EMH EarlyModernHistory

  Malcolm Gaskill, On Quitting Academia This week’s edition of The London Review of Books has a long piece by Malcolm Gaskill analysing his decision last May to take voluntary redundancy from the University of East Anglia and to leave the academic world. [1] It is partly a personal story about his journey from doctoral research in Cambridge to a temporary lectureship in history at Keele University, the completion of his Ph.D. and, in due course, his arrival at UEA in 2007 where he became a Professor four years later. On this journey, there were moments of excitement, of intellectual revelation, of articles and books being published, of attendance at conferences and seminars, the supervision of postgraduates and so on. Then, two years ago, came a turning point, the failure to win an important research grant, two articles being submitted and rejected, one of them on what seemed to him unsound grounds. It was an awakening: he had lost faith in his career and decided, after much int...

Reviews in the TLS and elsewhere The Times Literary Supplement (4 September, 2020) is of greater interest this week. It contains a review of Sir Noel Malcolm’s recent book on the Ottoman Empire by Margaret Meserve of the University of Notre Dame in the USA. The work evidently covers the respect Europeans felt after 1450 for Turkish arms, for the civic virtues – charity, sobriety and order – underpinning Ottoman society and the contrast its power posed to   Christian practices. It is, perhaps, a little surprising that Meserve did not comment on the degree to which Ottoman rulers encouraged men of low social origins, often converts from Christianity, to rise on the basis of their talents. Malcolm was nonetheless clear on the hostility of Catholics and Protestants to Muslim beliefs and on the willingness of European states to seek diplomatic or military alliance with Ottoman rulers. Even so, Europeans found themselves obliged to reflect on Ottoman Turkey in a range of ways durin...

Estimates of the Peerage’s total and average manorial holdings 1534-1641 based on Lawrence Stone’s two manorial samples and his estimates of gross rentals and landed income In the course of composing his study, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 , first published in 1965, Lawrence Stone argued that manorial counts could be used as an indicator of changing landed wealth and presented largely independent estimates of the landed incomes and manorial holdings of the peerage in 1558-1559, 1602 and 1641 to support his claims about the apparent contraction in the peerage’s landholdings between those dates. Whether the manorial counts and estimates of landed income were consistent with one another has been a matter of dispute. So, too, has been his use of the Phelps-Brown price index for consumables to measure changes in real income for the peerage over this period of time. If his contentions are examined, it appears that the peerage held the following number of manors (subject to ...

A morning’s reflections Like most people, my daily routine is fairly fixed. I check my incoming e-mails, look at the Google alerts I have for topics in early modern history and then look at twitter for items of interest posted by historians. I do not look as often as I should at the account of Susan Amussen, the widow of the late David Underdown, but this morning, thirty five years after their marriage, she put up a photograph from their celebrations that conveyed her absolute delight on that day. I have not seen a more moving image in a very long time. My original intention had been to comment on Neil McKendrick’s memoir on the life of Jack Plumb, the existence of which I discovered via Keith Livesey’s blog, A Trumpet of Sedition. It arrived on the last day of August and I finished reading it on Wednesday. [1] I do remember Plumb delivering the James Ford lectures in Oxford in Hilary Term of 1965 and hearing from him how the Tory Party of the late-seventeenth an...