Jennifer McFarland and Olivia Formby, University of Cambridge jmm269@cam.ac.uk occf2@cam.ac.uk Held at St John’s College, University of Cambridge on 24 June 2024, Age and Health 1500-1800 brought together nine postgraduate and early career speakers working on various aspects of health and the life cycle, with a further thirty attendees in person and online. In … Continued
Joe Saunders, University of York jes593@york.ac.uk I give and bequeath to William Leeke Stationer sometime myne apprentice, in respect of such paines as he is to take as one of the Overseers of this my wyll the… somme of Twentie shillings” In September 1602 this bequest was put into the will of Francis Coldocke, Stationer … Continued
Dr Rosamund Oates & Dr Jessica Purdy, Manchester Metropolitan University r.oates@mmu.ac.uk j.purdy@mmu.ac.uk In 2018, the Communities of Print research network hosted a conference in conjunction with Chetham’s Library, Manchester. The conference sought to bring together a range of researchers from PhD candidates to ECRs to established academics who all shared an interest in the history … Continued
Steph Bennett, University of Leeds @historiansteph Since the COVID-19 crisis began, clothing has become increasingly significant in our daily lives. From shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE) to wearing face masks, our clothing choices have been paramount to our health. Like today, people in the early modern period wore certain clothing and materials to try … Continued
Dr Janna Coomans, University of Amsterdam j.coomans@uva.nl Although the idea of the late medieval city as the apex of disease, chaos and dirt still looms in textbooks and popular culture, a range of recent publications have made efforts to ‘clean up’ the Middle Ages. This was not an era from which things gradually improved in … Continued
Alice Tomlinson, University of Manchester @alice_the_ant When I started researching women’s changing work patterns in the early modern period for an essay last autumn, I had no idea the rabbit hole I would end up exploring. Initially, I found that much work on women’s employment suggests that either women have been marching slowly towards emancipation … Continued
Rosanne M. Baars @RosanneBaars ‘Never was there a time more suited for the dissemination of rumours. After all, people mostly follow their emotions; they forge and shape news reports as they like to favour their own party, by adding something, leaving fragments out, even by inventing news reports and re-creating them from their own imagination. … Continued
Jasmine Kilburn-Toppin, Cardiff University Kilburn-ToppinJ@cardiff.ac.uk There are few heritage sites as iconic as the Tower of London. For most twenty-first century Londoners and tourists, the Tower is associated with famous prisoners, grisly executions, and the Crown Jewels. To the early modern mind, the Tower had a more varied range of associations. As well as being … Continued
Prof. Chris R. Kyle, Syracuse University & Prof. Jason Peacey, UCL (Editors) chkyle@maxwell.syr.edu j.peacey@ucl.ac.uk Historiography on early modern Britain arguably suffers from two related problems: the divergent approaches of social and political historians; and an inadequate conceptualization of the distinction between – and relationship between – ‘centre’ and ‘locality’. In this situation, there is a … Continued
Imogen Knox, University of Warwick @Imogen_Knox Society has long been troubled by the prevalence of suicide, with concerns around mental health rising through the COVID-19 pandemic. Late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England similarly believed itself to be facing the ‘prodigious frequency’ of ‘diabolical transports of despair, and self-murther’. The devil reaped ‘a plentiful (but most … Continued
