by Grace Stafford (University of Vienna) I first became interested in practices of veiling and head-covering during my PhD, when I stumbled across one of the single most beautiful portraits to survive from antiquity (in my opinion at least!). It is a marble bust of a woman, rendered with such sensitivity and plasticity that seems almost impossible for stone. She gazes just past us with heavily lidded eyes, her face calm, and her voluminous hairstyle enveloped by a delicate cover that creases and bunches with spectacular realism. She was made around 400 CE, probably somewhere near the east Roman capital of Constantinople, and represents a woman from a prominent family, or at least one rich enough to have a portrait like this carved. She is truly a triumph of late antique artistry, sitting right at the end of a 1000-year tradition of ancient portrait sculpture. What really attracted my attention though, was the way in which she was described in the catalogue of Roman portraits in which I found her. After a long and detailed description typical of such books, the final paragraph turned to the issue of her covered hair. It stated directly that this garment was not simply […]

by Dr. Laura Flannigan (St. John’s, University of Oxford) The early modern period witnessed unprecedented levels of litigation. Indeed, the size of surviving archive of court rolls, pleadings, and depositions marks out the contours of a ‘legal revolution’ in the centuries up to c.1600, observable across much of the Western world. This trend, scholars have assumed, was preconditioned by population recovery following the Black Death, by rising literacy and document ownership, and by the centralisation of judicial systems under various monarchical regimes. Frequent litigation would seem to imply widespread knowledge of its norms and procedures among litigants – enough to drive them to seek out law courts and legal authorities more regularly. But what did (and what could) this knowledge consist of, how was it acquired and disseminated, who by, and how coherently or accurately? These were some of the questions that formed the genesis of this one-day workshop on ‘Popular Knowledge of the Law in Early Modernity’ at St John’s College, Oxford, with contributors exploring English and trans-Atlantic contexts for answers. One distinction that emerged early in the day’s discussions was that between the knowledge of litigants and that of the lawyers who advised them. The former is typically […]

Received from Dr. Naomi Lloyd-Jones (Durham University) Dates: 23rd – 24th July 2024 Times: 09:00-17:00 Location: Collingwood College Penthouse Conference Suite, Durham University and online Download Programme Conference Event Listing on the Durham University Website Join us for two days of stimulating discussion about the place of politics and the meaning of the political in modern Scotland, a period of massive political, constitutional, economic, environmental, religious and social change in Scotland, the UK and the empire. The conference features 40 paper presentations, a keynote on ‘Where did the nineteenth century go?’ and a roundtable on ‘The future of Scottish political history?’. Registration is now open. The conference is free to attend, and hybrid. Registration is currently open and will close for in-person attendance on 4 July and for online attendance on 18 July. We are also holding pre-conference workshop on publishing in academic journals, in conjunction with Edinburgh University Press (taking place 14:30-16:00 on 22nd July 2024, also at Durham University). It is aimed at PGRs and ECRs, but all are welcome. It is free and hybrid; register on the via the booking website by 18 July. Registration (free) This event is supported by: Lverhulme Trust, Centre for Nineteenth Century Studies, The History of Parliament […]

Received from Dr. Craig Whittall Key Details Colonies, Camps and Captive Spaces of Empire Workshop Date: 2nd July 2024 Location: London Call for Participants pdf. Event Overview This interdisciplinary workshop brings together two convergent, but not yet connected, fields of colonial history – historical practices of domestic and agricultural labour ‘colonies’, which embodied many of the hallmarks of colonialism, and the coercive and captive spaces of overseas empires in which forms of colonial power were put into direct material practice, namely colonial concentration camps, penal colonies and reformatory/residential schools. These two highly interdisciplinary traditions of scholarship have yet to be brought into productive alignment. On the one hand, ‘domestic’ colonies, labour camps, and other disciplinary reformatories have been explored by researchers such as Barbara Arneil (2017), John Field (2013) and, in the European context, Stephen Toth (2019). The development of ‘imperial’ equivalents of these institutions in European empires has been explored by Clare Anderson (2000, 2018) and her major ‘Carceral Archipelago’ European Research Council project. The history of colonial concentration camps is a relatively new area of focus that is rapidly expanding, led by Aidan Forth (2017, 2024), Elizabeth van Heyningen (2013), Jonas Kreienbaum (2019), and David Olusoga and Casper Erichsen (2011) Guest […]

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 […]

Received from Dr. Henry Miller (Northumbria) Event Overview This one-day interdisciplinary conference to be held on 11 September 2025 at the London Campus of Northumbria University seeks to bring together early modern and modern historians, as well as scholars from across the humanities and social sciences, to consider the historical and contemporary roles of oaths and oath-taking in Britain and Ireland, and beyond. The keynote lecture will be delivered by Prof. Ted Vallance (Roehampton). Supported by Northumbria University and the Social History Society in addition to the Past and Present Society. The organisers are: Dr. James McConnel and Dr. Henry Miller. This conference will be held in London in September 2025, having been rescheduled from Newcastle in spring 2025. Call for Papers – Oaths and Oath-taking in Historical Perspective: Britain, Ireland, and the British Empire, 1700 to the present As the 2023 coronation of King Charles III highlighted, oaths remain a feature of modern British public life. Indeed, though largely taken for granted, oaths and declarations continue to play a much wider role within many state agencies (e.g., cabinet government, parliaments, the judiciary, the magistracy, the armed forces, and the police force). Oaths also feature in other parts of life […]

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 […]