Did the Puritans ban Christmas dinner?
The History of Parliament blog has a new post today about how Christmas was celebrated, or not, in the mid-17th century, which users Pepys’ diary’s one of its examples:
Site News: Pepys in the media
A paper about Pepys's eye problems
David James Harries recently got in touch to mention a paper he wrote for The Journal of Dry Eye and Ocular Surface Disease, entitled ‘Pepys’s Eyes: A Modern Answer to an Old Conundrum?’. Here’s the abstract:
'The Closet' by Danielle Bobker
Readers of this site may be interested in a new book, The Closet: The Eighteenth-Century Architecture of Intimacy by Danielle Bobker, which looks at this room as it was written about by various authors, including Samuel Pepys. Given how interested Pepys was in improving and enjoying his closet, it sounds interesting.
Pepys: the Covid Diaries
A couple of months ago I mentioned a couple of modern versions of Samuel Pepys recounting their experiences of living through the age of the coronavirus. If you’re looking for more, here’s Samuel Pepys: The Covid Diaries.
Samuel Pepys and the virus
There’s been a parody Samuel Pepys twitter account running for a while at @Pepys_Diaries. It’s a modern-day take on Pepys, imagining him writing in the modern world. Unfortunately one of the account’s recent tweets, drawing parallels between the Plague and 2020’s coronavirus, has been quoted out of context and spread around as if it’s a real excerpt from the diary. The tweet:
Interview in the Samuel Pepys Club newsletter
The Samuel Pepys Club has a newsletter and the March 2020 issue contains an interview with me about this site, aimed at people who don’t know much about it. The interview is a little out of date — it’s from nearly two years ago — but, er, if you’re one of the club’s 140 members then you can read it.
New free ebook of the diary
Standard Ebooks is a volunteer-run project to create free ebooks with high standards of typography, formatting and accessibility, readable on a number of devices. They recently released an edition of The Diary, by Samuel Pepys so if you have an ebook reader of some kind you might want to download it so you always have a copy with you.
Recent Pepys articles
I’ve noticed a few articles about Pepys appearing recently:
New Samuel Pepys £2 coin
The Royal Mint, who often produce special coins for special occasions, have produced a £2 coin to honour Samuel Pepys, 350 years after his last diary entry:
The Pithy Pepys: 1660
Jake Mongler has created a new version of the first year of Pepys’ diary, 1660, aiming to make it more easily readable to modern ears. I asked Jake to describe it for us himself: