EMH EarlyModernHistory

  Differences in perspective amongst historians working on early English colonial history are inevitable. Scholars on the other side of the Atlantic are usually focused on the development of those societies and are sometimes tempted to overlook the significance of their links to England. The publications marking the importance of 1619 in the history of Virginia testified to the continuing cult of the ‘saintly’ Sir Edwin Sandys and his allies and, at times, minimised their responsibility for the loss of human lives in the colony and the collapse of the Virginia Company of London. This approach incidentally overlooks the fact that, as a prebend in the Church of England, Sandys was in holy orders and thus legally barred from serving in his most famous role as an M.P. in the House of Commons. His overtures to George Villiers, Marquis and then Duke of Buckingham, and his hopes of serving King James VI and I as one of his Secretaries of State tend to be overlooked and his contemporary cr...

Yesterday evening, I was reading Vernon A.Ives's edition of  The Rich Papers: Letters from Bermuda 1615-1646 (Canada, 1984) when I came across this passage at the start of a letter from Nathaniel Butler, then Governor in the colony of Bermuda, to Sir Nathaniel Rich. The transcription reads: "The fierce assault of sickness made upon the fayre Temple of the body of your excellent Lady  hath (I hope) long ere this [received?] a full and perfect repulse. Otherwise (which God forbidd) the losse were too extentive to be included within the bounds of the most enlarged Famelye,. I shall ever rest  her Beadsman, Admirour and humble servant." [ibid., page 221. 30 November, 1620] I have not yet checked this against PRO 30/15/285 but, if correct, it seems, prima facie, to suggest that Sir Nathaniel Rich's wife had been seriously ill and that Butler hoped in far off Bermuda that she had recovered. It is possible that Butler might have been thinking of another female member of the ...

 

 

  Conrad Russell on Christopher Hill’s book, The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries, in The London Review of Books (October, 1984) [1] Encounters between historians of different and contrasting generations are often illuminating: they show up more than just differences of approach but also distinctions in views, sometimes of a critical or hostile nature. Conrad Russell’s review in the LRB on the post-1660 reactions of supporters of the ‘good old cause’ to their eclipse is   a case in point, antique though it now is. It was not just a reflection on disagreements between the two men but, in addition, the product of personal differences dating back to the period when Conrad Russell had been one of Hill’s postgraduate pupils in Oxford and who had left to pursue a teaching career at Bedford College in the University of London where he had, after a decade and a half, risen to prominence as the first of the ‘revisionists’ who had overthrown the materialist interpr...

  Ann Hughes’s paper to the Dugdale Society’s Conference held on 16 th May, 2021 on the subject of studies of counties during her academic career I spent part of yesterday morning watching and listening in to Ann Hughes’s comments on the transformation of county studies in the period up to and including the English Civil War during the course of her academic career. She had been an undergraduate and then a postgraduate at Liverpool University where she completed a doctoral thesis on Warwickshire before moving on to the Open University, to Manchester university and then to Keele University where she occupied a professorial chair until her retirement.   In the course of her talk, she paid tribute to the influence of the late Brian Quintrell and reflected on the evolution of county studies since the 1960s. Early work tended to be focused on the role of the gentry within counties, work that illuminated the lives of the gentry as a landed elite and which contributed to underst...

  Inside and Outside Academic Life Every day when I look at the internet in general and at Twitter in particular I come across independent scholars writing about their own research and writing and the problems they face outside the academic environment in which they have been trained. Most of them are very well qualified with doctorates or other advanced degrees but have found themselves unable to gain jobs in universities or colleges. This is partly the result of universities awarding more advanced degrees and thus producing more candidates for a relatively restricted number of prospective posts. It also has the effect from the point of view of employers of gaining a wide degree of choice in appointments and of keeping salaries lower because of the competition for posts. Having experienced this situation in the past myself, I have every sympathy with the predicament of those with a vocation for academic work but who must endure the frustration of being unable to secure appropria...

  Jeremy Fradkin, 'Anti-Popery and Non-Christians 1640-1660' 3 May 16:30   Early Modern Politics and Religion Workshop Date : 3 May 2021, 16:30 (Monday, 2nd week, Trinity 2021) Venue : Online with Microsoft Teams Speaker :  Jeremy Fradkin (McGill University) Part of :  Early Modern Politics and Religion Workshop Booking required? : Required Booking email :  sarah.mortimer@chch.ox.ac.uk Audience : Public Pasted. 

 Sarah Mortimer (Christ Church College, Oxford) has produced an interesting short paper on this subject last month. It can be read  here  Well worth a look.