Early Modern Notes

I’ve been in the archives going through Cheshire court files for 1685-87 over the last few days, and realised that I’d just missed an anniversary that’s worth commenting on. On 15 July 1685, James Scott, Duke of Monmouth was executed (a thoroughly botched job, apparently; beheading often was) on Tower Hill for leading an unsuccessful rebellion against the not-terribly popular Catholic James II.

Now, living in an age where politicians merely start wars and leave soldiers - and civilians - to pay the price, that really is taking ultimate responsibility for your political actions.

Anyway, the reason that the court files jogged my memory is because of prosecutions for seditious words. The formal record of a criminal trial in the English early modern legal system, the indictment, is usually an arid, formulaic document (written in Latin until 1733). However, indictments for seditious words included details of what the accused had allegedly said. Some say most about the fears of those in government, like the prosecution of a man in 1665 for saying that ‘hee had rather fight against the king then drincke a cup of beare’. (I haven’t found any in these particular files, although I’ve seen them elsewhere, of prosecutions for saying that one ‘did not give a turd for the king’.)

But the indictments also show that for some in the stronger Protestant areas of Cheshire, the failure of Monmouth’s rebellion was a terrible disappointment, one that could barely be faced; there was clearly much grasping at straws. Take this declaration, on 28 July, days after the news of the execution would have reached even the remotest villages: ‘The Duke of Monmouth is alive he’s alive, he’s alive, and the king is dead King James the second, King Charles [II] his brother is dead, and Monmouth has an army within thirty two or thirty foure miles of Oxford God blesse him God blesse and prosper him and his army, I wish myselfe with him’. Eighteen months later, this woman was unbearably bitter: ‘There is no king in England nor hath beene since midsumer last was twelve month’. And despite the public execution, the rumours that would not go away. February 1687: ‘I have beene with the duke of Monmouth about a fortnight ago at sea where he hath a considerable fleet with him and will be here ‘ere long with a more considerable army then he had before’. Anyone interested in the subject of political rumour can do no better than to start with Adam Fox’s marvellous book on Oral and literate culture in early modern England, by the way.

Seditious words, unlike treason, was not a capital felony, but that didn’t mean that offenders got off lightly. The usual punishment was a spell in the pillory, sometimes a whipping, and a heavy fine. Those who could not pay were likely to find themselves spending months in prison, reduced to writing - or finding friends who would write on their behalf - begging petitions to the judges for mercy.

Not that the Glorious Revolution immediately brought freedom of speech. In the Old Bailey Proceedings (1674-1799), fifty people were tried for seditious words in London after 1688. But nearly all of these were before the mid-1720s (with one or two following the 1745 Rebellion). I haven’t done the counting yet, but I suspect that will be outnumbered in the 20 years or so of seventeenth-century Cheshire indictments that I’ve recorded - in a much smaller population than that of eighteenth-century London. It’s a fascinating subject that has yet to be extensively studied.

Anybody wanting references for the primary sources quoted or, indeed, the few secondary works that I’ve come across on this topic is welcome to get in touch with me.

(Originally posted 20 July 2004.)

Does anyone know if there’s an online version of the 1701 pamphlet, “Hanging not punishment enough” anywhere? I’m not having any success on Google, but maybe it’s lurking out in the invisible web somewhere. (If it’s on EEBO, that would be fine for my purposes as the university has a subscription. Though I think I may have checked that out already.) Even extracts might do. As far as I know it doesn’t appear in any modern printed edition or anthology, but if I’m wrong about that, I’d also be glad to know. (Darn it, I knew there was something I was supposed to look up in the BL last month…) I’ve also been ferreting around online for Bernard Mandeville’s “Inquiry into the causes of the frequent executions at Tyburn” (1725) without success so far, though I might be able to get hold of that at NLW.

Fun reading, huh?

More generally I’m on the hunt for online primary sources for the module I’ll be running next semester: anything (of reasonable academic standards) to do with early modern crime, criminal justice, punishment etc in early modern Britain, both archival and print sources. I do have quite a few listed over at EMR already, as well as stuff related to WalesI’ve put up myself (and I’ll hopefully be adding more for the ungrateful wretches students), but if there’s anything I haven’t got… (NB: be aware that if you post comments with several links the moderator will kick in.)

I want to cover as much of Britain (though I’ll leave Ireland to one side) as possible, and I’ve realised that I have very little secondary reading on Scotland (except a handful of fairly narrow topics like witchcraft). I don’t even know much about the primary sources available there. Have I been missing something important?

You will probably be hearing more about this course in the coming weeks.

(It seems a good idea to follow up the Africa history re-posting with this, which was written around the same time.)

As my next-door neighbour* Brandon Watson has recently commented from the perspective of early modern philosophy, not everyone knows what ‘early modern’ means. Even amongst those who would recognise it, it covers a pretty varied timespan; it can, I think, start as early as the mid-fifteenth century, even if c.1500 is regarded as more usual. As for endpoints: some would not allow it to extend beyond about 1750 (in fact, many books of ‘early modern history’, in British history at least, stop at 1640…); for others it can clearly go to 1800 and even beyond. Americanists, of course, have another (more commonly used?) name for it, with a very clear terminal date: ‘the colonial period’. Or, if we are discussing the ‘early early modern’, up to the early seventeenth century, others - especially those focused on literature - may use the term ‘Renaissance’; and the ‘late early modern’ might go under the headings ‘Enlightenment’, ‘Industrial Revolution’, ‘Romanticism’…

And then there are nationally/regionally specific, often dynastic, titles covering various parts of the period: Tudor, Stuart, Ancien Regime, Tokugawa, Mughal, Ottoman. Those non-European ones, in their non-conformity to European periodisation, also pose some questions about spatial varieties (or even limits?) to the concept of ‘early modern’. A Japanese historian may seem on the surface fairly comfortable with the idea of early modern Japan (with the dates 1600-1868) - or is that just a pragmatic way of giving Euroamerican students a label that they can recognise, to make them more comfortable?

