EMH EarlyModernHistory

  Waseem Ahmed’s review of Jonathan Healey’s book, The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England  (Counterfire. 19 October, 2023) Waseeem Ahmed is probably best known for his current postgraduate work at University College, London on the politics of the Interregnum between 1649 and 1660 and for his role in organising the recent conference at the Institute of Historical Research on the impact and influence of Christopher Hill’s book, The World Turned Upside Down. It is, therefore, no surprise that his review of Jonathan Healey’s work, The Blazing World, is generally laudatory, praising its assessment of the transformation of English society in the seventeenth century and its synthesis of detailed academic research and sound analytical judgment. Healey’s view of early-seventeenth English society as fractured and subject to economic and social changes -e.g. In the rise of the gentry and the middling sort, political and religious polarisation, disputes over the locatio...

 

In 1968, which is longer ago than I care to contemplate, I was pursuing my research in the British Museum's manuscript room when I was introduced to R.C.Johnson, the American historian who had just been appointed to edit the sources for the Yale University's project on the Parliament of 1628. I had been doing the work on the Parliaments of the 1620s that later led to my essay on the origins of the politics of the 'middle group' published in 1972 and had become acquainted with a large number of previously unused manuscripts on this subject. In the course of our conversations, I mentioned to Professor Johnson that a set of notes by Sir Nathaniel Rich on proceedings in the House of Commons in 1628 survived in what was then the Huntingdon Record Office. (He was generous enough to offer me a job on the Yale project at that time, an offer I turned down because (a) I was fully engaged in my own research on the 2nd Earl of Warwick at the University of Oxford and (b) I presumptu...

 His obituary notice can be found  here . Sadly, I never met him but send my condolences to his family and friends.

  12/07/2023 Call For Papers Download CFP in English Télécharger l’appel à communications “‘Nor thou nor thy religion dost controule, The amorousnesse of an harmonious Soule’: Rethinking Devotional Works and Practices in the British Isles  (16th-18th c.)”  *** (Scroll down for the French version) When John Donne published  Devotions upon Emergent Occasions  in 1624, he followed in the footsteps of a long tradition of devotional publications. Four hundred years later the concerns voiced by the English poet still resonate and invite one to think about the evolution and legacy of devotional works which have never ceased to appeal to both devout practitioners and lay readers alike. Such works convey the strong and complex nature of the relationship that the believer has with God. Indeed, devotion implies a series of religious observances, duties and actions, as well as a more inward-looking life, with a focus on keeping the soul in a disposition of piety and fervour...

  Wednesdays at 5:15pm Graham Storey Room, Trinity Hall   18 Oct. Rachel Foxley (University of Reading) ‘Political Polarisation in the English Civil War: A Digital Humanities Approach’   25 Oct. Rosamund Oates (Manchester Metropolitan University) ‘Deafness in Early Modern England’   1 Nov. Roundtable on Jonah Miller,  Gender and Policing in Early Modern England  (2023), with the author, Amy Erickson, and Elizabeth Foyster   8 Nov. Michael Braddick (University of Sheffield) ‘Christopher Hill and the Crisis of Bourgeois Culture in the 1930s’   15 Nov. Xiang Wei (University of Cambridge) ‘Religion and Scottish Military Experience,  c. 1690–1763’   22 Nov. Anna French (University of Liverpool) ‘“Like Olive Shoots Around Your Table”: Locating the Early Modern Infant’   29 Nov. Hannah Yip (University of Manchester) ‘Precarity: An Early Modern History?’

I came across a very short piece on Lawrence Stone yesterday on this local history site  here  . It had one or two details about his mother, Mabel Reid, who was a housekeeper and matron at Godstowe Girls school and who died in 1978, that I had not known before. Stone himself apparently attended Downsend Preparatory School in Leatherhead before going on to Charterhouse.