Palaeography

"The MSt in English Literature is a very intense course." They say this a lot.

This week, I had my first assessed assignment (yes, I've been back in school for the past 7 weeks). It was for my palaeography course--i.e., early modern handwriting. We look at manuscripts (well, photocopies of manuscripts but we've got access to the manuscript holdings in the Duke Humphries library of the Bodleian so we could branch out if we choose) written in the 17th century, mostly in secretary hand.

It gives me a bit of a headache because the writing's cramped and difficult but it's weirdly satisfying. You know how when you work out a math problem and you just get this perfect, gorgeous number at the end and you feel like somehow the Universe works? It feels like that when you stare and stare at these squiggles on the page and then they suddenly resolve themselves into words.

We had two passages to transcribe. One was pretty straightforward. The other one was...difficult. But this is essentially a pass-fail thing, so I think this won't be the end of my career in English Literature. It's still too early in the game for that.