Overheard on a Salt Marsh

Nymph, nymph, what are your beads?

Green glass, goblin. Why do you stare at them?

Give them me.

No.

Give them me. Give them me.

No.

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Let Us All Now Praise Secondary Source

Primary source is great, you really need to read it to learn to world-building, but --

You've got to read secondary sources too.

These have two big benefits.

One is that secondary sources can go after primary sources that you can't.  Maybe you can't get your hands on them -- possibly because of translation.  Maybe because of time factors, or you don't know how to analyze them.  Reading through all the baptismal records of many London churches, and doing a statistical analysis of them -- well, that was the means by which one scholar demonstrated that all the preachers who deplored the May games for their sexual license were, well, wrong.  The month in which illegitimate babies were disproportionately conceived was August, not May; May had no more than the average month; and this is shown nine months later by the baptism of the babies conceived then.  Even literary sources can be hard to get through.  I read a book on attitudes toward children in the first centuries AD, and the author had gone through many sermons on "becoming like a little child" to pick up Christian attitudes.  (The favorites, BTW, were not sexually active, not greedy (children, offered a coin or an apple, take the apple), and not class conscious (the children of slaves and the children of the rich play together freely).)

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