Research Rebuffs

I’m currently involved in an ongoing, and frustrating, saga that revolves around around me attempting to secure some documents long distance from the British Library for the purposes of adding them to my monograph.

It all started because I found something from the Lansdowne MS that I wanted to include, a bit of narrative about an illicit marriage in 1605 between Charles Blount, Earl of Devonshire, and Penelope, Lady Rich as reflected in a letter from Devonshire to James I and VI. I already had the passage I wanted to quote from a published catalogue of the Lansdowne Manuscripts but, while it did include the folio number, it didn’t include the date of the letter. So that’s how it started, with me tracking down various other sources trying to find the date of the letter, emailing friends in London to see if they’d do me a solid and swing by the BL to check it out, contacting reference specialists in the Manuscripts and Maps Department, etc.

But, from the there, it was down the rabbit hole for me in that I found about 4 other manuscripts related to the illicit marriage that I now also want to view. So I’ve gone from needing a date on one folio to working out how I can get the BL to make scans of about 30 pages of material from various collections and then mail them to me so I can transcribe them and get them into the book. Failing that (I’m expecting that at least some of the documents may be too fragile to scan – ah, the joys of working with documents from the early 1600s), I’m hoping to convince a London pal to give up an afternoon making some transcriptions for me…in exchange for me buying them a dinner. And I may even have to post on H-Net (a humanities scholars’ message board) to try to hire someone. All of this is to say that it’s been a frustrating week and that, in this moment, I dearly miss proximity to my precious archives. Long-distance research is a real pain.

skirt: Zara / shirt: Zara / jacket: F21 / sandals: Spring / purse: Michael Kors / necklace: Tattered Rose