by Antonia Anstatt (Merton, University of Oxford) and Ed van der Molen (University of Nottingham) The ‘Gender and Sainthood, 1100-1500’ Conference was held at the History Faculty of the University of Oxford on the 5th and 6th of April 2024, and was organised by Antonia Anstatt (University of Oxford) and Ed van der Molen (University of Nottingham). Bringing together scholars from the UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, Canada, and the US, the conference aimed to place the complex cultural categories of sanctity and gender into conversation with each other via the methodological lens of queer theory and trans studies. While the relationship between sainthood and gender has been well-trodden ground in the field for some time thanks to the work of scholars such as Caroline Walker Bynum, Barbara Newman, and John Coakley, and the increasing awareness of medievalists of the possibilities that trans and queer theories offer to a wide range of areas of research made now an opportune time to revisit this familiar convergence of categories from a new and exciting angle.    The conference took as its starting point the 2021 publication of Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography, edited by Alicia Spencer-Hall and Blake Gutt. This volume starts […]

Received from Anna Clark (St. John’s, University of Oxford) Event Overview ‘Women and Worlds of Learning’ is an interdisciplinary conference focused on the place of women within higher and further education. It is taking place 12th-13th April 2024 at the University of Oxford. Programme Friday 12th April 9.00-9.30: Welcome 9.30-10.30: Keynote 1 Annalisa Obeo (University of Padua) – The University of Women: On the experience of writing a history of women academics and students in Padua 10.30-10.45: Tea Break 10.45-12.15: Session 1 ​Panel 1 – The Place of Learned Ladies within Medieval Worlds of Learning​ Elena Rossi (University of Oxford/IHR) – TBC Victoria Rimbert (Universite Sorbonne Nouvelle/Universita degli Studi di Padova) – Laura Cereta’s World of Learning: itinerary of a XVth century learned woman ​Panel 2 – Framing the Feminine: The Role of Women within Art and Education Anna Clark (University of Oxford) – TBC Rose Teanby (De Montfort, Leicester) – A Woman’s Place?: Photographic Education in England 1839 – 1861 Adele Askelof (Stockholm University) – Photography education as power. Legitimation,social reproduction and positioning in the development of photographic education in Sweden1962-1997 ​12.15-13.15: Lunch 13.15-14.45: Session 2 Panel 3 – Beyond the Classroom: Alternative Models of Education Molly Cochran and Susannah Wright (Oxford […]

by Thomas Leng (University of Sheffield) In February 1973, an article appeared in Past and Present by a young American historian, with the deceptively prosaic title ‘The Civil War Politics of London’s Merchant Community’. Here, the author traced the emergence of a succession of merchant groupings linked to changes in the structure of overseas trade which unfolded in the 80 years up to the outbreak of civil war, culminating in a cohort of ‘new men’ who rose from England’s early colonial exploits, and who differed from the traditional trading company merchants who preceded them. Whereas the latter would cleave to the crown which privileged them, in the civil war these ‘new merchants’ came to occupy a pivotal position parliament’s victory, ushering in a regime that supported their commercial goals. In the case of the merchant community at least, civil war allegiance was rooted in socioeconomic position. This was not Robert Brenner’s first publication- in the previous year he had published a revisionist interpretation of English commercial expansion in the late Tudor and early Stuart periods as driven by the search for imports to feed an expanding domestic market. But his Past and Present article bought this analysis to bear on […]

Received from Dr. Laura Flannigan (St. John’s College, Oxford) Popular Knowledge of the Law in Early Modernity – one-day online workshop (3rd April 2023) Join us for an exciting online workshop exploring Popular Knowledge of the Law in Early Modernity. This one-day event will feature short papers and discussion on the study of law and litigiousness from new and established researchers in the field. Kindly supported by a workshop grant from The Past and Present Society, papers will be given in person at St John’s College, Oxford. Due to limited capacity at the venue for this event, additional attendees are invited to register to watch the papers, and to join us for questions and discussions, through a virtual platform. Registration Provisional programme: 10am – Welcome 10:15 – Panel 1 Mike Kipling (PhD, Oxford) – ‘Elizabethan Merchants and the Court of Requests’ Mabel Winter (Postdoctoral research associate, Sheffield) – ‘Through ‘advice & promocion’: legal knowledge and mill disputes in the Court of Exchequer’ Chloe Ingersent (PhD, Oxford) – ‘Defrauding the Elizabethan judiciary’ Jason Peacey (Professor of History, UCL) – ‘Power and Practices: Litigants as Petitioners in Early Stuart England’ 11:30 – BREAK 11:45 – Panel 2 Brodie Waddell (Senior Lecturer in History, Birkbeck)- ‘Voices and […]

