Martinalia
Welcome to Martinalia. An academic career generates material which for one reason or another does not get into print. There are public lectures and keynote addresses. Some are never intended for publication. Others are commissioned for projects which never get off the ground. There is material prepared for teaching, which may be useful to colleagues and students involved in similar courses. Some projects seem worth sharing with interested readers even though they remain unfinished, lacking the final polish needed for conventional academic publication. Since 2014 I have used Martinalia to publish essays and research reports.
The term "Martinalia" was coined by my friend Jim Sturgis.
Praise, My Soul, the King of Heaven – or was it Hivven?
In eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, hymns and poems generally rhymed "heaven" with "given" or "forgiven", suggesting an alternative popular pronunciation of the word itself. "Heaven" also had two specific features which limited the scope for poetic pairings. Purists insisted that the second part of the word should be clipped or swallowed, making it almost monosyllabic. In addition, it referred to a majestic afterlife, and was treated as a taboo word that required to be rhymed in a respectful, even reverent manner. These constraints retreated in Victorian times. The spread of basic literacy seems to have encouraged people to voice words as they saw them on the page, and "heaven" became bisyllabic. At the same time, less literal interpretations of the Bible encouraged a relaxed and hedonistic use of the concept, whimsically reflected in popular verse. In the absence of sound recordings before the invention of Edison's phonograph, it is impossible to know precisely how any words were pronounced. Hence this exploration of "heaven" is necessarily inconclusive, but it strays into some curious byways in its search.
Social interaction of Canadian and British political elites, 1849-1894
This essay discusses aspects of social and informal contact between Canadian and British political leaders in the second half of the nineteenth century.
The concept of Natal history: a useful tool for exploring South Africa's past? (1994)
In 1994, I published a review article, "Identity and Interaction: a defence of Natal history" in the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History.This argued that the concept of Natal history could offer a useful framework in which to group together and study the interaction of peoples in a region of south-eastern Africa roughly (and I stress the adverb) bounded by the Swazi and the Portuguese to the north, the Xhosa to the south-west and the Sotho and the Boers in the interior.
Identity and Interaction: a defence of Natal history
"Identity and Interaction: a Defence of Natal History", published in the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, xxii (1994), 317-31, is now (2024) edited with an Introduction as "The concept of Natal history: a useful tool for exploring South Africa's past?":
https://www.gedmartin.net/martinalia-mainmenu-3/410-concept-natal-history.
An interview with Edgar Harry Brookes, 1976
In December 1976, I enjoyed the privilege and the pleasure of an interview with one of South Africa's most senior liberal intellectuals, Dr Edgar Brookes.
Magdalene College Cambridge Notes: Election Night, 15 October 1964
When Britain went to the polls on 15 October 1964, I had been an undergraduate at Magdalene College, Cambridge for barely two weeks.
Essex history on www.gedmartin.net
A list of material on www.gedmartin.net relating to the history of Essex. Essex, of course, is defined as in terms of its historic boundaries, including areas now administratively part of Greater London.
Archival evidence and John A. Macdonald biography
In 2007, I was invited to contribute to the first issue of the Journal of Historical Biography, founded by Dr Barbara J. Messamore and based at what would soon become the University of the Fraser Valley in British Columbia. As I was then preparing to write about the career of John A. Macdonald, Canada's first prime minister, I took the opportunity to discuss issues relating to the surviving source materials about his career.
Two Canberra historians: W.K. Hancock and C.M.H. Clark
The years 2010 and 2011 saw the publication of two outstanding biographies of notable Australian historians, by Jim Davidson on W.K. Hancock and Mark McKenna on C.M.H. Clark.
Magdalene College Cambridge and British Jewry
The essay examines the role of Magdalene College Cambridge, mostly through some of its prominent members, in the recognition of Britain's Jewish community, from their return to England in the sixteen-fifties, through the intermittent campaigns for the concession of civil and educational rights during the following two centuries. The careers of some of the College's Jewish members from the mid-nineteenth century and into the twentieth century are surveyed in the second half of the study, to give some flavour of individuals and, more generally, to indicate that their experiences of Magdalene seem to have been much the same as those of their non-Jewish contemporaries.
More Articles …
- Magdalene College Cambridge Notes: the Palestine connection
- Magdalene College Cambridge Notes: Tedder, Leigh-Mallory and D-Day
- Lord Bury's civilization scorecard for Canada's First Nations, 1855
- Anglican contempt for Essex Quakers: Canewdon, c. 1667
- The Canadian analogy in South African Union, 1870-1910
- Mountstuart church, Toor, County Waterford
- To Margate by steamboat in verse, 1828
- Canadian economic history in a South African context: Pietermaritzburg, 1992
- Building Canberra in the 1970s: Beaumont Close, Chapman
- Lazarus Cohen: a Jewish trader in Victorian Cambridge
- Magdalene College Cambridge Notes: Geoffrey Blok (1933-7)
- A.C. Benson in images
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