EMH EarlyModernHistory

This highly important evaluation of the recent publication of Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches by the Oxford University Press can be read here Even better, it can be downloaded free of charge.

  Limerick History Research Seminar in association with the Limerick Centre for Early Modern Studies, 4 March 5:15pm.   Speaker: Prof. Bridget Heal  (University of St Andrews).   Title of paper: ' News, Narration, and Religion during the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) '.   The seminar will be held online via MS Teams. Here's the link: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_NWM1NDgzNmMtMWYzNC00ODEzLWI0Y2YtOGZmYjU4OWUzOGY2%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%220084b924-3ab4-4116-9251-9939f695e54c%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%22e7ab089e-c482-46cf-9705-a6de420f4175%22%7d

 There is a new and interesting discussion on this topic just up on the WTUD website. It can be read here .

  New podcast with Professor John Morrill in discussion with Professor Andrew Hopper about the Saffron Walden debates during the split between Parliament and the New Model Army. The precursor to the later Putney Debates. (pasted)

  Narratives of the early years of the Long Parliament have been dominated by considerations of the fiery debates leading to the Civil War and of the political and religious contentions gripping the realm. It has long been recognised that petitioning was crucial in this Parliament, with large-scale supplications for root and branch reform entering both Houses. Overlooked are the torrent of petitions sent by corporations and individuals seeking action from an institution which was seen as a Parliament like any other, with the time and inclination to offer redress. This paper will consider the importance of economic grievances for pushing subjects and corporate bodies to interact with Parliament, driven not by concerns with popery or evil counsel, but by their economic interests. Memory will be shown to have been crucial to petitioners, as some subjects pursued causes introduced in previous Parliaments, whilst others skilfully manipulated parliamentary memory in their a...

Mike Braddick's book arrived at my home yesterday. I read about two thirds of it yesterday and shall finish it this morning. Hill was my supervisor at Oxford when he was Master of Balliol. In personal terms we got on perfectly well and were always polite to one another. I did not, however, find him very helpful in an academic sense since he was completely unacquainted with manuscript sources of any kind and thus unable to guide me to the resources I needed to find for my research. I was also unsympathetic to his approach to the history of early modern England. This was odd since Balliol College was only a couple of hundred yards from the Bodleian Library which had and has one of the most magnificent collections of 17th-century documentary material anywhere in the U.K. It was not until I was at the Huntington Library in California in January, 1997 that I saw him again. His wife, Bridget, was already worried about his state of health which she thought had been affected by his work on...

 This discussion of just over an hour's length can be seen here on YouTube.

  Clare Jackson, Kurosh Meskat, Alex Courtney and Nicole Cumming, taking place 4 March: James VI and I After 400 Years: New Perspectives and Fresh Reassessments: https://www.gla.ac.uk/events/listings/index.html/event/13706   The second is the annual John Durkan Memorial Lecture, taking place 25 March which is a conversation this year between Paulina Kewes and Susan Doran: The Durkan Lecture | The Visual Image of James VI on the Continent: https://www.gla.ac.uk/events/listings/index.html/event/13709

 

 

 

  Claire Gheeraert-Graffeuille  (University of Rouen Normandy) will give a paper on ‘Memoir-writing, historiography and the English Revolution: the case of Sir Thomas Fairfax's Short Memorials’ .   We will meet in the Graham Storey Room at Trinity Hall at 5.15pm.  Pasted.

I was surprised this morning to find that Michael Sturza had read my very brief note on Parliamentary History before Conrad Russell and the Rise of Revisionism. He had a book on the role of London between 1640 and 1643 published a couple of years ago setting out the case for the role of the capital as the focus for the class animosities that he believed had stimulated the start of the Civil Wars of the 1640s in England. I did not find this convincing, especially in the light of Valerie Pearl's 1961 book on London from 1625 until the early-1640s. Nor did I think his subscription to the Marxist doctrines of Christopher Hill and Brian Manning at all plausible. And I said so. Whether he has changed his mind I rather doubt but the historiography has moved on a long way since the 1950s and early-1960s.

 Details of this discussion are now available here .

  The World Turned Upside Down @world_turned Watch out for NEW PODCAST tomorrow with Dr Elaine Murphy discussing Parliament’s navy during the British and Irish civil wars

  Thursday 13 February 2025 17:00 - Seventeenth-Century Foxe? Samuel Clarke and Presbyterian Historiography Matthew Leech-Gerrard (New College, Oxford) 17:00 - Regulatory Failure and the Moral Antecedents of Public Banking in England, 1559-1642 Raphael Adès (Christ Church, Oxford) Thursday 20 February 2025 ...

 A major reorganisation of local government in Essex has been proposed involving the abolition of Essex County Council and the creation of at least three unitary authorities. What the implications for the Essex Record Office situated in Chelsmford might be remain unclear. I wrote to Angela Rayner, the Secretary of State responsible for this prospective scheme a few days ago but have so far had no reply to my e-mail. Today, I have sought clarification from Councillor Kevin Bentley, the leader of Essex County Council, also by e-mail. It is in the interests of everyone interested in the history of the county that the ERO should continue to exist and to make available its collections to the academic historians and wider community interested in the past of Essex. If not, what might happen to this internationally renowned archive? 

