Reflections on last Tuesday's conference at the IHR from Professor Tyacke (pasted)

 

‘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 old enough to remember the ‘Tudor Seminar’ meeting in the then ‘England Room’, with the reading tables and chairs all pushed into the centre and the walls encased by books. Collective discussion and not, in fact, the reading of papers was the Tudor norm until the 1970s. Years later, on a return visit to UCL, the distinguished economic historian Michael Postan recalled the modus operandi of this seminar in the early 1930s, as a hive of frenetic activity, with members scaling vertiginous ladders and hefting stout works of reference, yet reiterating to himself afterwards the question: ‘what was it all for, what was it all for?’ Training in problem solving, of a certain kind, was presumably at least part of the answer. Yet Postan’s own notion of ‘relevance’ was evidently very different.  

  Around the time Sir John Neale died, in 1975, Joel Hurstfield invited Conrad Russell and me to join him in running this same seminar, now rechristened ‘English History, 1500-1650’ and in future mainly devoted to the reading of papers. With a further changing of the guard, we were joined a few years later by David Starkey - among others. Come 1992, however, a new seminar was born under the title ‘The Religious History of Britain, from the 15th to the 18th Centuries’, and initially led by Ken Fincham, Susan Harman Moore and me. (Numerous further convenors have since joined.) Among our various motives, was a wish to secure for the subject of religious history a greater prominence than previously .Moreover, I had long personally been of the view that ‘religion’ was too narrowly defined - especially for the early-modern period. In addition I have recently been reminded, while researching for this evening, that a precedent existed in the earlier ‘breakaway’ of S.T. Bindoff from Neale’s Tudor Seminar, allegedly so as to devote more time to ‘social and economic history’.

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