The cultural historian Peter Burke discussed the problems with ‘early modern’ at some length in an interview (and he too was sceptical of the applicability of ‘early modern’ to Asian and African contexts).

What I am afraid of is the reification of the period, and because of division of labour we want to divide ourselves off from the mediaevalists on one side, the modernists on the other. But if we started to believe that our period is homogenous, then that would be the end. So I treat it just as a flag of convenience… the dates that matter vary according to the problem you are interested in. And so if political history need not have, probably should not have the same dates as economic history, and the history of high culture probably should not have the same dates as the history of popular culture. And yet we want to do total history, so what are we doing? I think the only thing is we use this term, but we don’t pretend it’s more than convenience.

I agree. (Though might a philosopher like Brandon argue that this is a typical bit of historians’ fudging?) But I’d still be curious to know what historians of Asia and Africa in (roughly) the half-millennium to 1900 think about all this.

And if you know of good online resources (in English) for the world beyond Europe and north America during that period, do let me know.

(Originally posted 10 July 2004)

*That link is no longer current: see Houyhnhnm Land

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PS: These issues also inspired Ralph Luker at Cliopatria to post this link. Go and read it. (But watch out for that Luker guy, he’s trouble. He just accused me of foot fetishism, wouldya believe it?)

PPS: I love Ralph really; his thoughts on the question of ‘early modern’ in African history (histories) at Cliopatria have sparked off some great comments, well worth reading.

This shoe blog, it must go on the blogroll now.

Sorry, couldn’t resist.

And also apologies for forgetting to give credit where it’s due: the tip came from Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind.

A post from Cronaca that I simply couldn’t resist (and gives me an excuse to quote more obscure legal documents…). It reports on documents bringing into question the legend of the invention of baseball in 1839, including a 1791 prohibition on games including ‘baseball’ at Pittsfield, Massachusetts, within 80 yards of the town meeting house, in order to protect its glass windows. Now, in my first ever foray into the Welsh eighteenth-century court archives several years ago, I came across something rather similar from Pembroke, south-west Wales, in 1789. The governors of the town had enacted an order

putting a stop to a riotous assembly and meeting and to a nuisance… practiced on every Shrove Tuesday within the town and streets of the said borough of Pembroke in playing of football up and down and across the streets of the said town and borough in the pursuit and kicking of which the windows of the houses within the said town and borough were frequently broken and the inhabitants thereof greatly incommoded disturbed and annoyed by the said riotous and unlawful assembly…

The town crier was sent out to proclaim the new prohibition. However, some ‘tumultuous and disorderly’ inhabitants of the town were disinclined to leave off their game and went ahead anyway. (I wonder what happened in Pittsfield?)

If only windows were being broken, the Pembroke Shrove Tuesday football might in fact have been a relatively civilised affair compared to the violent and bloody ball games played in various parts of Europe during the early modern period (and earlier). These were frequently played between neighbouring parishes, involving all the local able-bodied men: a form, in fact, of minor warfare. There were few restrictions on kicking and throwing the ball, and cudgelling the opponent in possession until he dropped it was permitted in the best-known version played in south-west Wales, knappan or cnapan (possibly of Viking origin). There were other types of game; in Glamorgan, they played bando (or bandy), with long curved bats (akin to modern hockey sticks). Nor were these games only for the plebs; an eighteenth-century Anglesey gentleman, William Bulkeley, often recorded his prowess at football in his diary, and the blood, broken bones and bruises it produced.

What happened in the nineteenth century - and I strongly suspect that baseball is another example of this - was not so much the invention of games like soccer and rugby (with its own founding myth) as their re-invention: new rules, new discipline, for the new industrial age. Not least in the increasingly crowded streets of towns and cities with their vulnerable windows and polite middle class residents; a trawl through urban archives of the late eighteenth century would very likely reveal many more cases like those of Pittsfield and Pembroke. The new codes and institutions of the nineteenth century were, in one sense, a long-term solution to the problem encountered at Pembroke: it was just not so easy to make people give up their favourite games. And it’s still not that easy to take violence out of the equation, on or off the pitch.

Some Links

The radical history of football
Cnapan and Bandy
Cornish Hurling
Entertainments in early modern Dartford
Florentine football
Shinty
Kabaddi

(Originally posted 21 July 2004.)

Check out this cartoon… (Thanks to scribbling woman for the tip.)

Let them eat cake (Via Arts & Letters Daily).

Despite a diet stuffed with cream, butter, cheese and meat, just 10 per cent of French adults are obese, compared with our 22 per cent, and America’s colossal 33 per cent. The French live longer too, and have lower death rates from coronary heart disease - in spite of those artery-clogging feasts of cholesterol and saturated fat. This curious observation, dubbed ‘the French paradox’, has baffled scientists for more than a decade. And it leaves us diet-obsessed Brits smarting.

And so I realise that my eating habits are really ‘French’ rather than ‘British’ or ‘American’ (lazy national stereotypes or useful generalisations? Well, just look at all the figures…). OK, I do eat in front of the TV (and sometimes standing up or on the go), but I don’t eat ready meals or much in the way of commercially processed foods; I hardly snack between meals at all (my vice is crisps; they are strictly rationed); I prefer quality over quantity; I don’t ever, ever go on diets (and I’m really bad about organised exercise); and I love rich foods (you may have noticed my love affair with cheese and butter). And no, I’m not overweight.
(Personally, I think there’s nothing wrong with being, say, 25lb over some ‘ideal’ weight prescribed out there by some food-faschist, and it’s better than being the same degree underweight, but that’s easy for me to say, isn’t it?)

True, the French women I know tend not to get too hung up on ‘dieting’; I have never witnessed a Parisienne performing the calorie or carbo calculus that bedevils so many British meals. But they do enjoy a sensible, sensuous way of eating… They savour their food. They are passionate about food. They have a national heritage devoted to and founded upon food… For them, it seems, eating is life-enriching exploit, not a chore, and certainly not a guilt-trip.

