Tea at Trianon: Helpful Tips on Historical Research

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, July 13, 2016

Helpful Tips on Historical Research

From Women Writers, Women's Books:

Academic research on historical topics is often hidden behind a paywall on sites like JStor. Download charges can be hefty, so a good place to start with these is a university library. Most welcome members of the public as reference users, and allow you access to their full collection (including the paywalled articles) while on site. If you need a recent academic article, a polite email to the author will often get it for you without the download charge.

Once you’ve established what’s already known about your subject and setting, think about sources that haven’t already been tapped. Historical books and manuscripts can be a marvellous source of inspiration for writers, whether of non-fiction or fiction. And large-scale digitisation projects are now making more of that material more easily available.

Archive.org and Google Books offer free digital versions of out-of-copyright books, so you can leaf through the virtual pages of a rare sixteenth-century volume without so much as leaving your desk. The Vatican Library is now in the process of digitising its manuscript collections, while the Medici Archive Project is putting the records of the Florentine ruling family online (with English summaries). Long-running digital history projects like the Old Bailey Online are widely used as sources for research. (Read more.)