received from Kiran Mehta (Wolfson, Oxford)

Hello! We invite you to join us for this two-day conference on prisons and incarceration in England, 1500-1850, that is taking place at Keble College, Oxford, UK on the 15th and 16th of July 2019. A provisional programme will be available online here and the poster can be downloaded here.

Overview

This conference will bring together senior academics and early career researchers to share their ongoing research into English imprisonment, discuss recent developments in the field, and set out new agendas for the history of prisons and imprisonment. This conference is interdisciplinary–our speakers are historians, literary scholars and criminologists–, spans a wide chronology, and takes an inclusive view of imprisonment, including not only criminal custody and incarceration, but also the imprisonment of debtors and prisoners of war. Our speakers employ a myriad of approaches in studying imprisonment, and the conference will encompass the complete range of prisons that existed in this period, beyond the penitentiary, including lock-ups, roundhouses, compters or counters, gaols, houses of correction or bridewells and prison hulks. Together, our speakers seek to explain the role that imprisonment and prisoners played in English society, economy and political life.

‘Convicts Exercising at Pentonville’ H. Mayhew and C. Bliny, The Criminal Prisons of London and scenes of prison life. With numerous illustrations from photographs (London, 1862), https://www.bl.uk/victorian-britain/articles/victorian-prisons-and-punishments

Early scholars of imprisonment focused largely on the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries as it was this period, with the rise of the ‘prison reform’ movement and the development of the penitentiary, in which they located the origins of the modern prison. This historiographical focus on the prison as a distinctly modern mode of punishment has obscured its contingency upon practices, attitudes and ideologies that had developed over a much longer period. Moreover, it has left largely unexplored the sheer scale and variety of early imprisonment and its significance to modern development. By recovering the early modern prison in all its variants and situating this work alongside new studies on the prison’s later incarnations, we hope this conference will suggest alternative frameworks from which to study imprisonment, provide new interpretations of incarceration, and advance different chronologies for the prison and its evolution.

‘The Harlot’s Progress’ (a possibly unauthorised re-engraving, in reverse of Hogarth’s original, engraved by Bickham, Mynde and Smith, London Metropolitan Archives, https://collage.cityoflondon.gov.uk.

Keynote Speakers

We are very lucky to have two keynote speakers:

Professor Rachel Weil (Cornell University, New York, USA)
Professor Joanna Innes (Oxford University, UK).

Registration

Registration at this event is free, but attendees are requested to advise of their intention to attend by completing this Eventbrite form.

Do get in touch if you have any questions.

This conference is funded by the generosity of the Past and Present Society and Keble College, Oxford. It is organised by Dr. Richard Bell (Keble College, Oxford) and Kiran Mehta (Wolfson College, Oxford) and presented by the Keble Medieval and Renaissance Cluster.

Past & Present is pleased to support this event and 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.

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