At the Pepys Library we welcome visiting scholars from around the world to consult the collection.

Prof. Ezra Zubrow, a former visiting fellow to Magdalene College, has kindly donated his journal article published in Arctic Anthropology to the Magdalene Libraries’ blog.  Please click on the abstract below to link to the full article:

‘Imagine a corked bottle with a message in it floating south on currents of the Arctic Ocean. The bottle is picked up, the message read, the bottle re-corked and put back in the water. Similarly, there are fragments of a culture that fl oat across time and space and are incorporated into a variety of societies. This is the narrative of a fragment of Lapp culture fi rst recorded in the 1670s that drifted through a variety of European cultures and eventually became a well-known part of Anglo-American society; its origin is generally unknown. The story of “A Boy’s Will” shows how resilient some thoughts, words, and ideas are as they drift through time, space, and culture.’

This is an excellent example of the wide variety of scholarship taking place in the Pepys Library, and we thank the publishers of Arctic Anthropology, the University of Wisconsin Press for granting the permission to display the journal article on the blog.