Ticked those boxes. But in Britain caring about good food is ridiculously expensive; in France it’s the affordable norm.

Almost every village in the country boasts a bustling market featuring local sausages, patties of farm-made chevre, figs and fennel in the appropriate season or truffles dug from a wood down the lane. It’s not just a choice available to the moneyed middle classes, but somewhere for everyone, every day.

(Mouth watering now…) And something else:

When they get those enviable produits du terroirs home, French people, it seems, naturally exercise strict portion control. In their study of why the French remain so much slimmer than Americans, the researchers from the University of Pennsylvania came to the remarkable conclusion that it was because the French ate less.

Not that any of this means that the ‘British’/'American’-type eaters could suddenly adopt ‘French’ eating as a miracle solution to their weight problems. A French woman living in Britain who was interviewed by the writer of the article put it quite clearly: “French women never eat while they’re walking or standing, like you do here. We have no culture of snacking, and especially not on fast food. This habit is ingrained in us from a young age.” (And while I eat a much wider range of food than I did as a child, in most ways my eating habits have not changed: I still eat the way I was brought up to eat. Thank you, mum.)

So, while I cheer all this and indulge in my favourite activity of saying yah-boo-sucks to the ‘experts’ who lecture us about fat and carbs and calories and exercise, it’s a reminder that lectures about fat and carbs and calories and exercise don’t work unless we start to get to grips with the deeper cultural, psychological and economic reasons why so many people in certain rich nations are consuming so much unhealthy food, even when they hate themselves for it, even when their health suffers and even when the big message is Thin is Beautiful and Fat is Barely Human.

This has been a thought-provoking - and exhausting - exercise. My study of African history as an undergrad was confined to the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries (and largely to specific areas of ‘British’ west and east Africa); stir in a bit of post-grad work on orientalism, missionaries and related topics, and, er, that’s about it. This thread on the periodization of African history at H-Africa is well worth reading. Importantly, some contributors argued very strongly for the need to focus on ‘indigenous’ perceptions and experiences (this one, by an archaeologist, I thought was particularly forceful). Except, perhaps, in terms of ‘encounters’ with Europeans from the fifteenth century up to imperial conquests, it’s doubtful how much relevance the term ‘early modern’ has to African history. I mean not so much the loadedness of the term ‘modern’ here as the basic question of whether there is (however roughly) any identifiable, useful ‘period’, whatever you might choose to call it, that bears any relation whatsoever to these dates [ie 1500ish-1800ish]. And then, of course, there’s the huge diversity of the continent to consider. That’s why my brain is spinning today.

I found myself a little concerned at the very, well, ‘modern’ perspectives expressed by some commenters in the H-Africa thread, such as this otherwise very interesting one: that is to say, the thousands of years in this vast continent before the ‘colonial’ and ‘postcolonial’ periods are all to be lumped together as the ‘pre-colonial’ or ‘independent’ period? And it has to be said that much of what you can find on the web does just that: a wealth of detailed resources and studies on the last century can be contrasted with surveys that breathlessly cover centuries at a time for earlier periods, or on ‘X topic’ in some rather timeless ‘pre-colonial’ setting. I appreciate that the nature of source materials in many areas may not allow the kind of specificity that document-oriented historians are used to, but even so… (And book and article titles that popped up on Google searches indicate that there’s interesting research going on out there.)

Anyway, I have tried to find resources that are not in the ultra-superficial league. There is a weighting towards ‘political’ narratives; more ’social’ stuff would have been good, but never mind. I have included very little on Europeans in Africa or slavery and the slave trade - there are already some relevant links at Early Modern Resources. If you bear in mind that it was compiled by someone who was learning as she went along (search strategy? what’s one of those then?), you may hopefully find it useful. (If you’re reading it and thinking ‘I could have done a better job than that’ - then get off your arse and do it, OK?)

African Timelines: 15th to early 19th centuries
The Story of Africa: Slavery
The Portuguese in Africa 1415-1600
Exploring Africa: Maps and Travel Narratives
The Eye of the Beholder (maps of Africa)
Antiquarian Maps of Africa
The Black Man’s Burden (1920)
Diffusion and other problems in the history of African states
Misunderstanding natives in the seventeenth century

Political African Women of the 16th-18th centuries
Pre-colonial Homosexuality in Africa
Pre-colonial Metalworking Bibliography
Ethnicity in Africa 1700-1850 Bibliography
African Political Entities before the Scramble
Zakat in pre-colonial sub-Saharan Africa

Timeline: The Maghrib 1400-1600
Timeline: The Maghrib 1600-1800
Warfare and firearms in fifteenth-century Morocco
Sa’did Architecture
Tunisia’s Andalusian Heritage
Libya: Ottoman Regency
Ottoman rule in Algeria
Timeline: Egypt 1400-1600
Timeline: Egypt 1600-1800
Egypt under the Ottoman Empire
History of Ottoman Egypt
Egypt: Ottoman Turk Period
Administration in Egypt from Ottoman Times (book review)
Cairo City Maps

The Story of Africa: West African Kingdoms
Timbuktu
Timbuktu Libraries
Songhay
Kingdoms of the Medieval Sudan
Timeline: Western and Central Sudan 1400-1600
Timeline: Western and Central Sudan 1600-1800
The Forest Kingdoms
Timeline: Guinea Coast 1400-1600
Timeline: Guinea Coast 1600-1800
Art,Innovation and Politics in Eighteenth-century Benin
Women in pre-colonial Nigeria

The Story of Africa: Central African Kingdoms
Timeline: Central Africa 1400-1600
Timeline: Central Africa 1600-1800
Luba
Luba and Lunda Empires
Kuba
Kuba Kingdom
The Kongo Kingdom and the Papacy
History of Angola

Timeline: Eastern and Southern Africa 1400-1600
Timeline: Eastern Africa 1600-1800
Timeline: Southern Africa 1600-1800
Kingdoms of Madagascar
The Dutch in South Africa

(Originally posted 24 July 2004.)

