by Dr. Peter Hill (Northumbria) The Ottoman Political Economies workshop was held in Cambridge on the 14th and 15th October 2022. The event was hosted by CRASSH and supported, in addition, by the Past and Present Society, the Economic History Society, and the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge. Ottoman Political Economies began as an online reading group in 2020, during the Covid-19 lockdowns. It was conceived as a space to bring together scholars, mainly early in their careers, interested in questions of political economy in Ottoman history – an area often dominated by cultural and intellectual approaches. We had run a successful series of online meetings, but this Cambridge workshop was the first time the group had been able to convene in person. As in most of our previous meetings, the workshop was dedicated to discussing work-in-progress by members of the group. We wanted to keep the focus on collective discussion, and so asked for short papers which were circulated in advance. The authors then presented these only briefly, in 5-10 minutes, followed by brief comments by a discussant, and the floor was then open for general discussion. We also kept notes of this discussion as a record for […]

by the Past & Present editorial team In 2021 and 2022 the Past & Present Society was pleased to sponsor a series of workshops and a conference organised by the Examining the Resources and Revenues of Royal Women in Premodern Europe project. Through a series of blog posts co-ordinated by Dr. Elena Woodacre the project’s Principal Investigator, participants in the events reported and reflected upon them. These blog posts are listed below: Examining the Resources and Revenues of Royal Women in Premodern Europe Workshop One: Land by Dr. Katia Wright (AGC Museum, Winchester) Examining the Resources and Revenues of Royal Women in Premodern Europe Workshop Two: Resources by Dr. Charlotte Backerra (Göttingen) Examining the Resources and Revenues of Royal Women in Premodern Europe Workshop Three: Affinities & Administration by Dr. Cathleen Sarti (Balliol College, Oxford) Reflections Upon the Examining the Resources and Revenues of Royal Women in Premodern Europe Conference by Dr. Elena Woodacre (Winchester) Past & Present was pleased to support these events 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.        

by the Past & Present editorial team Past & Present’s 2022 Supplement (No. 16) Beyond Truth: Fiction and Disinformation in Early Modern Europe, edited by Dr. Emma Claussen and Dr. Luca Zenobi (Cambridge) has been published. The volume’s abstract is as follows: “Fake news and fabrications have always both intrigued and alarmed. Over and above this ubiquity, at particular historical junctures, awareness — and wariness — of fakery have reached such prominence in public consciousness as to turn it into a cultural phenomenon in its own right. This was the case in the early modern period when, similarly to today, a combination of new technologies and new audiences (with the rise of novels and newspapers and the exponential expansion of the reading public) brought about various crises of communication as well as opportunities for some of the people who lived through them. The telling of tall tales loomed large, both in terms of sheer quantity and in the level of concern raised about them, sparking new ways of thinking about truth and the literary and critical skills required to identify it. Drawing on a series of papers first presented at a conference in 2018, this Supplement examines fiction, disinformation and […]

by the Past & Present editorial team Past & Present was delighted to learn that Dr. Koh Choon Hwee (Los Angeles, California) has received an Honourable Mention in the 2022 Berkshire Conference of Women Historians article prize for an article in any field of history by a woman scholar. The award is for her article “The Ottoman Postmaster: Contractors, Communication and Early Modern State Formation” published in Past & Present No. 251 (May 2021). The comments from the Prize Committee read as follows: “Choon Hwee Koh impressed the committee with this paper discussing outsourcing of communication networks in the early bureaucratic age. Her study speaks beyond the Ottoman empire of its focus to scholars studying state-building and control in other periods and places.” To mark the honour of Dr. Maglaque’s work being recognised in this way, and to enable the widest possible number of people to read the article our publisher Oxford University Press has made “The Ottoman Postmaster: Contractors, Communication and Early Modern State Formation” free to read for a period of three months.

by Dr. Elena Woodacre (Winchester) Conference – University of Winchester (and online), 4th-6th September 2022 The initial phase of the Examining the Resources and Revenues of Royal Women in Premodern Europe Project was intended to bring together scholars and postgraduate students to share their research on the economic agency and activity of queens and royal women. As the previous blog posts have noted, the three workshops provided an excellent opportunity for researchers in our network to not only present their individual findings but to have rich conversations about the connections between their work as well as note the divergences between the experiences of women living in different regions and centuries. The numbers of researchers in our network grew steadily over the course of this initial phase, as we shared our activity and more scholars and students became aware of the project and wished to take part in the workshops. By the time the final workshop was complete our network included over 80 researchers, from very senior scholars to new graduate students, spread all over Europe, the UK, North America, and Australia. The call for papers for the Queen’s Resources conference was open to all and brought more researchers to share […]

