1660 Diary Becomes 2003 Weblog

EnlightenmentFan writes "When technology improves a book that was already good, that's good news for nerds. I'm not talking about the Two Towers, but the diary of Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) (pronounced Peeps, as in marshmallow peeps), whose diaries record not only the Great Fire of London and the plague but his many seductions, trickeries, encounters with the king, almost getting executed, etc. Brit blogger Phil Gyford realized that this diary would make a great weblog--clickable footnotes, online feedback and all. So now he is serializing it daily, starting Jan 2, 1660, supposedly over the next ten years. The BBC has the backstory. I hope Gyford will deviate from Gutenberg's 1893 version to include some of Pepys's more outrageous sexual adventures, reduced by the 1893 version to "....""

Comments

blogs from history happen ...

[HealYourChurchWebSit]

Via blogs4God I found "the Fathers of the Christian Church as well as a few other blog that basically take books, devotionals or diaries out of the past and post them blogs.

I personally think this is a cool way to teach history. I'd like to see more of this on the high-school level as a means of familiarizing students with the great men and women of antiquity on a personal level.

Bloggus Caesari

[dazed-n-confused]

It's not a diary as such, but this reminds me of the excellent Bloggus Caesari ("The Original Warblogger") - Julius Caesar's ruminations from Gaul, now in weblog form, a tad over two thousand years later.

Neil Gaiman had this to say ...

[Anonymous Coward]

(from his blog:)

"The best thing about Pepys, I thought, when I read the diaries, some years ago, was watching him change, with the country, from the puritan days to the restoration -- watching him discover the theatre (to which he slowly becomes addicted), watching him grow and reinvent himself. The other best thing is that, confiding in a coded diary, he gradually becomes unutterably honest, and thus human, sometimes shockingly so."

I thought you guys might be interested.

Another blog from the past

[Astoundo]

I worked on a similar project a few years back: the diary of a revolutionary-war era Maine midwife. No one thought to call it a blog, but that's basically what it is--along with some teaching tools (this was NEH-funded). It's called dohistory.org. A lot of her diary focuses pickling vegetables and birthin' babies, but there's some real drama too; she testified in a gang rape trial, and her husband went to jail (on unrelated tax charges).

"mi mano sub her jupes and toca su thigh"

[EnlightenmentFan]

I admit to enjoying Pepys's sex tales, though I'm not so interested in his bowels. I also get a bang out of the polyglot mix of Spanish, French, and Latin he used to disguise these bits in case his wife figured out the rest of his shorthand.

To quote a Boston Globe article, now available only in the Google cache:

"Edited out until as recently as 1970 were the clumsy rolls beneath alehouse tables and the gropings in horse-drawn carriages, generally rendered in his unique personal porno style: 'and yo did take her, the first time in my life, sobra mi genu and poner mi mano sub her jupes and toca su thigh, which did hazer me great pleasure.' "