EMH EarlyModernHistory

  Pasted.

What did I do yesterday on the subject that has preoccupied me for so many years? The most enjoyable thing was pursuing the letters of Agnes Trollope (better known as Hugh Trevor-Roper) following her/his satrical enquiry to The New York Review of Books in 1996. It was prompted by Lawrence Stone's improbable comments on the sexual proclivities of English landowners. Stone's reply was less amusing. But I then tried recalling what else was known about this exchange. I did remember that I had made enquiries on the H-Albion site and got what appeared to be a pseudonymous reply. After searching my memory, I came up with the faint recollection that Alan Macfarlane had included something on this topic in his coverage of his time as an Oxford D.Phil. postgraduate. After some searching on Google, I found the relevant document and more letters about 'Agnes Trollope'. Apart from this, I put up a comment on the Rich family's profits from the tobacco trade in the early-1620s on t...

  Monday, September 11 Workshop: Parliamentary Culture in Colonial Contexts, c. 1500 - c.1700 Workshop on early modern parliamentary culture in a colonial context. 11 Sept 2023, Jesus College, Oxford. Free to attend! By  Oxford Centre for Early Modern Studies (CEMS) Follow Date and time Monday, September 11 · 9am - 5:30pm BST Location Jesus College Turl Street Oxford OX1 3DW Parliamentary Culture in Colonial Contexts, c.1500 - c.1700 11 September 2023 .  9am-5.15pm.  Jesus College, Oxford. Sponsored by the Royal Historical Society and Jesus College, Oxford. This workshop is free of charge for attendees. Programme: 9-9.30: Registration 9.30-9.35: Welcome Paulina Kewes (Jesus College, Oxford) & Paul Seaward (History of Parliament Trust) 9.35-10.35: I: Studying Parliamentary Culture in Colonial Contexts (Chair & Respondent: Susan Doran (University of Oxford, UK) Paul Seaward, ‘What is Parliamentary Culture?’ Paulina Kewes, ‘Sources and Methods’ 10.35-10.50: Co...

  The significance of the part played by the Virginia Company's abortive attempt to negotiate a contract with King James VI and I's regime over the importation of tobacco from Virginia and Bermuda into England and Wales in 1622-1623 has long been understood by historians. Its hard terms and the salaries envisaged for its prospective managers, Sir Edwin Sandys and his allies, stimulated fierce opposition in the Virginia and Bermuda Companies' Courts and led ultimately to the suspension of the contract, then to its termination and the enquiries that caused the revocation of the Virginia Company's charter. Criticism of the contract was fed not just by its monopolistic character and threat to the economic interests of many adventurers in the two companies but also by strong personal animosities. The point about the threat to the economic interests of some adventurers can be reinforced. One thing that has not apparently been done by historians is to use the surviving archive...

  Wesley Frank Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company. The Failure of a Colonial Experiment (Oxford University Press. New York, 1932) Wesley Frank Craven was a distinguished historian in the pre- and post-Second World War periods specialising mainly in the study of the early English colonies established in the seventeenth century. He was educated at Duke University, secured a Ph.D. at Cornell University on the life of Robert Rich, 2nd Earl of Warwick to 1642, and then taught at New York and Princeton Universities until his retirement. His first major book appeared in 1932 on the subject of the ‘Dissolution of the Virginia Company. The Failure of a Colonial Experiment.’ As a postgraduate at the University of Oxford working several decades later on the career and interests of the 2nd Earl of Warwick, I read it with great interest and had the good fortune thanks to the late Theodore Rabb to correspond with Craven on this topic. I was and am grateful to him for his courtesy. The e...

I have been thinking a little about the impact of the teachers I have known during my life. Two of them, the historian Roger Howell and the philosopher Jan Rogan, are probably the teachers for whom I have most respect and enduring admiration. I took a couple of early modern history courses with the late Roger Howell at St John’s College, Oxford in the early-1960s and recognised as soon as I met him how demanding a tutor he was going to be. My intellectual expectations were met. Sadly, I lost touch with him after he went back to Bowdoin College in Maine and only saw him once again in the North Library of the British Museum in c.1970. Jan Rogan was a philosophy teacher working near where I live on the east coast of England and had an unrivalled capacity for explaining difficult concepts to people of all ranges of ability. I did exchange a few e-mails with her in recent years before her death. I am grateful to have met both of them. There are or rather were other teachers whom I remember...

 An historian’s day: 10th August,2023 My day has a pretty fixed routine. When I get up, I normally check my incoming e-mail and then go on to look at my google alerts to see what has been post online since the preceding day. There are some blogs dealing with early modern history that I normally look at as well. In recent years, I have developed a database covering the local history societies in my native county and letting the officers of those societies have information about the activities  - lectures, meetings and trips - being organised elsewhere. Most but not all such local history societies have websites but some do not give full details of their events or their locations. I have been surprised to discover that a few people do not wish to receive such information and ask to be struck off  my list of contacts. One such request reached me this morning from the son of one of the officers of a nearby society to which I have spoken in the past: no reason was given. More ...

 

 Workshop for the Early Modern Period Michaelmas Term 2023 – Material Culture The Workshop for the Early Modern Period (WEMP) invites submissions for papers to be presented during Michaelmas Term (October-November 2023). The theme of this term is Material Culture, c. 1450-1800. All current graduate students at the University of Cambridge and any other institutions are encouraged to apply. Possible topics may include but are not restricted to: • Spaces (the home, sacred spaces, cabinets) • Affective and sensorial matters • Objects and memory • Material culture of science, medicine, and knowledge • Methodological reflections and approaches to non-textual sources • The relation between the visual and material • Cross-cultural and entangled objects • Trade and consumption • Makers, artisans, and itinerancy • Fashion and sumptuary law The workshop provides a forum for graduate students (MPhil/MA and PhD) to present their research on any aspect of early modern history in a friendly and w...

   Sound Faith: Religion and the Acoustic World, 1400-1800  The University of York  12-14 June 2024    Confirmed keynotes from:  Felipe Ledesma-Núñez (Harvard University)  Jan-Friedrich Missfelder (Universität Basel)  Lucía Martinez Valdivia (Reed College)    The experience of lived religion in the early modern world was, as it is now, profoundly auditory. The prophet Mohammed attached great importance to the power of the human voice, and the adhan, the Islamic call to prayer, sounds out five times a day from the minarets of every mosque in the world. For Christians, Romans 10:14, asks: ‘how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard?’ and in Judaism the rise of Kabbalah from the sixteenth century, for example, saw a renewed emphasis on singing as a means of elevating the spirit to the celestial. Sound and music were no less essential to indigenous religions, and colonisers and missionaries regularly described the mesmeri...

  Now subsumed within a Humanities grouping.

  The Short Parliament of April-May, 1640 in England The Short Parliament held in England between mid-April and early in May, 1640 has an intriguing place in the historiography of the pre-revolutionary period. This is partly because it witnessed an attempt by King Charles I’s regime to secure a vote of supply from his subjects in the House of Commons to facilitate his military efforts to defeat the rebellious Scots Covenanters. That the attempt failed despite the offer of future concessions over the redress of grievances and a later offer to abandon the collection of Ship Money is a familiar story. Some contemporaries and a number of later historians have viewed this failure as a missed opportunity to reach an accommodation between the Crown and the Court on one side and the critics and Country opponents of Charles I on the other. The possibility that the subsequent armed conflicts in the Stuart kingdoms might have been avoided still hangs in the air. Naturally enough, the appearan...