Pasted copy of Cromwell Museum online lectures for the autumn of 2024


 

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Finding out about what is going on in early modern history beyond this country

One of the puzzles I face most days concerns what is going on in early modern history in English-speaking countries beyond these shores. I have a reasonable understanding of the seminar papers being offered here and of the conferences being or about to be held. Most of the websites of relevance are known to me and I am, broadly speaking, aware of the names of historians working in the areas I am interested in. Google alerts and social media help to fill in the gaps. Where I am much less well informed arises from the activities of early modern historians in north America, in Australia and New Zealand. Despite having some regular contacts on the other side of the Atlantic, I have to work hard to search the myriad history departments and learned societies of the U.S.A. and Canada. Oddly enough, this does not appear to be so large an issue with countries in Europe where I conduct regular searches for publications and theses, conferences and seminars of potential interest. It would be good
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Peter Laslett The historiographical disputes of the 1950s and 1960s have largely been forgotten in the intervening period. The debates of those years have ceased to be the focus of scholarly attention. But one that has stuck in my memory is the highly critical review that Christopher Hill wrote for the journal, History and Theory , in 1967 on the book by Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost, published two years earlier. Laslett's conclusions based on the research of the then recently established Cambridge Group on the History of Population (CAMPOP) were highly unpalatable to Hill as he made clear in his lengthy analysis. The idea of a "one class" society was obviously anthema to Hill. Laslett's friend, J.H.Hexter, made a comparable asault on Hill's arguments and methods in The Times Literary Supplement in 1975. I did wonder if there was any pre-history to these exchanges and came across Laslett's review of the anthology of sources edited by Hill and Edmund De
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