EMH EarlyModernHistory

  ‘A Farewell to Arms’ 28/10/25 My very best thanks to all the speakers this afternoon, for your splendid contributions, and particularly to Ken Fincham for putting everything together. I am deeply grateful. You will be relieved, however, to learn that I will not be attempting a critique of what has been said! Nevertheless a collective thank you is required to Claire Langhamer, Director of the Institute of Historical Research and her team. The IHR not only provides a venue for our own ‘Religious History’ seminar, along with a galaxy of others, but is also backed up by an invaluable research library. In more recent years, times have not been easy for the Senate House institutes - especially after the breakup of the federal University of London. So we really do need to cherish this century-old and in many ways unique institution - the IHR. As envisaged by its first director, A. F. Pollard, the teaching model was that of the so- called ‘history library seminar’, and some of you may be...

  Hin und wieder liefert Googles Warnsystem unerwartete Ergebnisse. Gestern war ein typisches Beispiel dafür, als ich auf Ed Simons Rezension von Jonathan Healeys relativ neuem Werk „The Blazing World: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution“  aufmerksam wurde. Laut Simon sind in Liedern und Gedichten noch immer Echos dieser Welt des 17. Jahrhunderts zu hören, auch wenn ihre theologischen Auseinandersetzungen, rätselhaften politischen Arrangements und problematischen wissenschaftlichen Theorien modernen Lesern nach wie vor schwer zu erklären sind. Dennoch, so erklärte Healey und Simon stimmte zu, hatte sich diese Welt bis 1700 durch die Zunahme von Handel und Konsum, die Entwicklung politischer Parteien und der Presse sowie die Entstehung von Kaffeehäusern, Konzertsälen und Theatern verändert. Doch die Zeit hatte auch ihre Schattenseiten: die Verbreitung des liberalen wissenschaftlichen Positivismus und des religiösen Pluralismus, das Wachstum des Kolonialismus und des...

  Ik wil graag een paar punten naar voren brengen uit een paar recente berichten op je blog, A Trumpet of Sedition. Ik weet zeker dat je lezers (of zouden moeten) weten dat ik absoluut geen marxist ben, dus ik vertrek uiteraard vanuit een heel ander standpunt. De opkomst van het 'revisionisme' in de vroege tot midden jaren zeventig was naar mijn mening geen reactie op een reeks 'conservatieve' politieke impulsen. De kritiek op de Whig- en marxistische verklaringen van de oorsprong van de gebeurtenissen in de jaren 1640 en 1650 op de Britse Eilanden kwam voort uit de zwakke argumenten van Tawney, Stone, Hill en anderen over de 'opkomst van de adel': de voorstanders van het 'revisionisme' kwamen vanuit diverse politieke standpunten - Russell was destijds een aanhanger van de Labour Party voordat hij Liberal Democraat werd; John Morrill was geen conservatief en was begin jaren 1980 lid van de Social Democratic Party; Kevin Sharpe was ook geen conservatie...

 These can be found  here  .  My page on the academia.edu site has a number of my obscure publications on the same period.

  5.15pm in the Graham Storey Room at Trinity Hall. Paul Cavill (Pembroke College), will give a paper on ‘ The Two Swords: Spiritual and Temporal Jurisdiction in Henrician England’ .

 Follow the link  here  for this important interview.

      Pasted 

  Sophia Feist (Cambridge): Mapping Technical Knowledge across Sixteenth-Century German Tailors’ Workshops Francis Taylor (York):  Engines of divine art': The Material and Metaphoric Culture of Weeding Tools in Early Modern England

I have had a very busy few days since the end of last week. Friday was largely spent in an epic struggle to regain access to the internet and to my incoming e-mail. The rest of the day was spent in composing a review of Graham Hart's edition of 'Proceedings Against the 'Scandalous Ministers' of Essex, 1644-1649 published by the Boydell Press for the Church of England Record Society in 2024. Two documents  relevant to this subject survive, the latest one in the University of Leicester's Library which I found some years ago whilst looking for material on the Puritan lecturer, Thomas Hooker. Fortunately, I was able to report  to the Library Committee of the Essex Society for Archaeology and History on Saturday morning that I had composed this review and the other one on Broomfield as I had been asked to do. Later, on Sunday, I was able to get some AI transcripts of two seminar papers I heard last week, one by Blair Worden and the second by Alexandra Gajda and Ellen Pat...

On this book, follow the link  here  . 

 

 

This post has been advertised  here  . Applications close on 31st October, 2025.

 For the indentification of 91 books at the University of Glasgow's library, follow the link  here  .