At last, the Vision of Britain website seems to be working properly - and worth the wait, too. There’s really something for everyone interested in Britain (though not Ireland) here. There are lots of statistics since 1801 and nineteenth- and twentieth-century maps. Type in your postcode or a place name for a wealth of local information…

And then there’s the section on travellers’ tales, from the twelfth to the nineteenth centuries, Gerald of Wales through to George Borrow and William Cobbett via James Boswell (amongst others).

Much to my delight, the journeys of both Daniel Defoe* and Celia Fiennes are included (I’ve updated the earlier post on St Winifred’s using this link).

*The sections on Wales have not been included (yet?); although there are some doubts about how many of the places in Wales he actually visited anyway…

Update: The advice I’ve had via H-Albion is that serious historical researchers who want information based on local administrative units should use the Expert Search rather than the box on the main page. It also allows wildcard searches (the mail notes the profusion of variant place names and spellings, “especially in Wales". Tell me about it…).

Nowadays, a pilgrimage to St Winifred’s Well at Holywell, Flintshire, is a curiosity to be reported indulgently by the BBC. In the seventeenth century, it was a much more serious, political, matter. Flintshire was, by the Restoration if not much earlier, one of the few Welsh counties with significant numbers of Catholic ‘recusants’ (the other main centre was Monmouthshire), and moreover the well attracted many Catholic pilgrims from further afield.

It’s a wonder the well was never shut down (especially as, apparently, the Gunpowder Plotters went there); it’s not that far from the English border and hardly in what you’d call remote moorlands. It did have some powerful patrons at various points. Margaret Beaufort, Henry VII’s mother, was its most important late 15th-century patron. Two centuries later, James II and his second wife made a pilgrimage in 1687, hoping for the saint’s intervention to give them an heir. And we know the trouble that led to in 1688.* The well was ransacked by anti-catholic rioters after the Revolution, but was going strong again in the eighteenth century - more as a bathing ’spa’ than a site of religious pilgrimage.

The Cistercian Way: Holywell
St Winefride’s Well

The BBC recounts the well-known legend: a local chieftain beheaded the maiden Winefride after she rejected him. A spring rose from the point where her head fell (before it was miraculously restored to its owner’s neck, which the BBC doesn’t mention). And “the stones surrounding the fountain were stained forever with her blood, and the blood falling in the water coloured also the moss that grows there and which has the perfume of frankincense, though some say of violets.” The BBC also doesn’t go on to mention the story that Celia Fiennes told about the moss, the locals and the pilgrims:

I saw abundance of ye devout papists on their Knees all round a well. Poor people are deluded into an ignorant blind zeale and to be pity’d by us yt have the advantage of knowing better and ought to be better. There is some stones of a Reddish Coullour in ye well sd to be some of St Winifred’s blood also, wch ye poore people take out and bring to ye strangers for Curiosity and Relicts, and also moss about ye bancks full of great virtue for Every thing. But its a Certaine gaine to ye poore people - every one gives them something for bringing them moss and ye stones, but lest they should in length of tyme be quite gather’d up they take Care to replenish it dayly from some mossy hill and so stick it along ye sides of ye well.

Very crafty.

BTW, if Winifred sounds familiar to crime fiction readers, she is the same saint who is so dear to Cadfael in Ellis Peters’ A morbid taste for bones.

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*For anyone reading this who doesn’t know their seventeenth-century political history, it was the birth of a male heir and hence the prospect of a Catholic succession that sparked off the ‘Glorious Revolution’. This heir was James, ‘The Old Pretender’.)

(Originally posted 29 June 2004.)

If you haven’t been paying attention, Claire has decided to start blogging more intensively about her research on early modern print culture, and has been posting some good articles - which, by coincidence, should complement some of the posts I’m republishing from the summer. (How did I write so much about post-Restoration politics? I didn’t even think I was into political history. Wow, do I actually have some new ideas coming on…?)

She’s just posted about the Popish Plot as depicted in playing cards and visual representations in artefacts such as jewellery, and is promising more nice things to come. (Yum yum, says the early modern geek over here.)

And for other blogs focusing on particular aspects of the early modern - excellent academic resources in their own right - you can visit:

Anglo-Dutch Wars: seventeenth-century naval and military history.

Houyhnhnm Land: early modern philosophy resources.

Pepys’ Diary: posted daily, with annotations posted by readers and lots of useful background. A wonderful use of the blog format and technology, which now seems to be an expanding field: John Wesley’s Journal; David Brainerd’s Journal; Da Vinci’s Notebooks.

Philobiblon: regularly posts about early modern women, especially in London.

Giornale Nuovo: (mainly) early modern art and visual culture - a truly gorgeous as well as educational blog (though currently taking a blog sabbatical…).

Also, Renaissance Weblog is great at finding online writing (newspaper reviews, etc) about early modern related topics, mainly art and literary.

Have I missed anything important? Let me know if so. I think it’s marvellous to see these great, high quality ‘niche’ blogs springing up, and hope there will be many more. (But I am, as noted, an early modern geek.)

It’s that time of year again: newly-fledged graduates are considering whether to take the plunge into taking post-grad courses - whether because they’ve been enthused by inspirational teachers, are putting off finding a ‘real’ job, or even think the ‘real’ job for them might just lie in academia - and there’s an ever growing range of early modern options. Here’s a list (in no particular order) for you, or anyone you know who’s that way inclined. I’m sure it’s not complete, of course.

MA in Early Modern History, Sussex University. Core courses include ‘Society and Culture’ and ‘Literature, Politics and Religion’; options include ‘Heretics, witches and jews’; ‘France under Louis XIV’; ‘The Atlantic World’. There is also a Early Modern Literature and Culture MA based in the English department.

