Day two and three of a five day splurge

Linda was out at Oxford Airport all Saturday teaching a postponed day of her Pilates course. So a fairly uninterrupted day for me studying.

Lots of notes on history - mainly from the "very short introduction" that I read late last year, which is providing me with a basic framework for the more-detailed reading in historiography that I will be doing next - Evans' Defence of History and Iggers Historiography in the Twentieth Century will be next on this theme

I had an email response from Leonardo about the comments I sent him on his Copernicus and Ptolemy essay. He seemed pleased with what I had said and thought the comments helpful - but I am still reflecting on Caroline's comments from the other day. Perhaps I am mistaken in thinking that I should try to help people like Leonardo in such situations. This is a familiar criticism from Linda as well.

Read an article by Ann Blair this afternoon on responses to information overload in the Renaissance (as printed books became more available). A nice article I thought. Also read some of Doing a Literature Review, which I could really have done with at the start of the course. In fact, I have come to the view that the LSE writing seminars are missing quite a bit of useful teaching they could give us. My own reading has prepared me well for academic style writing I think, but this is definitely not true of many others on the course, who don't seem to me to be well-prepared at all.

Some more new ideas for my dissertation arose today related to origins of internal/external Historical split. Also on themes like whiggism and theory evaluation. I am still intending to link this all to Bruno, Tycho Brahe and Clavius. I've still not heard from the US conference, though I have come to the view that overall, I would prefer not to do this after all.