Research Roundup (2023-2024) – Ksenia Podvoiskaia, Robert Merges, and Miguel Fernandes

Ksenia Podvoiskaia (History)  – “Empire and Education: Teacher training in the British Empire, 1810-1840”

I visited the Society of Friends archive in London, the Norwich record office, the National Archives at Kew in London, PRONI in Belfast.

This research is the foundation of the next two chapters in my dissertation, and has also opened up some new avenues and directions for future chapters. The Belfast portion of my trip helped me round out research I had already done in Dublin on the Kildare Place Society and on education reports and commissions from the 1810s and 1820s. One of my chapters will likely focus on the transition to national education in Ireland and the role of the KPS and teacher training in that change. The Quaker records at the society of friends are going to help me trace the networks of dissenting education reformers across the empire. At all of my visits, I have found unexpected descriptive sources that will be really helpful in enriching my writing with textural details. 

In Belfast, I found a guide for female teachers in training outlining in detail each of the stitches they needed to master in their handiwork training. A large portion of female education in my period was focused on sewing and working with textiles, and in my previous research I had seen descriptions and even exemplars of what the students were working with, but this source is essentially a very early textbook designed for schoolmistresses in training in particular. This has encouraged me to make this kind of education and training a particular focus in one of my dissertation chapters.

Robert Merges (History) – “The Transformation of Irish Finance, 1641-1692”

I visited seven archives on my seven-week research trip: in Dublin, The National Library of Ireland, the manuscripts room at Trinity College Dublin, and the National Archive of Ireland; in Belfast, the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland; in Oxford, the Weston Library at the Bodleian; and in London, the National Archives and the British Library. The archival footprint of Irish history before independence is spread over a wide variety of regions, and thus any serious research project aimed at a comprehensive understanding of Irish history from a variety of perspectives must use multiple archives. Because land-ownership and governance were split between both Irish and English proprietors and office-holders, there is no consistent pattern as to where certain kinds of documents are held; for example, the letters of Cyril Wyche, secretary to a sequence of seventeenth-century Lords Lieutenant, are spread out between five archives in Dublin, Oxford, and London.

This research sets the stage for the final chapter of the dissertation project, which is planned to cover the period from 1500 (approximately when Irish Parliament is made subordinate to English Parliament) through 1700 (when, in my view, Ireland has fully become a colony of England). The final chapter deals with the aftermath of the failures of the plantation system to radically transform Ireland, and the subsequent encroachment of the English Treasury into Irish governance. Many of the documents I found were letters of Irish and English politicians describing a story of weakening Irish political independence and growing influence of London. Irish merchants and landlords, many of them Catholics, responded by reorienting their trade towards the French Atlantic and the European continent, culminating in James II’s Irish policy under Tyrconnell.

I found 3500 pages of documents dealing with the land settlement in the 1690s and 1700s, which tends to be vastly underappreciated in the literature relative to the Cromwellian settlement in the 1650s. This collection includes assessments of land values, number of tenements per parcel, previous owners, and purchasers; there is huge potential for a large quantitative study of the effects of a variety of inputs on final rental prices, which could allow me to judge the importance of the creation of the colonial property regime on the willingness of landlords to invest in improving their lands. Additionally, this can help contribute to my longer-term ambition to estimate the degree of wealth inequality in Ireland at various points in the early modern period and compare them to similar estimates of England.

Miguel Fernandes (History) – “Digital Diagrams: embodied cognition across medieval manuscript cultures”

In London, I consulted manuscripts and early printed books at the British Library and the Lambeth Palace Library. In Cambridge, I accessed similar materials at the Caius College Library, the Cambridge University Library, St. John’s College Library, the Trinity College Library, and the Fitzwilliam Museum. In Oxford, I worked with manuscripts and early printed books at the Weston Library, the libraries of Merton College, New College, Corpus Christi College, St. John’s College, and Magdalen College. These libraries house critical sources for my research. Specifically, I focused on texts and images related to finger-counting practices and representations—the central topic of my dissertation—and medieval logic diagrammatic practices, which are part of a separate but closely related research project.

This trip has profoundly shaped my project in several ways. I had the opportunity to examine some of the oldest sources related to my dissertation, housed in the British Library and the Bodleian Library. Additionally, I benefited from the vast and diverse collections preserved in these exceptionally rich archives, allowing me to compare a wide variety of sources, including Latin, Greek, early medieval, and early modern materials, thereby broadening the scope of my research. For the first time in my work, I closely studied early printed materials—previously, my research had focused exclusively on manuscripts. It quickly became evident that these printed works must be incorporated into my narrative. Material traces, such as signs of wear and tear, found in early printed books from Oxford and Cambridge provided invaluable insights into the evolving attitudes toward finger-counting practices over the centuries.Perhaps most importantly, I encountered a wealth of material entirely new to me and beyond my initial typology. This included finger-counting excerpts embedded in manuscripts related to grammar, exegesis, and genealogy. These discoveries compelled me to reconsider both my research questions and the overall scope of my dissertation.

One of the most surprising and revelatory objects I found was a printed book housed in the Trinity College Library in Cambridge: a seventeenth-century edition of Valeriano’s monumental Hieroglyphica, a kind of Renaissance dictionary of symbols that weaves together Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and medieval symbols, accompanied by commentary and illustrations. Among its many sections, it includes a brief discussion on finger-counting.

The particular copy at Trinity College reveals striking evidence of readers’ engagement with this topic. The finger-counting section shows a notably higher concentration of inky fingerprints compared to the rest of the book, which is otherwise relatively clean. Most remarkable, however, is the physical condition of the book: the binding is torn completely in two at the pages discussing finger-counting, with damage extending down to the spine. These traces of wear and tears suggests that the book was frequently opened wide at this section, likely under considerable pressure, leading to pages detaching and further damage caused by repeated use.