I’ve just spent my day looking at sixteenth-/seventeenth-century diaries, journals and account-books in the British Library. I get home in the evening and Sebastiaan, our web supremo, tells me that the CMT blog is ready to go live. What is the novice blogger to do? I can only hope that CMT members will be interested to know that ‘when King James was dead hee was opened, & hee had as much braines as any two men: & his head was as big as any two men’. Or that among the gifts a father recorded having given to his ungrateful son in 1656 was ‘a pocket pistol that was my wife’s’, and a horse he had received in return for an illuminated copy of Ptolemy’s Geography. Rest assured that this area of the website will mostly be devoted to more pressing matters: material texts in the news, reports back on lectures/books/articles in the field, progress reports on current projects, &c &c. Members of the Centre, and anyone else who’s interested, please do send me any blog-worthy materials (jes1003@cam.ac.uk) and I’ll do my best to turn them into posts.