Between silence and legibility: Queer female desire in Early Modern England
Now showing in the Library Atrium this LGBTQ+ History Month, History student Megan Conway presents an exhibition inquiring into the History of women who loved other women. Seen, suspected, imagined, and feared, the patriarchal fixation on the centrality of men left the love between women inadmissible to recorded History and absent from criminal law. While Medicine pathologised female sensuality, the Establishment failed to label and contain that which it feared, which was woven playfully and provocatively through art, performance, and literature. This display reflects on the instability on the edge of History's lens, recounting what happens to those who live on the fringes of what is admissible to contemporary understanding - the "space where intimacy flickers into view before disappearing again".
Now showing in the Library for Gypsy, Roma, Traveller, Showman, and Boater History Month, this latest exhibition from Dr Annabel Tremlett in collaboration with local GRTSB writer, artist, and activist Amanda Garrie, explores local connections with and between people with Gypsy, Roma, Traveller, Showpeople and Boatpeople (‘GRTSB’) heritages. These are all such different groups with different traditions, languages and cultural practices in countries across Europe. But they are still connected through histories of travelling and nomadism, strong affiliations to kin and community, with deep traditions in crafts, music, trading, toolmaking, and entertainment.
Free trial access to the British Online Archives' Witchcraft and Magic Archive
This month only, we offer you a window into a past that eerily parallels the present. Explore how the 1450 techno-social revolution led to polarisation of opinion, technofeudalism, and the persecution of women and minorities while the rich elite continued to meddle in magic without reproof.
The Witchcraft and Magic in England (ca. 1400 - 1920) archive brings together more than 57,000 images with source documents form multiple institutional collections spanning over 500 years, tracing the development of magical thought and witchcraft in Britain, exploring themes from belief, religion and politics to gender, medicine, and science.
It can be tempting to hyperfocus on revision to the exclusion of all else, ditching self-care, burning the candle at both ends (and in the middle), re-reading the textbooks in the hope that something will stick this time or procrastinating because you think more clearly after a 24-hour panicked hyperfocus revision session at the last moment. That's why we've put together these evidence-based revision tips.
Choosing to be alone, to do very little, or to engage intensively with something that requires intense intellectual and/or physical exertion can both be restful. Waiting for a bus that doesn't arrive can be meditative and serene or ruin your day and induce dread anxiety about the reliability of public transport and whether you will ever arrive anywhere on time again.
The art of resting is subtle and widely misunderstood. Sit back and drink in this potted summary of one of our well loved Quick Choice books on how and when we actually rest, as opposed to doing nothing but fretting that we are falling behind.
