Samuel Pepys, blogger: Happy Birthday

"23 February 1659/60. Thursday, my birthday, now twenty-seven years." I almost missed the birthday of Samuel Pepys. Pepys, as you probably know, blogged his Diary from January 2003 until May 2012, and his site is maintained by Phil Gyford. Gyford began the whole thing again, with new software, in January 2013, as he explains in a posting on his own site. We wish Pepys and Gyford well.

Pepys, App

Yesterday, I began a (very) brief talk to our department Careers Day about blogging in the 17th and 21st centuries, with "What News?": Pepys’s repeated query to acquaintances and bystanders as he walked daily between the City of London and the court of Whitehall in Westminster, according to his diary from the 1660s. (I should note that Pepys is not only a blog, but also an app, reviewed here.) What was Pepys seeking? I suggested that what he was after was not facts, not history, but rumor/gossip. If it was nailed down, it was not au courant, and of less interest to him. Anyway, Pepys would have made a good blogger (and I guess he does).

Announcing the early modern blogosphere

Colleagues on my floor find the term early modern blogosphere somewhat humorous - was there a blogosphere in the early modern period? But, of course, the term early modern itself didn't exist during the period, nor was it applied to the era more than sporadically before the 1960s (and Tudor historians think they have problem because of recent claims that their term is anachronistic). Moreover, at least two famous early modern Englishmen, Samuel Pepys and now Daniel Defoe have been blogging away over the last decade. Pepys, alas, has finished, but Defoe appears to be hard at work blogging, or is it re-blogging his Review.


Anyway, a draft of Newton Key, “Crowdsourcing the Early Modern Blogosphere,” which is scheduled to be published in historyblogosphere: Bloggen in den Geschichtswissenschaften, ed. Peter Haber and Eva Pfanzelter (Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, forthcoming, 2013), has been posted in an open source peer review version. It is available at http://historyblogosphere.oldenbourg-verlag.de/open-peer-review/key/ for review and comments (the site will ask you to register before you can enter comments, but you can do so quickly with minimal detail) through mid-December 2012.