Work-in-progress

Status update on Victorian Reformations, a.k.a. Book Two:

Rough work: first chapter split into two (now chapters two and three--the book has gone from intro + five chapters to intro + seven chapters + conclusion); Scott section yanked out of its original position in chapter two, in preparation for a move to the new first chapter.

Revisions: worked on what is now ch. 5, the Marian persecutions chapter--moved one paragraph to clarify historical chronology; incorporated some contextual clarifications about Queen Victoria in late-Victorian culture; upgraded the footnotes.  Still needs a new paragraph about the persecutions themselves.

Elsewhere, made some corrections & upgraded footnotes.

New material: started writing the Scott chapter, beginning with a discussion not of Scott, but of The Recess. 

Reading: right now, mostly the secondary criticism on The Monastery and The Abbot--of which there is, quite frankly, not very much.  A few more early church/Lollard novels for chapters two and three, both of which need expansion now that they've been split. Some of the reading I'm also doing for the religion & lit bibliographical essay has been quietly migrating to my footnotes. 

Miscellaneous reflections: I really would have liked Thomas Freeman's "Inventing Bloody Mary: Perceptions of Mary Tudor from the Restoration to the Twentieth Century" to have appeared before I wrote the article that mutated into the Marian persecutions chapter, but one cannot have everything.  As it turns out, aside from John Lingard and Agnes Strickland, we cover entirely different bodies of material (and, of course, since I'm a literary critic--honestly, yes, really I am--and he's a historian, we deal with it very differently).  Incidentally, this is one of those useful reminders that two people can work on very similar topics without suffering grave trauma.