MA in Early Modern History, Kings College London. The core course is ‘Approaches to early modern history’; options include ‘Composite monarchies and consensual states’; ‘Ritual in early modern society’; ‘The body and society’.

MA in Comparative History of Early Modern European Societies, Birkbeck University of London. Core: ‘Themes in Early Modern History’; options including ‘Early Modern London’; ‘Death, Disease and the Early Modern City’; ‘Power and Communication from the Reformation to the Enlightenment’.

MA in Medieval and Early Modern History, University of Bristol. Core: ‘Themes and Problems in Medieval and Early Modern History’. Most of its early modern content focuses on the period to about 1600, eg: ‘The English Reformation’; ‘The first globalisation, 1400-1600′; ‘The decline and fall of the GAelic World: Ireland and Scotland, 1300-1600′.

MA in British and European Cultural and Political History c.1400-1800, Manchester University. The core is ‘Issues and debates in early modern history’; options include ‘First Century of Spanish America’; ‘Church, society and religion in seventeenth-century France’; ‘People, work and wealth in English towns’.

MA in Early Modern History, University of East Anglia. Core courses include ‘Authority and ideology in early modern England’, ‘Society and culture in early modern England’; options, ‘Political cultures of eighteenth-century Britain’, ‘Colonial America’, ‘Landscape history’.

Interdisciplinary MA, Texts in History, 1500-1750, Reading University. Core courses focus on ‘history and literature’; options include ‘Riot, rebellion and popular protest’; ‘Mid-tudor political narratives’; ‘The early modern midwife’.

MA in Early Modern History, University of York. Focus on ’social and cultural’ history; options include ‘The radical reformation in Germany’; ‘From the body beautiful to the body politic’; ‘The politics of the parish’.

MA in Renaissance and Early Modern Europe, Royal Holloway, University of London. There is a core course on methodology, theory and skills; again ranges over medieval and early modern, options include ‘The material culture of domestic life’; ‘The body in culture/society’; ‘Eighteenth-century women’.

MA in Seventeenth-century Studies, University of Durham seventeenth-century studies centre.

The Centre for 18th-century Studies at York runs several interdisciplinary MA courses, mainly on the period 1750-1850.

Update: Cambridge University has a MPhil in Early Modern History, a taught course that looks similar to other universities’ MAs. (A Cambridge or Oxford MA is not the same as a normal MA, by the way). (Thanks to Danny for the tip.)

Think and look around carefully. Even if you’re certain that you want to do early modern, you don’t necessarily have to do a dedicated early modern history course. I didn’t (my MA was in Women’s and Gender History at York, which gave plenty of opportunities to do early modern subjects). It can be healthy to do something else from time to time! Apart from courses designated as ‘early modern’, there are many more ‘general’ Masters courses that include early modern ‘pathways’ or substantial early modern components. For example:
University of Durham
University of Sheffield
University of Wales Aberystwyth

Or, as with the different options at Sussex, there are plenty of early modern Literature courses in English departments - worth thinking about if you have strong interests in that direction. The Guardian online provides a very good postgraduate course search facility.

It’s worth making sure that the course includes strong research training and preferably auxiliary skills training too (languages especially Latin, palaeography, computing skills). A dissertation, which may be up to 20,000 words long, is a key part of all Masters courses. And if you’re planning to go on to a PhD, it will be essential preparation [you can do a PhD without a MA beforehand if resources are limited, but I tend to not recommend it…]. Visit the department and the location if you possibly can. Find out from other students what the prospectus doesn’t tell you, not least about IT and library facilities. And research resources for that all-important dissertation.

Bear in mind, if you’re thinking about it for this year [2004-5], that you’ve missed the competitions of the two governmental funding bodies in this area, the AHRB and ESRC [but they’ll soon be opening for 2005-6; I will try to get round to writing that post on how to get funding, promise]. There may still be university and departmental opportunities, however. And I’m sure these courses will still be around next year.*

(Originally posted 24 June 2004).

* NB that course details and offerings could have changed since the summer - check carefully before signing up to anything!

Tyburn Tree: Public Execution in Early Modern England
http://www.unc.edu/~charliem/index.htm

(Created by Zachary Lesser of Columbia University in October 1995; expanded and maintained by Charlie Mitchell, Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.)

Tyburn Tree is a fine and deservedly popular online resource. It covers a range of executions - from high-profile political beheadings, burnings, to the hangings of felons. It’s divided into five main sections at the front page: Background and Documents, Dying Speeches, Pictures, Bibliography, Links to Other Sites.

Tyburn Tree is a remarkably plain and simple site in these high-tech days, which means that it’s simple to access and quick to load. Still, a more distinct style - if only to give the site a clear identity – might not go amiss. More seriously, it could be more clearly organised and signposted. In particular, the front page gives no clues to the diversity of the ‘Background and Documents’ section, which is a mixture of primary and secondary sources of different types, with both internal and (slightly confusingly, given the ‘Links to Other Sites’ page) external links, on several topics. The bibliography is also extensive and varied; and there is also a very useful glossary of terms. However, a substantial number of the external links on several pages are broken.

The site’s own material is generally excellent, perhaps especially its pages on the locations of executions, and the standard of transcribed material seems good – as far as it goes. There are distinct limitations to the content. Firstly, it isn’t really about executions in early modern England, as its title claims, but in London (although this emphasis is acknowledged in the about page). This risks giving the impression that the London experience was representative of the country as a whole, which is problematic to say the least. The capital city is the most fertile source of information about capital punishment, especially if one is dependent on printed sources. In terms of numbers, London was quite simply the foremost site of executions of all kinds in England and Wales, not least but not only high-profile political ones. (There has been to my knowledge no systematic comparative study of the use of capital punishment relative to population across the country, but even given its size, it’s quite possible that London was exceptional.) Might greater familiarity with executions and their sheer scale have meant that execution had different social and cultural significances for Londoners?

