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‘A Hand Prepared to be Red’: Manliness and Violence on Britain’s Colonial Frontiers
Posted on February 25, 2013 | No CommentsOn the frontiers of Queensland and British Columbia in the mid-nineteenth century, a culture of violence prevailed. Frontier men accommodated violence in their lives as a routine and normal part of frontier living. The Victorian ethos of 'manliness' - the possession of essential virtues such as self-restraint, courage and strenuous effort - had within it the potential for violence. On the frontier the practice of manliness often entailed violence and the manly ethos could be distorted to justify and legitimise violent acts. -
‘Thou glorious kingdome, thou chiefe of empires’: Persia in seventeenth-century travel literature
Posted on February 24, 2013 | No CommentsThe late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries saw a rise in European travel to Persia, and consequently in writings about such travel. -
Crime Among the Puritans … and the penalties therefor
Posted on February 24, 2013 | No CommentsMassachusetts in the seventeenth century. You weren’t afraid to walk the streets. Drugs and pornography hadn’t yet become stylish, and the big overcrowded prison hadn’t been invented. Some of us might long to return to that morally unambiguous, less violent age. But before giving in to such yearnings, let’s take a closer look at Law and order in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. -
The Spanish Ulcer: Napoleon, Britain, and the Siege of Cádiz
Posted on February 20, 2013 | No CommentsWhen the dust settled on the Napoleonic Wars, Cádiz held the distinction of being the only city in continental Europe to survive a siege by Napoleon. -
Newton, The Last Magician
Posted on February 18, 2013 | No CommentsNewton was very guarded about discussing his experimental results, especially in chymistry. He loathed the thought of someone figuring something new out from his ideas, and he was obsessed with getting full credit for discoveries. -
Henry Hardware’s Moment and the Puritan Attack on Drama
Posted on February 18, 2013 | No CommentsHenry Hardware's Moment and the Puritan Attack on Drama Robert Tittler (Concordia University) Early Theatre, 1.1 (1998): 39-54 (paper). Article 4. Abstract Henry Hardware has become familiar to many theatre... -
The Medical Marketplace
Posted on February 17, 2013 | No CommentsMost earlier accounts of early modern medical practice had either focused on the notional three-part occupational hierarchy of physicians who advised, surgeons who operated and apothecaries who prepared drugs, or else were simply dominated by a concern with learned, ‘professional’ practitioners. -
Wicked Women of Tudor England: Queens, Aristocrats, Commoners
Posted on February 16, 2013 | No CommentsThis fascinating and occasionally salacious historical study delves into the lives of six Tudor women celebrated for their reputed wickedness. -
John Ash and the Rise of the Children’s Grammar
Posted on February 15, 2013 | No CommentsAsh’s Grammatical Institutes (1760) was originally written for the author’s five-year-old daughter and was printed for the use of his schoolmaster friends. -
Trust your senses? An Introduction to the Victorian Sensorium
Posted on February 14, 2013 | No CommentsIt is not surprising to find such a wide divergence of opinion on the value and veracity of sensory experience in the nineteenth century. In an era of rapid industrialization, urbanization and increasing democratization, the Victorian sensorium was under assault as never before. -
Sensate Detection in Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the Lady
Posted on February 14, 2013 | No CommentsMore importantly, however, I want to demonstrate through a close reading of The Law and the Lady how this novel brings the two genres into such close alignment that emotion and imagination, sensate subjective categories, rather than objective analysis and facts, become the unlikely investigative tools by which any particular case is solved. -
Sexuality in Jude the Obscure and the Sexuality of the Victorian Era
Posted on February 13, 2013 | No CommentsSexuality has an important role to play in one’s life. Sexual feelings should be given vent to. This paper draws a comparison between the sexuality of the Victorian era and the sexuality of Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. -
Indecision 1655: The debate surrounding the Readmission of Jews to England
Posted on February 13, 2013 | No CommentsWhat were the differing opinions regarding Jews and how did these notions play a role in the readmission of Jews to England? -
Romeo and the Apothecary
Posted on February 11, 2013 | No CommentsSince the apothecary in the source is no more than a plot device, we might wonder why Shakespeare devotes so much space to him if he is only such a device in the play as well. -
How Holinshed’s Chronicles shaped Shakespeare and English history
