EMH EarlyModernHistory

  Kathryn Hughes on Leanda de Lisle’s study of Henrietta Maria It was not quite a case of lightning striking twice in almost the same place within twenty four hours but it was pretty close. Today’s edition of The Sunday Times has a review by Kathryn Hughes in its Culture magazine of Leanda de Lisle’s new book, Henrietta Maria , Conspirator, Warrior and Phoenix Queen. [1] In one sense, it is the logical successor to the latter’s study of Charles I, White King , published not long ago. But I am not clear what Hughes’s qualifications for this task were since she is an historian of the Victorian period who is also interested in contemporary culture. John Adamson or Michelle Dobbie or Malcolm Smuts would have been more appropriate for this role. Much of Kathryn Hughes’s review concentrates on Henrietta Maria’s early life as the daughter of Henri IV and Marie de Medici and the development of her relationship after their marriage with King Charles I. Her predilection for conspicuous ...

  Today’s post brought a copy of the most recent Times Literary Supplement . It contained a piece by Madoc Cairns, a staff writer at the Catholic Publication, the Tablet, of Victor Stater’s new book on the Popish Plot of 1679 entitled Hoax : The Popish Plot that never was. Cairns began by describing the plethora of plots to which credence was given by contemporaries and the willingness to believe the claims of Titus Oates that a plot to restore Catholicism in England was in existence. The death of the magistrate, Edmund Godfrey, who had heard Oates’s claims, lent apparent substance to these allegations. The Earl of Shaftesbury was willing to exploit such fears for his own political aims aided and abetted by jurists like Chief Justice Scroggs. Eventually, however, the panic subsided. Charles II called the bluff of the Whigs seeking to exclude his brother, James, Duke of York, from the succession and first adjourned Parliament to Oxford and then dissolved it. Cairns concluded by prai...

  Paul Musselwhite on the patents granted to Samuel Argall and John Martin by the Virginia Company of London in 1616-1617 One of the key features of Paul Musselwhite’s remarkable claims about the nature of land grants in Virginia in the period leading up to the ‘Great Reforms’ of November, 1618 concerns his analysis of the grants made to Captain Samuel Argall and Captain John Martin in 1616-1617. He has claimed in two or three places that these grants involved the creation of large landed estates with a more hierarchical manorial structure of landownership than the colony had previously experienced. [1] In addition, he has twice argued that, although the terms agreed to by Argall and Martin have not survived, it was likely that an agreement made by Edward, Lord Zouche in December, 1617 with the 3 rd Lord De La Warr, who was about to return to Virginia as its Governor, “was likely modelled on these earlier agreements.” [2] It is true that the details regarding the patent given...

  Zoom Webinar  Debating Intellectual Change in early modern Europe (16 th   – 18 th   centuries)  Hosted by IMEMS, Durham University  7 July 2022, 3.00pm-5.00pm BST   Registration now open to all:  please click here  to book your place.   Participants and titles :     Jeffrey Burson:   “Transposing Erudition from Late Humanism to the Early Enlightenment”   Robert Ingram:   “Sin and Sovereignty”  Dmitri Levitin:   “European intellectual change, 1500–1800: two big myths, and how to replace them”  Diego Lucci:   “Long Reformation or Religious Enlightenment?”   Luisa Simonutti:   “Islamic Influences on Intellectual Change in Seventeenth-Century Europe”   Ann Thomson:   “How useful is the notion of “the Enlightenment”?”    Chair/moderator:   Marco Barducci   (University of Pavia/IMEMS)    In this Zoom Webinar, l eading intellectual historians...

  Cromwell Association Study Day 2022 The Auditorium, St Fagans National Museum of History, St Fagans, Cardiff Saturday 15th October Ismini Pells A nation under siege: Wales and the Welsh in the Civil Wars of the 1640s Chaired by Dr Ismini Pells, Trustee of the Cromwell Association and postdoctoral research fellow, Department for Continuing Education at the University of Oxford, working on the major AHRC-funded research project,  ‘Conflict, Welfare and Memory: Maimed Soldiers and War Widows of the English Civil Wars, 1642-1700’ , Civil War Petitions Project. Agenda 9.45  Registration and coffee 10.25  Welcome and introduction 10.30  ‘The Nursery of the King’s Infantry’? How distinctive was the main civil war (1642-46) in Wales? Professor Peter Gaunt Pembroke Castle Almost all of Wales came out swiftly, fervently and without resistance for the king in 1642 and then served as part of the royalist heartlands, uncontested and seeing little active fighting for most o...

 

I am sorry to say that I missed the IHR seminar on the volume of essays in honour of Ann Hughes edited by Jason Peacey and Peter Lake and published by the Manchester University Press, which took place yesterday afternoon. The strike by the RMT Union precluded my hopes of getting to London and I let the organisers know at about 12.20 p.m. that I would not be coming. Sadly, I did not check again because, at c.3.15 p.m. yesterday, they sent me and others e-mails indicating that the seminar would take place as a hybrid session on zoom: I did not see either message until this morning. So, I am cross and disappointed that I could not see or hear what happened at the seminar.  On the other hand, news reaches me this morning that the edition of Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches overseen by John Morrill will be published in three volumes in August, each volume costing £170.