EMH EarlyModernHistory

  Richard Cobb to Hugh Trevor-Roper. 7th February, 1988 "For once Dr Hill and you are in agreement. The former has little respect for the new Earl's scholarship and told us that he was a fraud. That was when we [Balliol College] elected Pennington [in 1965 as Hill's successor as a Fellow in History]. Well, of course, Merton [College] too occasionally turns out a Monster.... 'The new Earl' who was disparaged by Christopher Hill was Conrad Russell, son of Bertrand the philosopher. Pennington who beat him for the vacant Balliol Fellowship was Donald Pennington." My Dear Hugh, Letters from Richard Cobb to Hugh Trevor-Roper and others. Edited by Tim Heald (Frances Lincoln Publishers. London. 2011. Pages 166, 167)

 

 This article in the Journal The Seventeenth Century can be read here . Well worth reading.

I spent part of yesterday evening wondering what has happened to Tom Cogswell's e-mail address at the University of California Riverside. Both the e-mails I sent to him were returned as 'undeliverable' which is a puzzle. It is possible that he has retired and that his university e-mail address has been cancelled but I have no proof of this. It would be pretty sad to lose contact with him since we have known one another for over forty years. This morning I attended a meeting of a sub-committee of the Essex Archaeological and History Society in the Charles Gray room of Colchester Castle Museum. I had not been in the room before but was intrigued to see this fireplace with its grotesques which, I suspect, must date to the late-sixteenth or early-seventeenth centuries.  

 

 

 I had missed this publication last month. It looks highly interesting. (Pasted) Download Flyer → Recommend to library Title Details 416 Pages 23.4 x 15.6 cm 11 graphs and 4 b/w illus. Series: Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History Series Vol. Number: 53 Imprint: Boydell Press ...

 Yesterday's edition of the Scottish newspaper, The Herald, carries the verdict of Dr John Young (University of Strathclyde) on Charles I's rule in his northern kingdom. It can be read here . He takes the view that Charles had not only been an anglicized monarch but was also an absentee one. I have wondered over many years about his inheritance of attitudes from his father, James VI and I, and whether he brought these to bear on his Anglo-Welsh and Irish regimes.

There is an interesting discussion in the forthcoming issue of History Today for April, 2025 on the question whether Charles I had to die in January, 1649. Alice Hunt (Southampton University), Jonathan Healey (Oxford University), John Rees (Goldsmiths College, London) and Rachel Hammersley (Newcastle University) offer contrasting verdicts here .

 Professor Questier's interesting recent observations on this topic can be read here .

 This programme looks exceptionally interesting. Programme: Thursday, 5 June 2025 – Turl Street, Exeter College, Oxford 17:15 Sir John Elliott Memorial Lecture   Welcome and Introduction by Giuseppe Marcocci (University of Oxford)  Serge Gruzinski (CNRS, EHESS), Between Imperial History and Global History: Sir John Elliott, Historian of the Americas 19:00 Drinks     Friday, 6 June 2025 – Cohen Quad, Walton Street, Exeter College, Oxford   10:00-10:30 Session 1: The Early Modern Atlantic World   Chair: Molly Warsh  (University of Pittsburgh)  Fabien Montcher  (St Louis University), Iberian Knots: Rhizomatic Readings of the Composite Monarchies Erica Feild-Marchello  (University of Oxford), Language and Race in the Early Modern Spanish World Gabriel Rocha  (Brown University), Corridors in Common: Towards an Integrated Vision of the Early Atlantic 12:30-13:00 Pre-lunch Speech: Judith Elliott , A Personal Recollecti...

I have been very puzzled to read the transcript of Michael Braddick's interview at Housman's Bookshop in London earlier this month. It was part of the process of promoting the biography composed by Braddick (All Souls College, Oxford) and was, I suspect, given in front of an audience sympathetic to Hill's beliefs and career. What appears to me to be a problem in the talk is the connection drawn between the appearance of 'revisionism' in early to mid-17th century historiography and the rise of Thatcherism in British political life. In fact, the criticisms of Marxist and Whig historiography associated with Conrad Russell, John Morrill, Kevin Sharpe and others came into print in the mid to late-1970s under the Labour governments of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan. Russell's essay on Parliamentary politics was published in 1976 as was John Morrill's book on the Revolt of the Provinces. Kevin Sharpe's edited volume of essays appeared in 1978. None of them c...

 Jonathan Fitzgibbons has an interesting set of observations up on the History of Parliament website on this subject. It can be read here .

 Andrew Hopper's article is now to be found in The English Historical Review and can be read here .

  Radicals: A celebration of the life and work of Christopher Hill (1912-2003), with Professor Michael Braddick  Talk  Admission: Free admission, booking required Book tickets Event details Michael Braddick discusses his new book, Christopher Hill: The Life of a Radical Historian (Verso), with Laura Forster, Freya Sierhuis, and Laura Stewart. Christopher Hill was one of the most prolific historical writers of the 20th century. The author of over a dozen books, and a huge corpus of articles and essays, Hill possessed the rare ability of being able to produce intellectually demanding scholarship while making history accessible to the public. In widely read studies such as The World Turned Upside Down, Puritanism and Revolution, and Milton and the English Revolution, Hill popularised the idea that the seventeenth century had been 'revolutionary'. Although Hill's Marxist frameworks and his methodology were subjected to sustained criticism, the ...