Posted on February 11, 2013 | No CommentsThe Oxford Handbook of Holinshed's Chronicles brings together leading specialists in a variety of fields - literature, history, religion, classical studies and bibliography - in order fully to evaluate the multi-faceted book. -
Emotional Intertexts: Female Romantic Friendship and the Anguish of Marriage
Posted on February 11, 2013 | No CommentsIn the decades after the path-breaking work of Lillian Faderman and Caroll Smith- Rosenberg, critical energy was largely directed to questions of the compatibility of female romantic friendship with marriage and the contested erotic content of inter- female intimacy. -
The impact of the Reformation on the Tudor royal household to 1553
Posted on February 11, 2013 | No CommentsThe primary objective is to examine the impact of the Reformation upon private devotional practices of individuals within the royal household. -
Hysteria and Femininity: A Tentative Investigation into a Victorian and Edwardian Myth
Posted on February 10, 2013 | No CommentsBased on the medical narratives of various hysterical women shown in fictional and operatic texts, it meticulously discusses Anglo-American feminist scholars and their French counterparts’ different responses to and interpretative strategies for the same texts, calling for the integration of these two perspectives——a meaningful fusion of humanity and philosophy, essentialisation and romanticisation in ultimately deconstructing the patriarchal myth. -
Political Perceptions in Early Anglo-Indian Relations
Posted on February 10, 2013 | No CommentsIn the summer of 1584 three Englishmen appeared at the court of Akbar, the first to reach the center of the Mughal empire. -
Haberdashery for use in dress 1550-1800
Posted on February 8, 2013 | No CommentsSince textile garments were first made and shaped to fit, haberdashery wares were employed in their construction and present in dress at all levels of society. -
The Non-Elite Consumer and ‘Wearing Apparel’ in Herefordshire and Worcestershire, 1800-1850
Posted on February 8, 2013 | No CommentsHow clothing was obtained, how supply networks for clothing were used by such consumers, and how consumers perceived their clothing and its relationship with fashion. -
Empty Hands and Precious Pictures: Post-mortem Portrait Photographs of Children
Posted on February 7, 2013 | No CommentsThis essay asks what kinds of comfort might be found in a photograph of a dead child, and in it I seek to place the post-mortem portrait photograph in the context of the Victorian emotional, material and visual culture of death. -
Boys’ Adventure Magazines and the Discourse of Adventure, 1860-1885
Posted on February 7, 2013 | No CommentsRecent cultural critics have cited adventure magazines as tools—of a ruling class frightened of the increasingly powerful underclasses; or of the Imperial establishment; or of a middle class dead set on imposing its narrow racist, patriotic, Evangelical, superior, manly, anti-virtually-everything-not-it attitude on impressionable working- and lower middle-class boys. -
Taste, Appreciation and the Study of Literature: F.D. Maurice, R.G. Moulton and the Extramural Effect
Posted on February 6, 2013 | No CommentsAspects of what might be termed the pre-history of extramural literary education have been traced by Franklin Court in the lectures delivered by Adam Smith and Hugh Blair at the Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow in the second half of the eighteenth century. -
Fragments of the Modern City: Material Culture and the Rhythms of Everyday Life in Victorian London
Posted on February 4, 2013 | No CommentsIn this article we explore the potential of material evidence to generate new understandings of everyday life in the Victorian metropolis. -
“The Ablest Man in the British Army” The Life and Career of General Sir John Hope
Posted on February 4, 2013 | No CommentsThousands of books have been written about the England’s war with France during the Napoléonic Era; however, very few of these books highlight the life and career of General Sir John Hope. -
The Development of the English Board Game, 1770 – 1850
Posted on February 4, 2013 | No CommentsIt is known from surviving records, paintings and artifacts that games of the period (and today) are played in a similar way to those of ancient civilisations in the near and far east. There are only a few basic methods of playing games and over the past 250 years many thousands of variations have been created. The basic methods of play come down to four types – race games, strategy games, table games and card games. -
“The army isn’t all work”: Physical culture in the evolution of the British army, 1860-1920
Posted on February 4, 2013 | No CommentsBetween the Crimean War and the end of WWI the British Army underwent a dramatic change from being an anachronistic and frequently ineffective organization to being perhaps the most professional and highly trained army in the world. -
From the Unusual to the Banal: the Archaeology of Everyday Life in Victorian London