The next meeting of Cambridge’s Early Modern British and Irish History seminar series takes place today at 5.15pm in the Graham Storey Room, Trinity Hall. Marlo Avidon (Christ’s College) will give a paper on ‘“Mis wants an upper Coate…”: Sartorial Literacy and the Fashionable Lifecycle in 17th Century England’.

 This volume will be published on 6th March, 2025. For more details, follow the link here .

I knew Conrad Russell quite well in the late-1960s and early-1970s following our first meeting in the tea room of the Institute of Historical Research in the autumn of 1968. We then shared an interest in the major figures who were critical of King Charles I's regime in the late-1620s and during the 1630s. Despite his subsequent work on the career of John Pym, Russell later lost interest in these people and came to the view in the latter stages of his academic research that there was little or no wish to use force against the King's rule in England at least before c.1642. I was therefore interested to read in his work on The Causes of the English Civil War published in 1990 (Pp.10-11) his claim that England was the last of Charles I's kingdoms to resist him and that the revolutionary propensities there were so weak, a problem that he sought to address. Russell's view that such evidence could not be found or had not yet been found was, in my view, fallacious. He was appar...

 This article in Past and Present is now available in open access  here .

  CfP: Popular Recreations in Early Modern England CREMS, University of Birmingham CfP Deadline: 3rd April 2025 Conference: 25th June 2025 Hosted at the University of Birmingham by the Centre for Reformation and Early Modern Studies, this study day explores what English people did for fun or personal restoration in the 16th and long 17th centuries. It considers a wide range of recreational materials and activities such as ballads, sport, devotional literature or practices, psalms/psalm singing, prints, emblems, dancing, ephemera, poetry, walking, commonplace books, bearbaiting, horse riding, decoration, readerships, game playing, eating/drinking, hunting, storytelling/folk belief, gardens, theatregoing activity and more! Though the study day is open to all, postgraduate researchers are particularly encouraged to submit papers. Suggested topics for 20-minute papers: Ideas surrounding “popular” culture in this period and the reception of popular cultural history Recreation a...

 Peter Seddon's new book will be launched tomorrow, 11th February. Details of the launch can be found here .

  11 February (online): George Lasry, Norbert Biermann, Satoshi Tomokiyo, and Alex Courtney: 'The Lost Letters of Mary Stuart'.  25 February (please note this takes place at 17:00 (GMT) in the Teaching Suite, The Warburg Institute in Woburn Square) :  Maddy Keightley-Phillipps (Durham): ''Shee deals in Popish Books': Early Modern English Women and the Transnational Distribution of Illicit Catholic Books'. 11 March (please note this takes place at 17:00 at Westminster Cathedral Archives, 16a Abingdon Road, High Street Kensington) :  Peter Lake (Vanderbilt): 'Godly Lives: Samuel Clarke and Richard Challoner'. 25 March (please note this takes place at 17:00 in the Bancroft Room in Lambeth Palace Library) : Arnold Hunt (Durham): 'The Forgotten Laudian? Richard Steward (1595-1651) and the Origins of Anglican High Churchmanship'.

  Investigating two mid-Jacobean Court Scandals: the Lake-Roos case and the fall of Lord Treasurer Suffolk This paper approaches the 'scandalous' mid-Jacobean Court from a fresh perspective by zooming in on two extraordinary, yet understudied, cases – the Lake-Roos feud, c. 1616-19, and the dismissal and arrest of Lord Treasurer, Thomas Howard, Earl of Suffolk in 1618-19. A close examination and contextualisation of contemporary responses and allusions to these events in newsletters, manuscript libels, sermons, and other and other texts, enriches our understandings of ‘popular’ sentiments, perceptions of King James and his court, and political awareness. The key themes that emerged in such responses - namely fears concerning religious and gender inversion - echo the more blatant arguments made at the time against the Spanish Match, in texts such as Thomas Alured’s ‘Letter to the Marquess of Buckingham’. This investigation facilitates a re-examination of the ‘scanda...

 Well, I I I I nearly did it. I I did. We're ready to go. Okay. I think we'll, we should make a start. Sorry. We're we're a minute or 2 late. We've had 1 or 2 issues with the room, but I hope they're gonna get get sorted out. Welcome everybody to the, second seminar of this term. We haven't got park point this week. Peter's talking and, he he he needs to manage it out. So, well, just let me say a few words. I mean, it's a real pleasure to welcome Peter back. I mean, he's probably given more papers in this seminar. Anybody else anybody else in its history. And he and I and, Nicholas Tarrick is here, probably, probably 3 of the longest standing members of the the seminar. We go back to the late seventies, friend. Guy. That's right. You know, her still was presiding over it. That's right. So, and I don't know how many papers Peter's done sitting there, but it's it's a lot longer. And Joseph Meade respond to the crisis of the ...