EMH EarlyModernHistory

I have just spent an afternoon checking through my list of local history societies and groups in my county. I am interested in the programmes of talks and visits that they will be holding in 2025. There are just about one hundred of these but  some, unfortunately, do not have websites and others only give short noice of meetings on platforms lik Facebook. Many interesting subjects are covered and provide opportunities for local historians and others, including academic historians and archaeologists, to reache out to people who are interested in the past. I should add that they represent a community that may need to be mobilised, if that is possible, to resist the attempts by some institutions to squeeze history teaching out of our universities.

  Winter Term 2025: 14 January (online):  David Manning (Leicester): 'Anglican/Quaker Divinity in the 1650s'. 28 January  (please note this takes place at 17:00 (GMT) in the Teaching Suite, The Warburg Institute in Woburn Square) :  Nick Mole (Buckinghamshire Record Society): 'An Inspector Calls: The Buckinghamshire Church Survey of 1637-39 and the Laudian Reformation of the Parish Church'. 11 February (online): George Lasry, Norbert Biermann, Satoshi Tomokiyo, and Alex Courtney: 'The Lost Letters of Mary Stuart'.  25 February (please note this takes place at 17:00 (GMT) in the Teaching Suite, The Warburg Institute in Woburn Square) :  Maddy Keightley-Phillipps (Durham): ''Shee deals in Popish Books': Early Modern English Women and the Transnational Distribution of Illicit Catholic Books'. 11 March (please note this takes place at 17:00 at Westminster Cathedral Archives, 16a Abingdon Road, High Street Kensington) :  Pe...

  Monday 13 January 5:30pm London time; on zoom only   Piers Brown (Kenyon College, USA): ‘Early Modern Crowd Affects and Crowd Effects’   How might we theorize an early modern version of the psychology of crowds? While the language of the passions has become a dominant paradigm for the history of emotions in the period, it doesn't extend effectively to an understanding of how people behave as groups, whether they be crowds, audiences, or subjects. Using the corpus of Shakespeare's writing as my primary source, I explore the early English vocabulary for describing crowds, with a focus on their depiction as surfaces on which distinctive movements can be read by orators, actors and authorities as a reflection of their passionate responses. Piers Brown  is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Kenyon College, Gambler, Ohio, USA  Book here: https://www.history.ac.uk/events/early-modern-crowd-affects-and-crowd-effects     Our pro...

 For a newspaper article featuring her research, go to https://www.gazette-news.co.uk/news/24799291.essexs-infamous-witch-trials-historian-court-systems-role/

This quotation can be found in the advertisement for Michael Braddick's book due out next February. It states that "his intellectual reputation was damaged by sustained academic criticism in the politically-charged atmosphere of the 1980s." I always got on well in personal terms with Christopher Hill but was very puzzled to read this. Once the revolt against determinism whether Whig or Marxist got under way in the mid-1970s, Christopher Hill's influence on the historiography of the seventeenth-century retreated. Most 'revisionists' concentrated on developing their own arguments rather than attacking Hill's body of work. (Mark Kishlansky was probably an exception.) I am not aware of any politically-inspired criticism as such.

Two days ago, I indicated that I was interested in the contrasting views of John Morrill and Andrew Barclay on Oliver Cromwell's putative relationship with Robert Rich, 2nd Earl of Warwick. John Morrill had argued in his essay on The Making of Oliver Cromwell published in 1990 that the Earl of Warwick might, perhaps, have been the aristocratic patron who suggested that the town of Cambridge might return Cromwell as one of its two Members of Parliament to the Short and Long Parliaments in 1640. On the other hand, Andrew Barclay in his book, Electing Cromwell published in 2011, doubted whether Cromwell was a client of the Earl and raised questions about the relationship between Warwick and his younger brother, the Earl of Holland, who was the Chancellor of the University of Cambridge. Town and Gown had disputes that it was difficult to see how they might be resolved if Warwick was expected to influence Holland to resolve them without significant complexities. Barclay thought the iss...