It feels rather unfair to say that the trouble with Tyburn Tree is that it leaves me wanting more. Charlie Mitchell comments in an interview that he wanted to balance the disproportionate attention paid to the eighteenth century with more information on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the site indeed does this. But London is not England, and it would be equally useful to see more about the provinces to redress the similarly excessive focus on the capital by many writers. Secondly, judging by the broken links (and absence of any links to recent essential resources such as The Old Bailey Proceedings), little has been done to the site in some time. And, finally, it really does need a proper site map and/or (at the very least) a slightly more informative front page.

(Originally posted 27 June 2004.)

Did I remember to post this a couple of weeks ago? It made me laugh, anyway.

The bloggers’ hierarchy.

I got round to reading some of William Salesbury’s A briefe and a playne introduction, teaching how to pronounce the letters in the British tong… today. Rather different to Welsh pronunciation guides (this one has audio files with examples) for all us suffering Welsh learners today. I’m not at all sure that ‘playne’ is the right word.

The introductory note ‘to the reader’ was a fascinating read. Here the author, William Salesbury, sets out the reasons he wrote the book. (I’ve changed ‘u’ to ‘v’ where appropriate and silently expanded some contractions, but otherwise the spelling is unchanged, barring any typos I might have missed.) After he had compiled ‘a little Dictionarye [1547] for the use and behove of my contry men’, he says,

there came came certayne persons unto me, whereof some where Englysh marchers bordering upon Wales: and some not skilled in the Walshe tonge, nevertheles havyng good and honeste occasions, eyther for their promotions and lyvynges, eyther els for trade of marchaudice and other their affayres to be conversante in the sayd contrye of Wales…

And some other were such Walshmen that had been brought up from their yoth and tender age, oute of the precincte of their native contrye, who thoughte it reproch to be utterly ignoraunt in their mother tong, having a mind also to come to some knowledge therin, wherby they myght ye rather (semyng lesse straung) renewe frendshyp and familiaritie with their contrye folke and frendes…

Nowe the other some, were such Englishe men as had not so urgente a cause, nor so earnest an occasion to travell in thys behalfe, but yet were they so fervent… as they (whom I spake of before) whom the Grekes with one propre terme cal Philoglottous, whose gentle herted disposition is alwaies addicte, bente, & geven to be sene in al languages, but speciallye of their owne felow subiectes and contrey menne, thoughe they purchase thereby but small gaynes, lucre, or wynnyng, which thynges be the honied swete baytes of the avaricious beastly misers, and contrarywyse the defiaunce of all liberal and noble stomakes. …

They asked Salesbury ‘whether the pronounciation of the letters in Walshe, dyd dyffer from the Englyshe soundynge of them? And I sayde verye muche.’ (I’ll say.) And so they asked if he would write a short guide setting out ‘a fewe englishe rules’ for Welsh pronunciation. To which he agreed, for ‘the encrease of mutuall amitie and brotherly love, and continuall frendshyppe, and some commoditie at the leaste wise, to suche as be desierous to be occupied thereaboutes.’

In practical terms, particularly relevant in considering the first group, it’s worth commenting that this follows shortly after the ‘Acts of Union’ (1536-43). That legislation (among other things) uniformly replaced most of the final vestiges of Welsh native law with English law, established the Courts of Great Sessions and boosted the influence and business of the Council in the Marches of Wales, based at Ludlow - which between them would have meant many new opportunities for clerks, administrators and lawyers, who might well want some way of communicating with the largely Welsh-speaking population without always having to rely on interpreters. Businessmen, too, might have seen new opportunities across the Welsh border if the legislation was successful in one of its primary aims, reducing Welsh lawlessness and disorder.

But there’s clearly more to it for Salesbury, a true Renaissance man, than that. I’m intrigued about those Welsh exiles, for a start. Were they perhaps the children of Welsh emigrants to London and other English cities (and it’s interesting that they remained attached to their ‘roots’)? The ‘London Welsh’ certainly already existed. Or could they even have been from Protestant families who went into exile to avoid persecution under Henry VIII, now returning following the succession of the far more enthusiastically Protestant Edward VI?

And then there’s Salesbury’s final group: Englishmen (any women, one wonders?) who were eager to learn for the love of learning and to increase ‘mutuall amitie and brotherly love’ with their Welsh neighbours; clearly, a truly noble enterprise. Salesbury was far from being the only highly educated and intelligent, polyglot Welshman in mid-Tudor England (another well known case is John Dee). The Cecils remained interested in their Welsh origins; even the Tudors did on occasion (usually when it suited them politically, it has to be said). Did men like Salesbury help to stimulate English interest in Welsh literary culture and the language? Shakespeare was certainly interested in the ancient ‘British’ (ie, Welsh) past. It would be fascinating to know whether any of Salesbury’s would-be Welsh learners were successful in their quest… and whether anyone ever used his little book effectively (it does seem to depend on knowing several classical languages before you even begin, which might further suggest that it was his third, already deeply learned, group for whom it was primarily intended. His translation of the New Testament was also aimed at a scholarly audience).

William Salesbury is primarily celebrated in Wales for his part in the Tudor ‘Welsh Renaissance’ and his contribution to Welsh language and literary culture: for his dictionary, for his pioneering Welsh translation of the New Testament (1567) and Prayer Book (1567). Quite right, too. All of these are indeed major achievements. But I’m beginning to wonder if he should also be celebrated as a pioneer in Welsh language teaching for adults, who did not merely champion his language amongst his own people, but also strove to give it wider currency (not least by harnessing the power of print) and to aid those who wished (even for ‘lucre’!) to learn it.

(Originally posted 22 June 2004)

Over the coming days, I’m going to re-publish at this site some posts from the original Blogger EMN a few months ago (with the odd revision and update). It’ll be easier to find them here for my own reference, and some of my newer readers may not have seen them before. (Apologies to those of you who have.) And I can pretend to be busily posting without having to write anything new…

Sheesh, it’s boring hanging around waiting for Blogger to do its thing when you’ve got used to WordPress being so fast.

