Can any sin be worse than completing someone else's crossword puzzle? Nay. I did it today to help out my wife, while she bought postcards in the Avignon rain. 'Bird's feather?' 'Pinion.' Obvious. She didn't thank me. For a moment, I felt quite autocidal.
BTW: I've discovered that Sir Thomas Browne coined the term 'suicide' in 1635, though the OED wrongly dates it to 1651. Shall I e-mail the OED? Nay. They'd tell me that Al Alvarez had pointed it out to them in 1972, so bugger off. (So why haven't they still clarified their reference?)
Ho, I've found another OED mistake. It dates ‘fadoodle’ as appearing first in 1670 but a variant appears in Middleton’s The Roaring Girl (1611): ‘Trapdoor. “'Tis fadoodling: if it please you”’. Definitely worth an e-mail.
I love this ebook reader. What else is there to do than use it to confute the OED? While all the rain otherwise unemployed in Spain falls on Provence?
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Click on the picture to discover the first entertaining - but entirely practical - step-by-step guide to success for students in English literature or other Humanities disciplines in the stylistic composition of essays, papers and postgraduate theses
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The personal website of John Yeoman XVIII, editor of 'The Apothecary's Tales' and of the archives of the Yeoman dynasty of apothecaries and gentlemen 1492-1914
How to Write Like an English Professor
Click on the picture to discover the first entertaining - but entirely practical - step-by-step guide to success for students in English literature or other Humanities disciplines in the stylistic composition of essays, papers and postgraduate theses
Frequently Asked Questions
1. Are the Yeoman diaries 'real'?
Most definitely so. The original manuscripts are lodged in the British Library (shelf ref: H.2006/3375). My edited transcripts of the diaries spanning the early 17th century are available for inspection in the Antiquarian Reading Room of the library of the University of Bedfordshire, Luton, England. Accompanying them is a copious exegesis that explains the more arcane terms and allusions in the texts: A Glossary to the Apothecary's Tales.
2. If the diaries are 'real', why are they presented in the form of a novel?
The original chronicles of Hippocrates Yeoman and Thomas Mercer came to me as a jumble of manuscript scraps, disordered in sequence and dispersed among other fragments that spanned six centuries. (A brief account of their discovery may be found in the edited chronicles for the period 1623-5, published as The Apothecary's Tales, and available from Smashwords.com.)
Those pertaining to the period 1603-25 alone totalled more than one million words. Most of the corpus concerned ephemera such as farm records, prices, purchases, wages and the like. When that had been excised, a narrative emerged of great potential interest.
I took the liberty of composing it into a popular form accessible to the modern reader. The Inst of Yeoman Studies desperately needs funding for its further research into the sociolinguistic and historiographic implications of these unique records. Works that are entirely scholarly attract little income, alas.
3. Any any other further publications planned?
The total cache of documents unearthed at Ivinghoe comprises vellum rolls, incunabula, commonplace books and bound diaries that extend from c1490 to 1914. Much of this material has still to be translated and redacted. The intention is to publish it seriatim in the coming years, funds willing, to provide an unparalleled research source for both the historian and the general reader.
Most definitely so. The original manuscripts are lodged in the British Library (shelf ref: H.2006/3375). My edited transcripts of the diaries spanning the early 17th century are available for inspection in the Antiquarian Reading Room of the library of the University of Bedfordshire, Luton, England. Accompanying them is a copious exegesis that explains the more arcane terms and allusions in the texts: A Glossary to the Apothecary's Tales.
2. If the diaries are 'real', why are they presented in the form of a novel?
The original chronicles of Hippocrates Yeoman and Thomas Mercer came to me as a jumble of manuscript scraps, disordered in sequence and dispersed among other fragments that spanned six centuries. (A brief account of their discovery may be found in the edited chronicles for the period 1623-5, published as The Apothecary's Tales, and available from Smashwords.com.)
Those pertaining to the period 1603-25 alone totalled more than one million words. Most of the corpus concerned ephemera such as farm records, prices, purchases, wages and the like. When that had been excised, a narrative emerged of great potential interest.
I took the liberty of composing it into a popular form accessible to the modern reader. The Inst of Yeoman Studies desperately needs funding for its further research into the sociolinguistic and historiographic implications of these unique records. Works that are entirely scholarly attract little income, alas.
3. Any any other further publications planned?
The total cache of documents unearthed at Ivinghoe comprises vellum rolls, incunabula, commonplace books and bound diaries that extend from c1490 to 1914. Much of this material has still to be translated and redacted. The intention is to publish it seriatim in the coming years, funds willing, to provide an unparalleled research source for both the historian and the general reader.
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Resources for Yeoman scholars
Current work in progress may be found at the central portal for international research in Yeomaniana, the official website of the Institute of Yeoman Studies: http://yeoman-institute.blogspot.com/
Recommended Links
- A Modern Herbal: Mrs Grieve
- Blogging the Renaissance
- Booking the Middle Ages
- Culpepper's English Physician: apothecary practices
- Elizabethan Household rules of management
- Ivinghoe: official web site
- Lexicon of Early Modern English
- Map of London in 16th century
- Newcourt's Map of London
- Stow's Survey of London 1603
Editor of the Yeoman diaries: John Yeoman XVIII
Dr John Yeoman MA (Hons) Oxon, MRes, MPhil, PhD, is the Executive Director of the Inst. of Yeoman Studies, Ivinghoe, England. For sixteen years he chaired a major publishing company that produced works of rural, historical and antiquarian interest. Following his discovery of the Yeoman family documents in Feb 2002, he gained a PhD in Renaissance Studies. His doctoral thesis took the form of a scholarly analysis of, and commentary upon, the Yeoman diaries written in the Jacobean period 1603-1625.
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