by Barbara Taylor (Queen Mary, University of London) What is solitude? The question tends to stop people in their tracks. The commonsense definition – an absence of other people – clearly won’t do, first because one can be wrong about this, that is be in the presence of others when one thinks one isn’t, but also because being with others is for many people the most solitary condition of all. Isolation, seclusion, privacy: none of these are solitude, although some may be preconditions for it. Sometimes aloneness is lonely – for some people unbearably lonely: ‘Solitude,’ the poet John Donne wrote after a period of confinement with illness, ‘is a torment which is not threatened in hell it selfe’. For other people – especially but not exclusively religious solitaries – solitude is a privileged site of intimate connection, an always-accompanied condition. ‘Never less alone than when alone’; ‘[nothing] so companionable as solitude’; ‘Alone in a crowd’; ‘solitude is best society’…The famous epigrams say it all; the language of solitude is crammed with such paradoxes. Solitude is a human eternal that is nonetheless historical, its meanings and valuations varying over time. Its history is one of controversy: from antiquity on people […]

by the Past & Present editorial team Saturday 3rd February 2024 was the 100th anniversary of the birth of Edward Palmer Thompson (best known by his publication initials E.P.). E.P. Thompson was a key member of the Communist Party Historians Group out of which Past & Present emerged. However, he is widely remembered today for his pioneering approach and significant contribution to the study of social history, exemplified by the work The Making of the English Working Class, as well as his trenchant interventions in the fields of historiography and politics. Between the 1960s and the 1990s Thompson published three articles in Past & Present. The first of which “Time, Work Discipline and Industrial Capitalism” (No. 38, 1967) is according to Altmetrics the “most citied” in the history of the journal. In honour of Thompson’s centenary our publisher Oxford University press has made his three articles for the journal free to read for the next fortnight: *“Time, Work Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism”, Past & Present, Volume 38, Issue 1, December 1967, Pages 56–97 *“The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century”, Past & Present, Volume 50, Issue 1, February 1971, Pages 76–136 *”Hunting the Jacobin Fox”, Past […]

by Will Pooley (University of Bristol) Where did “Doubt and the dislocation of magic: France, 1790–1940” my piece in Past & Present No. 262 come from? All origin stories are, of course, excuses. Historians are no more immune than anyone else from inventing their own pasts to suit the present. After all, historical fictions are fun. So let me tell it like this: I wanted the piece to do what the Wild on Collective have called ‘historically grounded theory’. I wanted to take seriously the possibility of ‘alternative epistemological inquiries, orientations, or starting points’. Historians are not passive consumers of ‘theory’: we have a record of proposing theoretical categories that are applied in other fields, too: ‘emotives’, ‘moral economy’, ‘critical fabulation’. I did not want to take a set of existing theories and applying them to an example, but wanted to ask how historical evidence challenges historians to – perhaps – rethink categories that appear commonsensical. What does it mean to say that people in the past ‘believed’ something? Is ‘belief’ really what the sources convey? And how do historians think about what the sources habitually omit, mischaracterise, or misunderstand? So, the truth is that I started with the category […]

by Suzie Cloves (Manchester Metropolitan University) As part of Disability History Month 2023, Past and Present funded an event designed to answer “How can we best use sound to support access to heritage?”. This was hosted by Manchester Centre for Public Histories + Heritage (MCPHH) and its aim was to generate practical ideas that would encourage thoughtful use of sound to support access to heritage. The discussion was recorded so it could be shared as a freely available podcast and transcript, which you can find on the MCPHH blog. “I believe that our futures are defined by the elements of our past that we choose to preserve, display, destroy or keep hidden. So I view heritage as a sort of public vocabulary for defining our identities and perpetuating our values. All the different elements of heritage – be that a shoebox of letters, or a meeting place, or a memory, or a tune – are potential parts of an ongoing conversation about what matters and where we’re going next. If any one of us is excluded from that conversation, we are excluded from exploring our identity, finding our connection to community, and from defining how we’re treated in the future. This […]

Received from Edmund van der Molen (University of Nottingham) Event Title: Gender and Sainthood c. 1100 – 1500 Conference Date: 5th – 6th April 2024 Location: History Faculty, University of Oxford Organisers: Antonia Anstatt (Merton College, University of Oxford) and Edmund van der Molen (University of Nottingham) Full Programme Registration Link This conference is supported by the Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature, the Hagiography Society, the Past & Present Society, and the History Faculty, University of Oxford. Past & Present is pleased to support this event and supports other events like it. Applications for event funding are welcomed from scholars working in the field of historical studies at all stages in their careers.

Received from Susannah Bain, James Cogbill, Annabel Hancock, and Bee Jones (University of Oxford) Two day workshop taking place at Worcester College, University of Oxford 12th – 13th January 2024. Programme available here. Past & Present is pleased to support this event and supports other events like it. Applications for event funding are welcomed from scholars working in the field of historical studies at all stages in their careers.