The literature review exercise I am currently undertaking gives me a mixutre of great joy - I love the reading - and immense dread - am I reading enough, am I reading the right things, am I engaging with it at the right level and, ultimately, am I missing something blatantly obvious?

Today I finally found a little essay that, to some degree, reassured me!  A study of a Quaker congregation using narrative approaches offered concerns over Hopewell's work similar to those I had felt, added some new dimensions and connected more directly to some of the things I've read on historical method.  It also teased around the edge of questions of authority, with its ideas of individual, local and canoncial narrative.  It recognised the complexity of what it was trying to do, but seemed to offer a metaphor of braiding - which I took to mean plaiting - threads together.  Immediately my mind went to the tapestry metpahor I've posted about before, and also to good old Eeyore, sorry the writer of Ecclesiates, whose three-stranded cord is noted for its strength.

I am still waiting in anticipation that someone has already looked at all this stuff before and living with the dread that six years down the line someone will say 'so and so has already done this' (not lack of trust in supervisors, just an intuitive doubt that I can be onto something new), but in the meantime I am at least able to do a little bit of 'Brianing' (making connections) with what I have read.