by the Past & Present editorial team Three of the 2023-25 Past and Present postdoctoral fellows Drs. Lamin Manneh, Ana Struillou and Malika Zehni (Institute of Historical Research, London) have edited a virtual issue of the journal on the subject of Immobility. In their introduction they explain that: “Increasingly, since the early years of the twenty-first century, some have questioned the relevance of historians’ ‘fetishization of mobility’ in an era of closing borders. This has led to greater attention being placed on systems of ‘regulation and intervention’ that shape global migration. Shifting away from the narratives centred on movement and fluidity, we argue that immobility is not a mere lack of movement: it is about the power relations and barriers that enforce, experience, and resist stillness. By delving into the archives of Past and Present, we aim to construct a conversation around the processes of enforcing, experiencing, and challenging immobility. We have found that immobility shapes the experiences of both the historical actors found in the journal and the historians and scholars who write these histories.” Outlining the basis of their interest in the topic and why this should be a matter of interest to historians working in the contemporary […]

by Kate Shore (Lincoln College, University of Oxford) and Dr. Fred Smith (Balliol College, University of Oxford) What have the English ever done for us? This central question guided participants in a one-day workshop, organised by Fred Smith and Kate Shore, exploring the European impact and legacy of England’s early modern reformations. Once seen as insular and introverted, historians have increasingly come to recognise the extent to which England’s reformations, both Protestant and Catholic, developed in close and intimate dialogue with religious changes elsewhere throughout Europe. However, the history of Europe‘s many reformations and counter-reformations is still often told without much reference to England. Indeed, it is often assumed that England’s reformations had relatively little to offer their continental counterparts: as Diarmaid MacCulloch once suggested, ‘the flow of ideas in the [English] reformation seems at least at first sight to be a matter of imports from abroad, with an emphatically unfavourable balance of payments.’ The workshop, held in Balliol College, Oxford, on 27 March 2025, sought to interrogate this narrative by bringing together an international group of historians, literary scholars and theologians. Over the course of 12 papers and lively discussion, a number of things became clear. The first was […]