We’re only two weeks  in, and that’s already really, really interesting.  

The other thing I’m doing is going back to basics by re-reading Sir Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic. It was published 50 years ago this year, so it’ll be a good starting point, and I can then add the following 50 years’ worth of scholarship on top of this foundation, and see where I’m at. What I really need to do is get stuck in – and also get stuck in to some primary sources, probably a couple that are available online. Certainly to begin with, it’s going to be much more convenient to start online, and really start thinking about what I actually want to do and which path I want to follow.

I’m very aware that I’m starting at the beginning, whichever direction I go in, and I’ve got a lot  of reading to do, a lot of learning to do, and a lot of sources to look at. But I’m ready to get stuck in. I’m excited about it, a little bit overwhelmed, but I think that’s normal at the beginning of any big project.

So, here we are, I’m good to go!

New PhD, new YouTube channel, new blog posts?

eternal magpie YouTube channel trailer

I would apologise for largely abandoning this blog for the entire duration of my two-year MA, but honestly, I only had so much writing time and energy to go around, and all of it ended up going into my essays. But! The MA is now complete (I should find out how I did towards the end of the year), and just this week I’ve started my PhD!

As well as writing NINETY THOUSAND words about seventeenth century witches, as portrayed in herbals, almanacs, and husbandry manuals, one of my goals for the six-ish year duration of the PhD is to build up some skills in presenting my work to the public.

It takes a certain amount of effort to manage my chronic anxiety and extremely distractible brain at the best of times, and the thought of public speaking fills me with terror. But I do need to be able to present my work, and I will (eventually) need to survive my PhD viva, so I figured that it’s never too early to start practicing. Speaking to people I can’t see feels like a good place to start!

So far I don’t have a plan for this, I don’t have an upload schedule… nothing so organised. At some point I may well develop those things, but I’m not far enough into the research yet to really know how my time is going to balance out. I’m still working at the Cole Museum of Zoology and volunteering at the Herbarium, so even though my PhD is part time, I still need to be careful not to over-commit myself. (She says, as though that isn’t a lifelong habit that needs crushing into the ground.)

The first week of term has largely consisted of Admin Shenanigans, which I think are almost sorted out now. Fingers crossed. I’ve had a meeting with my supervisors, I’ve been to a couple of seminars, and I’ve only managed to triple-book myself for one very busy Thursday later in the term. What I haven’t done yet is ANY WORK, so Monday will be my first day of sitting down with my notes and having a Good Hard Think. I can’t wait!

A little light reading…

A selection of library books about witchcraft in Early Modern Europe

Last week I unexpectedly had a free morning to spend at the Library, so I spent it getting acquainted with the subject of witchcraft in Early Modern Europe. I’m still reading around the edges of early printed herbals and medicine, particularly in the area of lay medicine. I’m interested in how, and by whom, medicine was practiced by communities who didn’t necessarily have easy access to doctors.

I was thinking about rural and community medicine, and in particular the archetype of the “wise woman” who people might go to in times of need, expecting a remedy of some kind. One of the difficulties with looking into rural communities in the early modern period is that literacy was not widespread, so as a result there’s very little first hand information written down. I wondered whether I might find anything lurking in the documentation to do with witchcraft, but as it turned out, the answer was no… or at least not in the way that I’d expected.

According to Barbara Rosen:

… a closer look into ecclesiastical records and into the background of pamphlet and instructional literature suggests that a much larger number of English witches were “good witches” never brought to trial by neighbours, who regarded them as an asset to the community.

Few poor people visited doctors and they were cynical about the clergy, but they did visit witches, wise women, or cunning men in circumstances where healer, client, and suspected bad witch were all part of the same society and equally aware of its hidden dynamics.

Witchcraft in England 1558-1618, (1969) preface to the paperback edition (1991), pp viii & x

This view was also supported by Jane P. Davidson in her essay “The Myth of the Persecuted Female Healer” (1995)

…the historical evidence shows that female healers, with the exception of midwives, were rarely those denounced as witches. While the belief that midwives were witches was widespread, evidence indicates that even the number of practicing midwives that were tried and condemned is not particularly large.

…only a small number of European witches were specifically described as healers.

The Witchcraft Reader, Second Edition, ed. Darren Oldridge, 2008. Chapter 26 (p 258)

Davidson also quotes Doreen G. Nagy’s Popular Medicine in Seventeenth Century England, which I have yet to read:

Since most medical historians of the early modern period have written from the perspective of professional medicine, they have either completely ignored the role of ordinary women in the provision of medical services, or dismissed them with patronizing terms such as wise women, white witches, or simply old women… in fact women played a central role in Stuart health care.

Popular Medicine in Seventeenth Century England, Doreen G. Nagy, 1988

So, it looks as though my next step is to read that book… and also to have a look for some more recent research in this particular area. As soon as I collect my Postgraduate library card (at the end of next month), I can start looking at some of the online journals and ebooks which I don’t have access to at the moment.

I’m also looking at the history of botany, and all manner of folklore to do with plants. In fact my reading list is starting to get a little bit out of hand! I really need to start making a spreadsheet of what I’ve read, and some notes about which particular areas I’d like to focus on next. Otherwise I could easily keep reading aimlessly around the subject forever.

The Oxford Latin Course, Book One

I’m intending to focus primarily on books written in English, but I thought it might be sensible to have a bit of a refresher course in Latin, just in case. I’ve gone right back to the beginning with the Oxford Latin Course, having discovered that I could remember precisely nothing of the Latin that I’d learned in my first year as an undergraduate, way back in the mists of 1993. So far the translations are going pretty well… but oh! The grammar!

I went to high school during a period when we weren’t really taught English grammar, never mind Latin, so there’s a huge chunk of stuff (particularly regarding cases and how to make them agree with one another) that I simply don’t know. I’m getting there – but very slowly!

Harris Garden

Hellebore
Hellebore

Last weekend we went to an open day at the Harris Garden, part of the University of Reading.

Magnolia
Magnolia

For some reason I’d completely forgotten how to make my camera behave, so I managed to come home with a grand total of three in-focus photos.

Seed pods
Seed pods

Here they are!

Hops and Walks

Hop flowers

This morning I have been mostly separating dried hop flowers from their stalks. I found out the hard way that hop flowers contain a great deal of pollen, which is very sticky and dyes your fingers bright yellow. Apparently the stems can also be an irritant, so I’ll definitely be wearing gloves next time!

The hops were harvested by Sarah from the Skycarrots allotment, and now that they’ve dried, they’re destined for little hop pillows. I’ve made the insides for nine already, and should be able to double that with this crop.

I didn’t want to show you the unfinished hop pillows, lying around in their underwear, so more photos will come once I’ve sewn up the outer bags. So, in the meantime, I thought I’d show you a couple of random photos I’ve taken on recent walks.

Cat

Here’s a cat, who I often meet on the way to the Post Office. The trees that he usually hides amongst have been recently chopped down, so he was watching the squirrels from this excellent vantage point on top of a fence.

Twilight on campus

This is what the University campus looked like at 5pm last Wednesday. I came out of the Cole Museum to see this amazing sky, and thoroughly confused a number of students by stopping to take a photo of it.

I’m really enjoying having a camera with me at all times. Fingers crossed I’ll be able to afford a new copy of Lightroom soon, so I can get back to using RAW files with a bit more room for editing. Still loving the automatic square format though. I know it’s just an affectation, but there’s something about it that I really like.