A one-day workshop, Oaths and Oath-taking in Historical Perspective: Britain, Ireland, and the British Empire, 1700-present, will be held at Northumbria University on Friday, 7 March 2025.
In recent decades, early modern historians have advanced our understandings of oaths and oath-taking. However, understanding the evolution and role of oaths over the longue durée (especially beyond the early eighteenth century) requires more attention. Rather than charting a decline from an early modern peak and seeing oaths as an archaic practice, this workshop will explore the different roles that oaths perform and have performed and why this has mattered in different temporal, geographic, social, and political contexts.
Possible topics could include, but are not confined to;
- Language and rituals of oaths
- Subversive oaths
- Oaths and secrecy
- Religious oaths and tests
- Loyalty, the constitution, and the state
- Assertory and promissory oaths
- Perjury and oaths as legal instruments
- Oaths and modernity
- Oaths, business, and capitalism
- Oaths, performance, practice, and behaviour
- Oaths as speech acts
- Oaths, vows, swearing, and promises
- Oaths and dispute resolution
- Oath and material culture
- Literacy and oath taking
- Oaths and the history of emotions
- Resisting oaths
- Conscience and notions of honour
- Oaths and marriage
- Oaths and professionalism
- Mundane / profane oaths
- Comparative perspectives on oaths and oath-taking
Proposals of c. 250 words (for 15-minute in-person presentations) concerning these or other topics, should be submitted, along with a short CV, by the end of Friday, 6 January 2025. The submissions should be sent to henry.miller@northumbria.ac.uk. Proposers will be informed of the outcome in early January 2025.
The workshop is supported by the Social History Society and the Past & Present Society. Some funding will be available to subsidise ECR speakers. More information can be found on the workshop’s website