EMH EarlyModernHistory

  The controversy over the economic and social origins of the English Revolution was a topic that excited ferocious debate over sixty years ago. Historians of the calibre of R.H.Tawney and Hugh Trevor-Roper, J.P.Cooper, Christopher Hill and Lawrence Stone advanced radically different interpretations to explain the violent events of the 1640s and 1650s in the British Isles. American scholars, most famously of all, J.H.Hexter, like Willson Coates, Harold Hulme, Judith Shklar and Perez Zagorin also commented with varying degrees of sharpness on the issues at stake. But only one of the major participants, Lawrence Stone, offered an account of the historiography of the dispute, first of all in his introduction to the anthology of academic articles and documentary sources entitled Social Change and Revolution in England 1540-1640 which he edited in 1965 and then, in slightly revised form, in Chapter 2 of his work, The Causes of the English Revolution 1529-1642 , published in 1972. It is...

 

 

  The importance of the negotiations between the Lord Treasurer, the Earl of Middlesex, and the Virginia and Bermuda companies from the summer of 1622 over a contract to import tobacco into England has been analysed in works by historians from the time of W.R.Scott and Wesley Frank Craven in the last century to the present day. Although agreement was reached, the unfavourable nature of the terms and the salaries to be paid to the dominant party in the two companies led by Sir Edwin Sandys, the Ferrar brothers and their supporters produced a reaction so hostile that the contract had to be abandoned. Once news of the Indian massacre of English settlers in Virginia in March, 1622 reached England, the fate of the Virginia Company of London hung in the balance. Eventually, Sandys’s enemies led by the 2 nd Earl of Warwick and Sir Thomas Smith, the former Treasurer of the company and a major mercantile figure, secured the dissolution of the Virginia Company and the ejection of Sandys and...

 Andrew Thrush has some informative comments on the enemies of George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham in the Parliaments of the 1620s available  here  .

  Sweet and Clean? Bodies and Clothes in Early Modern England Susan North Oxford, Oxford University Press,  2020 , ISBN: 9780198856139; 368pp.; Price: £70.00 Reviewer: Dr Beverly Lemire University of Alberta, Canada Citation: Dr Beverly Lemire, review of  Sweet and Clean? Bodies and Clothes in Early Modern England , (review no. 2416) DOI: 10.14296/RiH/2014/2416 Date accessed: 23 October, 2020 Students of history are not always aware when they live through major historiographic change; shifts are sometimes only recognizable in hindsight, with accumulated divergences sharply evident against the backdrop of the field. This volume by Susan North marks a historiographic advance from several perspectives, bringing questions of training, habit, labour, and lifestyle in early modern England into close conversation with health, fashion, morality, and materiality. Cleanliness—its presence and its absence—is the core focus. There has been some recent scholarship in this subject area...

 I saw part of last evening's conference on line on this essential resource for the events of the 1640s in Stuart Ireland. A short introduction to this resource can be found  here  . 

 I am very much looking forward to sitting in on two online conferences or seminars later today. At 5.15 p.m., Justin Schwartz (King's College, London) will be delivering a paper to the Institute of Historical Research's seminar on 17th-century British history on the subject of 'The Politics of Consensus and the Agreements of the People'. Two weeks ago, David Como (Stanford University) gave an intriguing paper on the material in Lambeth Palace Library on Ireton and the Levellers. Then, at 7.00 p.m., Trinity College, Dublin has a conference to mark ten years of the Depositions' Project covering the Irish Rebellion of 1641. Jane Ohlmeyer (TCD) and John Walter (University of Essex) will be two of the participants. 

  The decade of the 1630s was marked by the imposition of unpopular policies in Essex and elsewhere by the regime of King Charles I. In the Church of England, Puritan ministers found themselves silenced and often deprived of their livings for resisting the new emphasis on the sacraments rather than on preaching, on the doctrine of free will rather than on predestination, on the movement of altars to the East end of churches and over the toleration of games on Sundays. In the State, levies like Ship Money were extended inland (without Parliamentary sanction), novel monopolies in trade were established and the forest of Essex’s boundaries were widened to cover almost all of the county. Naturally enough, when Charles was obliged to call Parliament again in the spring of 1640 because of Scotland’s rebellion, the grievances of the freeholders of Essex were presented to the House of Commons through the hands of the county’s two M.P.s, Sir Thomas Barrington of Hatfield Broad Oak and Sir...