by the Past & Present editorial team Past & Present was delighted to learn that Dr. Erin Maglaque (Sheffield) has been awarded the 2022 Society for Italian Historical Studies article prize in Medieval and Early Modern Italian History. The award is for her article “Care Work and the Family in Catholic Reformation Tuscany” published in Past & Present No. 253 (November 2021). The citation from the Prize Committee reads as follows: “The Society for Italian Historical Studies is delighted to award this year’s Article Prize for Medieval and Early Modern Italian History to Erin Maglaque for her article “Care Work and the Family in Catholic Reformation Tuscany,” published in Past & Present in November 2021. Maglaque’s article examines the records of rural wet nursing commissioned by Florence’s Spedale degli Innocenti to reveal the ways that these women manipulated the hospital’s system of paid care work for young foundlings. Maglaque productively argues that the economies of mothering have not always been unwaged, and that paid care work is inextricable from the fluid social, religious, and cultural boundaries defining the family. Maglaque’s article is a theoretically sophisticated piece of engaged scholarship. The author draws on impressive archival work and a breadth of […]

Received from Dr. Lorenzo Bondioli (Cambridge), Dr. Michele Campopiano (York), Dr. Paolo Tedesco (Tübingen) Before Capitalist Hegemony Workshop: 9th-10th December 2022, SG1, Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road, Cambridge, CB3 9DT Overview This workshop seeks to re-launch the concept of Mode of Production as a heuristic tool assisting us in addressing a central epistemological problem of the historical discipline: how are we to approach past societies in their immensely varied historical specificity, and how are we to address the relations they entertained with each other? The debate on Modes of Production contributed to redefining the methodology of social and economic history since the late nineteenth century, and in spite of its biases and shortcomings, was key to the framing of pioneering global-historical and comparative approaches, from Samir Amin’s unequal development, to Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-system analysis, Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People without History, and John Haldon’s The State and the Tributary Mode of Production. The welcome flourishing of global narratives de-centring Europe and disputing many tenets of an old Eurocentric narrative of globalisation, makes the old challenge even more daunting. Historians are thus called to draw meaningful connections between profoundly different societies; at the same time, the cultural turn has […]

by Dr. Cathleen Sarti (Balliol College, Oxford) Workshop Three: Affinities and Administration This workshop on Affinities & Administration of Royal Women in Premodern Europe closed a workshop series conducted virtually during the pandemic. Going online enabled us to keep the conversation on resources and revenues of royal women, started in a core team around 2018, going, and – even more important – to include much more and much more widely spread scholars than usual. In this third workshop, scholars from England, Germany, Spain, Sweden, and Australia were able to share their research. The audience also joined from their homes all over Europe, Australia, or North America. In the first two workshops on lands and resources the importance of administration and networks for royal women – be they empresses, queens, electresses, duchesses, or princesses – were discussed. This third workshop now put the spotlight on “queen adjacent”-actors, as Nicola Clark (Chichester, UK), one of the presenters, called them. Monarchical rule, despite the name, was a joint effort, and royal women were often particularly good in making use of formal and informal connections. Royal female households, consisting of administrative personnel, ladies-in-waiting, household staff, and family members. Discussing cases from various European realms […]

by Dr. Charlotte Backerra (Göttingen) Workshop Two: Resources The workshop on ‘Resources’ was the second of three virtual workshops of the international project Examining the Resources and Revenues of Royal Women in Premodern Europe. In this project, we are focused on the economic means and agency of royal women, such as empresses, queens, and other sovereign rulers or consorts, from different medieval and early modern countries such as Bohemia, England, France, Holy Roman Empire, Poland, Portugal, or Spain. The workshops, held in 2021 and early 2022, connected researchers from all over the world who presented sources and case studies relevant to the specific topics of each workshop. For the second workshop from 8-9 September 2021, the general themes were dower, dowry, and accounts. Generally, the resources of a premodern woman and especially consort were based on marriage contracts and inheritance certificates. In most marriage contracts, dower, dowry, widerlage, morgive, and pin money were specified. Sources on financial inheritance are testaments and inventories, which allow us to trace inheritances given to a woman, for example by her mother, father, brothers and sisters, or members of the wider family. Resources consisted of lands, monetary income, and material possessions. In terms of lands, the […]

by Dr. Katia Wright (AGC Museum, Winchester) Workshop One: Lands On 19 and 20 May 2021, scholars gathered together online from across the globe to attend a workshop regarding the question of royal women’s lands. This was the first of a series of workshops organised by the Examining the Resources and Revenues of Royal Women in Premodern Europe project, which analyses the economic revenues and agency of royal women across Europe. These workshops, which culminated in a conference in September 2022, marked phase one of the project, and were designed to highlight key areas of ongoing research and to raise questions regarding royal women’s finances and resources. This initial workshop focused on lands and landownership as nearly all royal women from queens to duchesses, empresses to princesses, had access to some form of landed income across their lifetimes. The papers presented at the workshop covered a wide range of areas and time periods across premodern Europe and highlighted key issues to be addressed in the following workshops and important questions for the project to answer. ‘Lands’ covers a vast subject surrounding queenly resources, which overlaps with the majority of royal women’s finances across premodern Europe. All women received income from […]