 

  The Richard Holmes Memorial Lecture Atrocity, justice and reconciliation 15 November 2025 - 2:00 - 4:30 PM ...

  Early Modern Britain Seminar, Michaelmas Term 2025 Thursdays at 5 pm, Oakeshott Room, Lincoln College ( except 23 October: for which Lower Lecture Room ); online on Teams     16 October         Dr Alexandra Gajda (Jesus College) and Dr Ellen Paterson (Keble College) ‘Prosperity, Petitions, and Parliament: Peace, Union and Economic Debate in Early Jacobean England’ Pauline Croft, ‘Free Trade and the House of Commons 1605-1606’, Economic History Review , 28 (1975), 17-27;   S.G.E. Lythe,  ‘ The Union of the Crowns in 1603 and the Debate on Economic Integration’, Journal of Scottish Political Economy  5 (1958), 219-28; Alexandra Gajda, ‘War, peace and commerce and the Treaty of London (1604)’, Historical Research,  96 (2023), 459-72.   23 October     Dr Hannah Dawson (King’s College, London) ‘Early Modern Selfhood Revisited: the Case of Feminism’ Mary Astell, Reflections on Marriage (1706), prefa...

  S.R.Gardiner’s anticipation of the ‘county community’ hypothesis Several decades ago, Alan Everitt argued in his study of the county of Kent that its rulers formed a community of their own, that this community was distinct from that of other counties and that, when its leaders spoke of their ‘country’ they meant Kent rather than England. It was in reaction to the demands of the King and his Privy Council that the community of Kent shaped its political and religious responses and that this form of localism helped to explain the antecedents and outbreak of the English Civil War or Revolution. There is no doubt about the stimulus that this hypothesis gave to the investigation of county histories across the period. The works of Anthony Fletcher, John Morrill and the late Clive Holmes testify to its impact. In historiographical terms, it was highly significant in the late-1960s and 1970s, even though its influence has now faded. At that time, I was sceptical partly becau...

  I first met Christopher Hill at the start of Michaelmas term in October, 1965. I had actually heard him deliver a series of lectures in Balliol College’s dining hall in Hilary term of 1963, lectures which drew upon his draft work on  Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England  subsequently published in 1964, and had been more than surprised to find that he was to be my postgraduate supervisor for the ensuing years. We met in his office which was located in the main quadrangle behind the small outer one through which one had to pass and to the east. He sat in a chair that hung down by a chain from the ceiling and seemed principally interested on this first occasion on my social origins and the cost of my watch which was one of the first to give the date as well as the time. I did find his willingness to remain silent for long periods, which I later learnt was an old Oxford teaching technique, rather disconcerting, but, that apart, we were always polite to one an...

I made a quick trip to the C.U.L. today to renew my ticket and follow up some references. The first went better than the second. 

 For John Morrill's brief reflections on his career and life as an early modern historian follow the link  here  .

  Oct 22 The Two Swords: Spiritual and Temporal Jurisdiction in Henrician England Paul Cavill (Cambridge) Followed by Drinks Reception Oct 29 ‘Improving’ the Garden and the Natural Knowledge of Early Modern Householders, 1600-1750 Lucy Havard (Cambridge) Nov 5 Family Archives in England, 1650-1838: Manuscripts, Memory, and the Making of History Imogen Peck (Birmingham) Nov 12 State of the Field session, ‘Bodies in Motion’ ...

  11 November “And the Whole Household Goe to their Rest”: Sleep Timings and Agricultural Work in Early Modern England and America Sasha Handley (Manchester University) 18 November The Material Culture of Wills, England 1540-1790 Emily Vine (Exeter)

 

 

 Andrew Hopper will be giving a talk on this subject in Banbury tomorrow evening. For more details follow the link  here  .

  I watched this on-line discussion of Hill's corpus of works from the late-1930s until the 1990s last night with some discomfort. In a personal sense I ought to say that I always got on perfectly well with Christopher Hill although I disagreed with his work, approach and methods.       First of all, Hill's influence reached its apogee in 1972 with the publication of his book, The World Turned Upside Down. This was mainly true outside Oxford University but not within it where other figures - Hugh Trevor-Roper, J.P.Cooper, Keith Thomas and Donald Pennington - were significant. It was already clear from the work being done by John Morrill, Kevin Sharpe and Blair Worden in the university that an entirely new approach was being formulated to the events of the early to middle Stuart period. Hill (like Lawrence Stone) appeared to me to have been completely oblivious to this developing shift in focus let alone to the work of Conrad Russell in London. (Hill private...