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
Dr Chad McDonald, University of Southampton c.d.mcdonald@soton.ac.uk @Chad_McDonald In this blogpost, Dr Chad McDonald discusses the work that led to him winning the inaugural Pamela Cox Public History Prize. He focuses on his travelling exhibition, James Parkes and the Age of Intolerance, whilst also reflecting on his social media and school outreach activities. On 27 April … Continued
Professor Ian Forrest, University of Oxford ian.forrest@oriel.ox.ac.uk We are delighted to share this blog about Ian Forrest’s Trustworthy Men: How Inequality and Faith Made the Medieval Church (Princeton University Press, 2018), the runner-up of the 2020 SHS book prize. No-one had really noticed the ‘trustworthy men’, but as I pondered this medieval administrative term I … Continued
Dr Naomi Pullin, University of Warwick naomi.pullin@warwick.ac.uk In Female Friends and the Making of Transatlantic Quakerism, 1650-1750 I provide the first in-depth exploration of British and colonial Quaker women over the movement’s first century. The central question informing my research is how Quakerism’s transition from a radical sect to a settled church altered … Continued
Dr Laura Mair is REF Impact Officer for the School of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh. Alongside completing her doctoral research on the ragged school movement, in 2015-16 she acted as research consultant to the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Museum of Childhood for their ‘On Their Own’ exhibition on British child migrants.
In her contribution to the Research, she reflects on her experience of researching the intimate history of children’s and adult’s lives in the Victorian ragged schools, which is the subject of her new book ‘Religion and Relationships in Ragged Schools: An Intimate History of Educating the Poor, 1844-1870’, which is published by Routledge.
Mary Laven is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Jesus College. She is a social and cultural historian of early modern Italy and Europe, with particular interests in religion, gender, sociability, and material culture. She is the author of ‘Virgins of Venice: Enclosed Lives and Broken Vows in the Renaissance Convent’ (Viking Penguin, 2002) and ‘Mission to China: Matteo Ricci and the Jesuit Encounter with the East’ (Faber and Faber, 2011).
In her contribution to the Research Exchange, she reflects on the challenges of writing the social history of the Renaissance and the benefits of collaborative research. Her new book ‘The Sacred Home in Renaissance Italy’ was co-written with Abigail Brundin and Deborah Howard and published in July 2018 by Oxford University Press.