  Trinity College, Dublin seminar this afternoon I spent the late afternoon watching an online seminar presided over by Patrick Walsh of Trinity College, Dublin. The development of this means of communication between historians since the onset of the current coronavirus pandemic has enabled me to see and listen to a range of historians with whom I should not previously have been in contact. Grace Hoffman, a Ph.D. student at TCD, was of most interest. She has been working on the depositions arising from the 1641 Irish Rebellion and had some intriguing points to make and questions to raise about the language used by the victims of the rising. There were also issues about the use of translation and the degree to which the questions asked might have shaped their replies. I shall look forward to finding out what her broader conclusions are in due course.                                     ...

 

  Lawrence Stone’s early life One of the slightly surprising features of the festschrift published in 1989 for Lawrence Stone on his retirement was the absence of any reference to his parents and to his early schooling. None of his former colleagues or pupils gave any information on these topics nor did Stone himself in his self-appreciation at the end of the volume. [1] But I have just come across a piece in a local history publication focused on Epsom which helps to fill in these gaps. [2] Lawrence Stone was born in 1919 and lived with his parents at No.3 Lower Court Road in Epsom, a street with solid houses   but relatively small gardens. Stone’s social origins   seem to have been lower middle class at best.   It appears that his father, also named Lawrence, was a commercial artist in advertising and his mother, Mabel, later worked as a matron at a girls’ school in High Wycombe. Both parents were evidently living  in Leatherhead by 1934 but it is doubtfu...

 

  Talking in Private: Tracing Everyday Conversations in Early Modern Europe Call for Publications 7-8 October 2021 Centre for Privacy Studies, University of Copenhagen   Adriaen Van Ostade,  Farmer’s Tavern , ca. 1659-70, Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main People of early modern Europe had various reasons to talk in private. From sharing personal matters to discussing important secrets, all layers of society had their reasons to want to keep certain exchanges out of public ears. However, detecting notions of private conversation in historical sources typically becomes a complex pursuit, full of subtle references that require creative approaches, especially when it comes to more informal practices. Yet, in a reading against the grain, different sources can offer us hints of how these conversations took place. Notions of private conversations were also shaped by legal and religious norms, literary models, and practices of everyday life. To examine private conversati...

  Copied and pasted.

I also read yesterday Donald Pennington's obituary tribute to Christopher Hill in the Proceedings of the British Academy for 2005. His admiration for Hill was apparent throughout. But I was struck by his account of the period between 1978 and 1980 when Christopher Hill was at the Open University. He was then involved in designing a course entitled 'A203. Seventeenth-Century England: A Changing Culture, 1618-1689'. Anne Laurence, who had been a postgraduate at the University of Oxford and was just beginning a distinguished career at the Open University, had apparently supplied Pennington with a paper describing Hill's role at the O.U. and his part in designing the A203 course. I was very puzzled to read Pennington's assessment of the course, which I later taught for the O.U. until its demise in 1990. It was, in my view, vintage Christopher Hill from the mid to late-1960s. Its view of the period was old-fashioned and out-of-date when it began to be offered. Tutors lik...

  Footwear at the Caroline Court What the courtiers of Charles I and his queen, Henriette Marie, wore on their feet is a subject about which I had never thought until yesterday. I then came across an interesting   piece by Erin Griffey entitled ‘Shoes, slippers, galoshes and boots: Footwear at the Stuart court’ published on the Early Modern court blog on 13 th March, 2019. After some short introductory remarks on the visibility of male courtiers’ footwear and silk stockings, her focus was on the difficulty of detecting what female courtiers were wearing. Very few prints and none of Van Dyck’s portraits offer clues even though some depictions of masques do reveal shoes. To fill this gap, Erin Griffey turned to the accounts of the Queen’s shoemakers, Thomas Gray until mid-1628 and then her regular shoemaker until 1638, John Fossey, who may have been a German judging by the variety of spellings that survive for his name. In fact, Fossey supplied the Queen with dozens of pair...

  Lambeth Palace Library Lambeth Palace Library holds one of the archives that I have long known about but never visited. It has the survey of the clergy of Essex in 1604 in its possession as well as the papers of the Bramston family of Skreens in Roxwell. Partly because copies of both are available in the Essex Record Office in Chelmsford, I have never felt the temptation to go to Lambeth Palace to visit its library. This morning, however, prompted by a reference generously supplied by a long-standing friend, I went to its on-line catalogue and was greatly surprised to see how rich its collection of sixteenth and seventeenth-century manuscripts actually is. These resources are not just to do with church affairs or ecclesiastical administration and appointments but also cover secular matters – high politics, county and more local issues, doctrinal and intellectual disputes and much more. I regret that I had not realised this before. The revelation has made me determined to visit ...