Last Full Week in London exclusively

This weekend marks the last London exclusive week of my trip. This coming Monday it'll be off to a new adventure at Oxford, and a new system to learn. I'm a little disappointed that I won't get to work in the classic Bodleain manuscript room, the Duke Humphries Reading Room, but it can't be helped. Their special collections temporarily lives in the science library building while the usual building is being renovated.

The latter part of this past week I've been going back to certain manuscripts at the British Library  for details and confirmation or not of ideas that came up while going through them the first time. I will likely go back for some further such work Oct. 4-6 once I'm done at Cambridge.

Today I did get the majority of the writing that I wanted to finished up, but there's still some places that will need filling in once back in Milwaukee. One thing that I noticed when I started going back to manuscripts was that at times they were getting easier to read. A lot of the details that I realized I was going to need dealt with needing the specifics of marginal notes and comments whose existence I had previously noted. This was the period when I really realized how hard this kind of work can be.

We should all say a prayer of thanks to the scholars who put together all those nice editions of critical authoritative texts that we love to fuss about dragging around Chaucer, Shakespeare, etc). The originals are not easy to read. At all. Even after trying for hours there are still a few places that I might have to quote using daggers because I can't read part of the notation. Unless I can find a full transcription in a reference book; that would be nice. But it won't be as satisfying as figuring it out myself. That kind of ability probably comes with practice, and lots of it.

A final note on the British Library: I finally went through the Treasures gallery on Thursday when I had some extra time due to the fact that someone else had a manuscript I had hoped to review (I fell very lucky that only happened once, and then after I had done an initial run through). It's really cool to be able to see the only surviving manuscript of Beowulf and one of Jane Austen's teenage journals. I don't quite understand why all of these things share a big room and the Magna Carta gets its own display room. Yes, I do realize that it is a very important historical document, but how it's more influential-important than Shakespeare or Austen I don't get.