I went out this morning to do the household's shopping and keen to acquire a copy of yesterday's Times Literary Supplement. It has a piece entitled 'A Stalinist Chump at Oxford' by Richard Davenport-Hines assessing Michael Braddick's recent book on Christopher Hill, my former supervisor. I was more than a little put out to discover that the only store in my local community that sells the TLS had none available, probably because they were sold out yesterday. That almost never happens. So I have put out appeals to see if someone will provide me with a copy. I hope so.

 This booklet can be downloaded here .

  A reminder that our final seminar of this academic term will be taking place this Tuesday 25 March in-person only at 5pm (GMT)  at Lambeth Palace Library  in collaboration with the Friends of Lambeth Palace Library . Please note the earlier time and change of venue. The seminar paper will be given by our convenor Dr Arnold Hunt (Durham) entitled 'The Forgotten Laudian? Richard Steward (1595-1651) and the Origins of Anglican High Churchmanship', with a copy of his paper abstract below:   'Richard Steward (1595-1651) played a key role in the promotion of Laudianism in the 1630s and the formation of Anglican royalism in the 1640s. During the Uxbridge negotiations in 1645, he exerted a decisive influence in persuading the king not to compromise on episcopacy, and after Charles’s execution in 1649 he continued to play an influential role in holding together the exiled royalist community and arguing against any accommodation with the Commonwealth ...

 Thanks everyone for joining today. Thanks for giving up your Saturday night, Saturday evening to come and talk with us. Joined today by Michael Braddock who is the author of a new biography of Christopher Hill, Christopher Hill of the Life, a Radical Historian, which is out now from Verso. You've written many books before, including a biography of John Lilburn, Can't Freedom of the People. There was a, a history of English revolution, the gods fury England's fire. Most recently, a useful history of Britain, the politics of getting things done. Yeah. Publish. Publish. I don't know yours. They get it. So, yeah, I think we'll do, about forty minutes of, discussion Yeah. And then we'll open up for for questions and answers afterwards. So first, I've, you know, I want to ask. I imagine most people here who've come to this event today will know well, I have some idea of who Christopher Hill was. But if people don't know or perhaps only have a you know, th...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 This University of Huddersfield M.A. thesis is of interest and can be seen here .

I had intended to comment on John Rees's encomium on the biography of Christopher Hill to be found on the Verso company's website but this would probably just repeat views I have already expressed elsewhere. What I did find interesting yesterday was an M.A. thesis by Patricia Honora Connor (Loyola University, Chicago)  on King Charles I's relations with his Parliaments of 1625, 1626 and 1628-1629. Given the date of its composition in 1942 and the printed sources and secondary works available to her, it was a sound and interesting piece of work. When I prepared a list of theses on early modern English Parliaments several years ago, I regrettably missed it. It only goes to show that there is more of significance in terms of scholarly work than one is aware of.

  Thursday, 6th March, 2025 I followed up my enquiries via the CORE database on the early colonial histories of Bermuda and Virginia to find some further academic sources. A number turned up including one on the trade to and from Virginia between 1606 and 1660. Admittedly, it was from several decades ago but I was intrigued to see that it had nothing on the claims made by Sir Edwin Sandys and his supporters in 1618 that there had been a sharp diminution in the number of commodities returned from Virginia while Samuel Argall was the acting governor there and Sir Thomas Smith was Treasurer of the Virginia Company in London. This has long been a suspect claim in my view. I was even more interested to find two or three pieces previously unknown to me about the apparent interest of Thomas Hobbes in the colonization of Virginia in the 1628-1631 period. These arguments will require me to assess their validity with some care in the near future. The only response I had to yesterday’s e-mail...

 The World Turned Upside Down website has an interesting conversation between Mike Gibbs and Imogen Peck (University of Birmingham) on how these conflicts were recalled in England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland. It can be heard and read here .

  Wednesday, 5th March, 2025 I had not posted on my blog for a couple of days, so my first task this morning was to find some material for that site. I found references on ‘X’ to a discussion on The World Turned Upside Down website by Andrew Hopper of Oxford University on the relationship between Sir Thomas Fairfax and Oliver Cromwell, who were, in succession, the commanding officers of the New Model Army, so that went up. And I then added a note that Waseem Ahmed would be speaking at Westminster University on the Levellers in a few weeks time. Waseem Ahmed is a postgraduate at University College, London working on the politics of the 1650s and contributing to a conference commemorating the late Anthony Wedgwood Benn, the Labour politician, at that time.   When I checked my incoming e-mail I found a request to connect with Lauren Working of the University of York on LinkedIn. I duly accepted and sent her some notes of mine on the early history of the English colony of Virgini...