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Anna Pravdica, History PhD Researcher 鈫� 糖心TV ePortfolio and

With generous funding provided by 糖心TV鈥檚 Centre for Renaissance Studies and the Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Partnership, I was able to travel to the Newberry Library in Chicago as a 糖心TV-Newberry Research Fellow. While there I attended the workshop 鈥樷��, organised and run with great success by Megan Heffernan (DePaul University) and Rebecca L. Fall (Newberry Library), in addition to a few days of archival research in the library鈥檚 collections of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British manuscripts.

It was a pleasure to attend 鈥楻efashioning the Seventeenth-Century Self鈥�, from hearing papers by researchers well-versed in Taylor鈥檚 life and work to taking part in broader discussions with a group of enthusiastic participants. Like myself, not everyone in attendance was an expert on Taylor. This fact allowed for wide-ranging conversations informed by a range of perspectives. The workshop struck a good balance overall, being both academically rigorous and genuinely fun鈥攖he day concluded with an experiment in constructing and 鈥渟ailing鈥� paper boats (inspired by Taylor鈥檚 鈥樷��), and the silliness of this activity was very much in the spirit of the man himself.

Taylor鈥檚 life as both labouring waterman and professional writer invites discussion of how lower-status men conceptualized and constructed their public identities. The workshop exposed me to some works by Taylor that I intend to explore further, such as his later anti-Parliamentarian Civil War-era pamphlets. These sources have a lot to say about how contemporary social, religious, and political contexts influenced non-elite individuals鈥� constructions and representations of the self鈥攖hemes I am hoping to explore in my thesis, which looks at seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ideas about sincerity and deceit and their connections to social identity.

I also spent two days looking at manuscript materials in the Newberry鈥檚 collections. I am currently researching and writing a chapter on religious ideas about sincerity and deceit, and sermons have proven to be a key source. So I was very excited to find three books of manuscript sermons in the archive, dating from the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries (case MS5A24, case MSC991.767, and case MSC9911.386).

Prior to this visit I had dealt solely with printed sermons; but I am especially interested in the impact that religious ideas about sincerity and deceit had on ordinary people and their interpersonal relationships in provincial parish environments, so I had been hoping to locate some manuscript sermons that might work as case studies. The sermon books I found at the Newberry perfectly fit these criteria.

I am next hoping to track down more information about the authors of these sermons and the contexts in which they lived and preached. But even if these inquires prove fruitless, the materials themselves are exciting: from what I鈥檝e read so far, they include lots of ruminations on sincerity, deceit, and related concepts like hypocrisy. I鈥檓 aware that not all trips to the archives will prove so lucky鈥攚ith this in mind, I鈥檓 especially appreciative of what was a hugely productive and truly enjoyable research trip.