Here is a real mixed bunch of recent announcements from various mailing lists that may interest you.

Conferences/Seminars

CFP: American Society for Legal History Conference, Cincinatti, Ohio, November 2005. Deadline for proposals: 1 February 2005.

CFP: Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies, 1-3 April 2005, Riverside, California. Deadline: 20 December 2004.

CFP: ‘Sisters are doing it for themselves’: Women and Informal Port Economies. Liverpool, UK, 24-25 June 2005. Deadline for proposals: 31 Nov 2004.

Atlantic History Workshop: “The Age of Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1770-1830″, Michigan State University, 12-14
May 2005. Applications deadline: 15 January 2005.

NEH Summer Seminar for College Teachers: Genre, Dialogue, and Community in British Romanticism, University of Nebraska, 13 June - 22 July 2005.

Other CFPs and Competitions

History Compass is seeking papers on British/Irish history, early modern and modern periods.

Call for Contributions to CW3 Journal (Corvey Women Writers on the Web), seeking following categories: short biographies, bibliographies, contemporary reviews and memoirs, images, synopses of novels represented in the Hallam Corvey CW3 database.

British Society for the History of Philosophy Graduate Student Essay Prize. Deadline 31 January 2005.

Fellowships, Grants

Princeton University Library Short-term Research Grants for 2005-6. Deadline for applications: 15 January 2005.

Don’t forget to check out these resources:

For Jobs
H-Net Jobs Guide (mainly north America)
Jobs.ac.uk (mainly UK)

For Conferences etc
H-Announce
Institute of Historical Research for events in the UK (and some beyond)
STAR project, for all sorts of interesting CFPs and conferences

sepoy at Chapati Mystery has an important message about digital archiving - personal archiving, that is. If you want to be able to access all that hard-won research data on your computer twenty years from now, go and read it and get thinking. (I know I need to.) Jonathan Dresner at Cliopatria is worrying about it too.

Jeremy at Clioweb also has his mind on serious questions: peer review and the future of digital scholarship

Danny at No Loss for Words is disturbed to find himself defending Dan Brown; surprised to find himself in agreement with G M Trevelyan; and annoyed at the naivety often shown by non-historians writing about doing history.

Brandon at Siris sets out his ideal history of philosophy course; then he does a little exercise in counterfactuals: er, if cats were cows and cows were dogs then cows would be dogs. No, I’ve got that wrong somewhere. But it’s not really a counterfactual anyway, apparently. Philosophers.

And, at Hoarded Ordinaries, Lorianne is off for the weekend without her computer. In the meantime, you can still see the first snow in New Hampshire, an axe-murderer (not really) and too many other wonderful things to list.

Claire noticed these the other day, and I’d picked some up last weekend: a new series of mini-books from Penguin. I still have a pile of the little books they brought out for their 60th anniversary - that must be nearly 10 years ago; these are on a similar principle, though a larger format (and more expensive… ah, well).

Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization, and helped make us who we are.

And, by the way, look at the quotes they’ve chosen on these covers… (You can see them properly on the website - click on the thumbnails and there are links to the images.)

Anyway, you can also vote for the book in the series that you think has had ‘the most impact on the world’. Marx & Engels and Darwin are currently pretty much sharing the lead.

Boris Johnson, everyone’s favourite floppy blond HIGNFY-fronting Tory, has a blog! (Sorry, this will probably mean nothing whatever to anyone outside Britain.) Alright, not a terribly exciting blog - but it does include some rueful reflections on upsetting Liverpool. And his newspaper writing and suchlike, as well as riveting Henley constituency news.

(Thanks to Claire for blogrolling that one…)

Now I think I might have to google William Hague and maybe Michael Portillo just to see what happens.

I’ve finished moving back home from London (and discovered that if you don’t mind being up for 20 hours straight and spending about 14 hours of that travelling - well, there was a lot of napping on trains - it is in fact possible to travel by train from Aberystwyth to south-west London, clean up a studio flat, hand over keys, and go home again the same day. Perfectly possible but nightmarish. And the train home ran late; but that’s been the story of just about every trip home for the last 6 months anyway.)

So hopefully I shall soon be able to settle back into some sort of routine - including proper blogging! - after the last couple of weeks’ disruptions.

Yet more bad news.

Fred Dibnah has died of cancer, at the age of 66.

For readers in Britain: get your video set or stay in tonight (6 November).

**John Peel Tribute on BBC2 at 10pm**

Despite technical difficulties, it’s here. (I’ll update the Carnivalesque home page later today.)

I’m a little busy to stop and read properly yet (and it may be worth waiting a few hours anyway…), but I’m delighted to see that Claire has a new history blog. She’s also putting out tentative feelers for an early modern group blog.

And she has also made the mistake of saying that she might like to host the next Carnival. Aha! Gotcha! …Seriously, in my role as the Mistress of Misrule, I am looking for future hosts. I think the two so far show that there is plenty of material to hold the Carnival every couple of months, so the next one should be early January (covering November/December).

You know what I completely forgot 5 November is also the anniversary of? Only the landing of William of Orange in Britain in 1688, is what… still, that was only the beginning of a series of momentous events: so I think it’s time for me to gear up to write something about the ‘Glorious Revolution’ very soon.

For tomorrow: the 5th of November, Gunpowder, Treason and Plot…

The Gunpowder Plot

To Picture a Plot

Gunpowder Plot Online Classroom

The Trial of Guy Fawkes: full transcript

Gunpowder Plot Society

Civil Wars of Ideas

Gunpowder Plot: High Treason in 1605

Bonfire Night (includes the Firework Safety Code)

The Traditions of Guy Fawkes Night

Guy Fawkes plot ‘was devastating’ (the physicists get on the case)

Guy Fawkes’ gunpowder ‘found’

Was Guy Fawkes tortured?

