EMH EarlyModernHistory

  12th October:   Alan Stewart (Columbia University), ‘ Prosecuting Essex: Francis Bacon in the courtroom and on the page’, ONLINE ONLY 26th October:   Julia Hamilton (independent scholar), ‘Performative Politics: Displaying Privacy in Stuart Interiors Using Built and Material Culture’ 9th November:   Edward Taylor (University of Birmingham), ‘ Mercurius Gallobelgicus  and the News Revolution in Britain, 1592-c.1650’ 23rd November:   Erica Canela (University of Birmingham), ‘ The Battle for England's Soul: Richard Baxter and the Early Quakers in the 1650s’ 7th December:   Naomi Tadmor (University of Lancaster), ‘ The settlement of the poor in England  c .1660–1780: law and social change’

  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, The Causes of the English Revolution 1529-1642 , published in 1972. It is...

 

 

 

 There will be a meeting in Market  Harborough on this subject on Saturday, 31st October. The speakers will be Dr Kate Peters, Dr Ismini Pells, Professors Richard Cust and Andrew Hopper. Further details can be found  here        .This is undoubtedly a powerful collection of academic historians.

 Early Modern Britain Seminar, Michaelmas Term 2026 Thursdays at 5 pm, Oakeshott Room, Lincoln College; online on Teams (please email ian.archer@history.ox.ac.uk)    15 October Prof. Lucy Wooding (Lincoln College) ‘“Sinceritie in these daies was sure borne to be sad”: Religion, Dissimulation and Elizabethan Drama’ Jeffrey Knapp, ‘Preachers and Players in Shakespeare’s England’, Representations 44 (1993), 29-59; Kilian Schindler, Religious Dissimulation and Early Modern Drama: The Limits of Toleration (2023), Introduction 22 October Rev Dr Brian Mac Cuarta (Campion Hall) ‘Irish wheat for London’s food crisis, 1630-1631’ Paul Slack, ‘Books of Orders: the making of English social policy 1577-1631’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5 th ser. 30 (1980), 1-22; Norman Gras, The evolution of the English corn market from the twelfth to the eighteenth century (Cambridge MA, 1915), 77-86; Raymond Gillespie, ‘Harvest crises in early seventeenth-century Ireland’, Irish Ec...

  Chadwick Room, Selwyn College Wednesdays 5.15pm (unless otherwise stated)     Michaelmas Term   21 October                       Kate Peters (Murray Edwards College, Cambridge) ‘ Alas, Master, for it was Borrowed’: Public Faith Bills and the Politics of Credit in the English Civil War’                                                 Followed by a drinks reception   28 October       Matthew Champion (University of Melbourne) and Harriet Lyon (Christ’s College, Cambridge)                   Writing Early Modern Histo...

 For Munro's assessment of Trevor-Roper's life and career follow the link  here  .

 

 

 Looking through some old files a few days ago I came across the late David Underdown's review of Clive Holmes's Book,  The Eastern Association in the English Civil War , in the Journal of Modern History (Volume 48 (1976), Pp.324-326). It was generally complimentary about Clive Holmes's scholarship in analysing the economic and social as well as the political fabric of the six counties that formed the Association after the start of the English Civil War. Holmes had brought out the differences between them very effectively. But there was one striking feature in his review: Underdown recognised the influence of the 2nd Earl of Warwick in the county of Essex but thought the Earl and his gentry allies had reinforced rather than created the widespread sympathy for the Long Parliament's cause. There was a danger that support for Parliament at lower levels of society might not be fully appreciated and that the civil war might be seen as a sort of aristocratic fronde in which P...

  30th September:  Convenor Dr Joan Redmond will be celebrating the publication of her monograph   Religion, Rebellion and Violence in Ireland, c1603-1649 . There will be a book launch and drinks reception at KCL on Wednesday 30th September from 6pm. Full details and the registration link can be found   here .    -   6th October:   Remembering Tom Freeman.   Tom Freeman, among his many other roles, was a convenor of the IHR’s Religious History of Britain seminar.  They are organising a half-day hybrid conference in his memory   on   Tuesday 6th October 1pm-6pm  in the Weston Room (Rolls Chapel), Maughan Library, KCL. To register in-person or online attendance please email   K.C.Fincham@kent.ac.uk .    -   10th October:  The Cromwell Association's annual Study Day will take place on Saturday 10th October at the Old Palace in Worcester and will be on the theme of 'Ending the Civil Wars' to mark ...