Activities

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 Patterson a day later. The latter had some extremely important points to make about the proceedings of the first Jacobean Parliament between 1604 and 1607, points which I consider to expose some serious issues with the late Conrad Russell's account of this Parliament. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Lawrence Stone and the historiography of the 'gentry controversy'

  LAWRENCE STONE AND THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE GENTRY CONTROVERSY The controversy over the economic and social origins of the English Revolution was a topic that excited ferocious debate over sixty years ago. Historians of the calibre of R.H.Tawney and Hugh Trevor-Roper, J.P.Cooper, Christopher Hill and Lawrence Stone advanced radically different interpretations to explain the violent events of the 1640s and 1650s in the British Isles. American scholars, most famously of all, J.H.Hexter, like Willson Coates, Harold Hulme, Judith Shklar and Perez Zagorin also commented with varying degrees of sharpness on the issues at stake. But only one of the major participants, Lawrence Stone, offered an account of the historiography of the dispute, first of all in his introduction to the anthology of academic articles and documentary sources entitled Social Change and Revolution in England 1540-1640 which he edited in 1965 and then, in slightly revised form, in Chapter 2 of his work...
Read more

Simon Healy has died

Image
  I am extremely sorry to report that Simon Healy, who worked for the History of Parliament Trust's 1604-1629 section for many years,  has died. I remember him as a very cheerful and engaging conversationalist. My condolences go to his widow and their two children.
Read more

Transcribing Walter Yonge's notes on proceedings in the House of Commons between 1642 and 1645

  In the spring of 1967, Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper, then the Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Oxford, wrote to me to ask if I would assist Dr Pearl in her work by transcribing Walter Yonge’s diaries held (in Additional Mss.18,777-18,780) in the Manuscript Department of the British Museum at that time. I agreed and it was settled that I would be paid £150 per volume by the History Faculty of the University. I duly transcribed the first of these volumes in 1967 and the remaining three by 1973. I was not her “assistant” in this task but undertook it myself. I did not, moreover, keep copies of the first three volumes. In mid-1975, I read in The Times Higher Education Supplement that she was preparing the Yonge volumes for publication. But nothing happened. By 1984, seventeen years after I had transcribed the first volume and eleven years after finishing the last one I was puzzled by this failure to proceed and, having asked several academic friends if they th...
Read more