Guy Fawkes

What if the Gunpowder Plot had succeeded?

Soon, I’ll be home, and I’ll have a helluva lot of work to do - course preparation, sorting out all this research… and, oh yes, writing. I’ve been extremely indulgent with this blog so far, since while I’ve been in London, a) I haven’t had a TV (or, indeed, a social life) to distract me, and b) it’s great relaxation after days and days slogging in the archives. But it can’t continue at quite this rate.

I’ve been amazed at how quickly I took to blogging (have I really been doing this for less than 6 months?), and how rapidly it’s taken off. (People out there like me! Wow!). I’ve been looking at my site stats, and visitors have doubled since I moved to my new host and launched EMN at this URL in July - much of that traffic to the blog itself; this main page got nearly 14,000 hits in October. Small beer compared to some of the biggies, but not bad for an academic history blog with a fairly narrow focus.

We shall see how it goes. There’s no way I’m going to stop blogging now, but things will have to slow down for a while at least. Bear with me, dear readers. Still, you can help me out a little. If output is going to be more limited, what would you most like to see?

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I sometimes think the searches people are doing to find the site are pretty dull compared to some (but at least they’re not creepy/icky, I suppose). I suspect a few people looking for the one and only Bitch PhD were a bit disappointed, and probably those after photos of the TV presenter Bettany Hughes too.

But these were mildly diverting:

‘class notes on the savage wars of peace’
‘puritan fashion pictures’
’super university comments’
‘crazy litigation suits’
‘nice lovely texts’
‘ignorance of history’ (some naive undergraduate who hasn’t realised just what a vast topic that is yet?)

I may have put up links to this part of the National Library of Wales’ website, but I ought to introduce it to you properly: The Digital Mirror (Y Drych Digidol) is a wonderful resource for those interested in the history of Wales, and new items are added regularly.

There are many high-quality scanned documents and images, often with commentaries and background information. Some are in Welsh, some in English - not to mention a handful in Latin and middle Cornish. (In a perfect world there would, of course, also be transcripts of all the items, but you can’t have everything…)

Of particular interest to early modernists (links to the pages with English-language commentary):

Archival records and manuscripts

Witchcraft in seventeenth-century Flintshire (court records, English-language source)

Lampeter vestry book, 1777-1803 (English)

Autobiography of an eighteenth-century smuggler (English). I have put up extracts from this, with comments, at EMR.

Early tourists in Wales (English), accounts by two late eighteenth-century English travellers in Wales.

History of the Gwydir family (English)

Payments to a servant maid (Cymraeg/English)

Morgan Llwyd’s Dialogue between a child and an old man (Cymraeg)

Printed materials

The case of Dr Bowles (English), the campaign in the early eighteenth century to remove a monoglot English-speaking clergyman from a Welsh-speaking parish.

Monsterous fish (English), the alleged sighting of a mermaid in Carmarthenshire, 1603.

Yny lhyvyr hwnn (Cymraeg), ‘In this book…’, the first printed book in Welsh (1546).

The 1588 Welsh Bible (Cymraeg), the first full translation in Welsh of both Testaments, regarded as one of the most important books ever printed for the survival of the Welsh language.

Images/maps

The Principality of Wales exactly described… (1718, English), Thomas Taylor’s county maps of Wales, apparently the first atlas relating entirely to Wales

Journey to Snowdon, from Thomas Pennant’s Tour in Wales (1778-83)

You might also be interested in the Gathering the Jewels project, a magnificent resource for many areas of Welsh history. Maybe I’ll come back to that another time.

For anyone thinking of paying a visit to The National Archives or the British Library this Friday (5 November): Don’t. Stay at home. Go shopping. Do some marking.

TNA and the BL will both be closed all day due to a national strike by the civil servants’ union PCSU, over government plans to cut 100,000 jobs.

I’ve checked the National Library of Wales and National Library of Scotland’s websites and haven’t seen anything about a strike-related closure there. The strike is, I would think, unlikely to affect university archives or county record offices, city libraries etc (their staff will be employed by local authorities).

But it may be worth your while to check before making special journeys to libraries and archives (or similar institutions) on Friday.

Peel Unplugged

Feasting with Nigella (anybody want to buy me a Christmas present?)

Polyglots earn more and get laid more

Kitties don’t like sharing

Top ten history of science books

Is American history in deep trouble?

Blame Napoleon

Love Washington

Because so many of the blogs I read are American, with politically minded writers (even those that wouldn’t be called ‘political’ blogs), this year I’ve felt that I’ve got closer to a US presidential election than ever before - although, as I’ve spent so much time in a home without a TV, I’ve seen less news coverage than in previous years.

It’s been a strange, often disturbing experience. Disturbing to see so much mutual hatred, fear, suspicion. There is simply no trust; and, with the result likely to be so close, no wonder there’s so much emphasis on fraud and manipulation of the vote. I’m tired of demonisation by both sides. I’m tired of the juvenility too frequently on display. I doubt that either Kerry or Bush can do much about the divisions that have become so worryingly apparent. Especially as either way, there is unlikely to be a clear mandate, there’ll probably be weeks of legal challenges, and we’ll see another four years of a president whose legitimacy will be subject to question.

Oh yeah, it’s all a great advertisement for democracy.

The Guardian reported on a new website, Vision of Britain that should interest anyone interested in British (local and social) history. It includes gazetteers, census information, writings by a wide range of travel writers - including two of my favourites, Gerald of Wales in the 12th century and Celia Fiennes in the 17th. What sounds particularly fun is that you can type in your postcode and get information about the area in which you live…

Except that I can’t try it out because it’s been so overwhelmed by visitors that it’s currently broken! But I live in hope that they’ll sort it out soon (after all, they received £1.5 million in Lottery grants… there must be something left for upgrades, surely?). I’ll keep an eye on this one.