Research is a seriously messy business. Relevant texts, facts, and figures appear at their own convenience (or so it seems). And, of course, the intrepid scholar frequently discovers that glaring gap in her resources only after she has begun actually working on her project.
For example:
1. Yesterday, I discovered that my old friend Emily Sarah Holt authored over three decades' worth of contributions to Notes & Queries, under the pseudonym of "Hermentrude." Luckily, my library actually has a number of Victorian periodicals in its holdings, including an entire run of N&Q. Granted, it's just a couple of additional sentences in the final article, but the information still fills out the elusive Miss Holt's profile; it confirms, for example, that she really did see herself as an active scholar. The notes & queries are on topics ranging from medieval history to marginalia to genealogy, and frequently relate to archival research; in fact, at the time of her death, she was working on a serious historical project, not a novel.
2. Over the weekend, anyone who wandered past my humble abode might have heard a cry uncommon in Jewish households: "Rats! Not enough Catholics!" How's that, you inquire? I'm working on a conference paper (with an imminent due date) about how Mary Tudor--the "Bloody Mary" of Protestant legend--functions in Victorian historical narratives about the persecutions. Some time ago, John Drabble published an interesting article about the polemical revival of interest in Mary at the beginning of the nineteenth century [1]; I'm writing about the next phase of that revival, post-Emancipation and post-"Papal Aggression." One of the most important Victorian accounts of Mary, as it happens, belongs to the Catholic historian John Lingard. Lingard's History sold enormously well and went into numerous editions; its influence went well beyond the Catholic demographic, and made itself felt in the work of popular non-Catholic historians like the Strickland sisters. As one might expect, this "mainstreaming" of a prominent Catholic account in turn provoked angst among the more staunch Protestants of the time.
So what's with the "not enough Catholics"? I realized this weekend that my own project is badly overloaded with the Protestant side of affairs, even though my original intention was to play the various contending discourses against each other. While I have a number of High Church (or, at least, High Church-inflected) texts devoted to Mary I, Catholic texts have not exactly been piling themselves up at my feet. Hence another trip to the library--and the Wellesley Index--to find the missing Catholics. I promptly turned up a number of them in the Dublin Review, either writing about Mary themselves or criticizing prominent Protestants (e.g., Froude) on Mary; my next stop will have to be the Tablet. The Rambler, it seems, had virtually nothing to say on the subject. (One of the frustrating things about the smaller Catholic journals, as with most Victorian denominational periodicals, is that their indexes haven't been disseminated in easily accessible form. To find materials in The Lamp, for example, I'd have to travel to the nearest library that owns a run.) Meanwhile, I'm finding that Catholic books devoted to the Reformation era seem to cluster rather strangely: either they're early-to-mid-Victorian (1840s, 1850s) or very late (1890s). There are some general ecclesiastical histories, as well as a few large-scale histories of England for Catholics and their children, and I'm looking at those. But Cardinal Gasquet's work, for example, is so late as to be virtually irrelevant to the main thrust of my argument, although he probably will come in at the very end. Nevertheless, I can't say if this is an accident of cataloging or text preservation, as opposed to something in the historical wind; I suspect that poking around in, say, Notre Dame's collection will reveal a rather different picture. [Note to self: you really should schedule a research trip there at some point.]
[1] John Drabble, "Mary's Protestant Martyrs and Elizabeth's Catholic Traitors in the Age of Catholic Emancipation," Church History 51 (1982): 172-85.
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