Posted on February 3, 2013 | No CommentsWhat do we know about everyday life in Victorian London? At one level, it would seem we know an awful lot. Few cities have generated such lively interest among historians and there is no shortage of contemporary accounts of the 19th-century metropolis. -
Living in Victorian London: The Clay Pipe Evidence
Posted on February 2, 2013 | No CommentsFour small fragments of clay pipe stem were found in context [5]. Despite attempts to date pipes by their stem bore, this remains an inadequate system at best, and fragments of this kind are almost impossible to date at all closely. Given the associated finds, it is highly likely that they are contemporaneous, unless residual or intrusive. -
With This Ring, I Surrender: Politics, Religion, and Marriage in Shakespeare and Tudor England
Posted on February 1, 2013 | No CommentsThe ideas I wish to explore are the overarching themes of politics, religion, and marriage in the Turor period under the rule of King Henry VIII from 1509 to 1547. The popular opinion of the period on Henry VIII's behavior can be seen in William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, Measure for Measure, and Henry VIII. -
Preserving Knowledge Through Popular Victorian Periodicals: An Examination of The Penny Magazine and the Illustrated London News, 1842–1843
Posted on February 1, 2013 | No CommentsThis study is based upon a detailed empirical study of every weekly issue of both of these periodicals for a period of twelve months between May 1842 and May 1843. -
Emergent Identity Masculinity and the Representation of Rape on the Early Modern Stage, 1590-1620
Posted on February 1, 2013 | No CommentsThis thesis is an investigation of the representation of the figure of the man who raped on the early modern stage. -
Policy-Making on the Victorian British Empire: British Imperialism 1837-1901
Posted on February 1, 2013 | No CommentsQuestion: “Far from being exceptionally aggressive and masterful, the rulers of Victorian Britain were generally reluctant imperialists.” How justified is this view? -
Early Modern England – Politics
Posted on February 1, 2013 | No CommentsAndrew Bretz, who teaches English theatre and history at the University of Guelph and Wilfrid Laurier University, created a series of videos for his undergraduate student in 2012. -
Pride and Prejudice celebrates 200th anniversary
Posted on January 30, 2013 | No Comments'In retrospect, we can see that Pride and Prejudice marks a beginning for the modern novel, with its domestic focus, its slight plot, and in its flawed heroine, the funny and loyal, opinionated and brave Elizabeth Bennet, a distinct personality.' -
Wellington’s Two-Front War: The Peninsular Campaigns, 1808-1814
Posted on January 30, 2013 | No CommentsIn the spring of 1808, Britain faced a strategic dilemma. Since the beginning of the Revolutionary Wars in 1793, Britain had spent enormous sums of money to subsidize four unsuccessful coalitions against France and had failed in all of their attempts to defeat the French on land. -
Actresses As Working Women In the Victorian Theatre
Posted on January 30, 2013 | No CommentsVictorian performers were an unusual socioeconomic group. Unlike other professionals they were recruited from all classes of society. While some performers demonstrated that hard work and sheer talent could overcomeany class disadvantages, there were others who spent their entire careers in poverty... -
Exotic Animals in Eighteenth-Century Britain
Posted on January 29, 2013 | No CommentsThe reality of exotic animals as commodities is established through a history of animal merchants in London and, from there, their wider place in eighteenth-century Britain is discerned. -
The royal armour workshops at Greenwich
Posted on January 29, 2013 | No CommentsSoon after he came to the throne in 1509 Henry VIII established a royal armour workshop that was to survive him by about 100 years. -
Subjects and Objects: Material Expressions of Love and Loyalty in Seventeenth-Century England
Posted on January 27, 2013 | No CommentsThe relationship between material objects, the passions, and contractual obligations was deeply embedded within early modern England. -
The house is hers, the soul is but a tenant’: Material Self-Fashioning and Revenge Tragedy
Posted on January 27, 2013 | No CommentsPlaying dead, however, is not merely a staging issue, though performance of a single character in two simultaneous but separate locations is a legitimate concern, both metaphysical and staging, since playing dead also poses eschatological and ontological challenges to neoplatonism, stoicism, and Christian theology, frameworks within which many Jacobean and revenge plays are conceived. -
Research Intelligence in Early Modern England
Posted on January 27, 2013 | No CommentsThis is a good place to introduce the early modern intelligence network and particularly the activities of John Dee, one of the most colorful and enigmatic characters of the English Renaissance. -
Becoming a London Goldsmith in the Seventeenth Century: Social Capital and Mobility of Apprentices and Masters of the Guild
Posted on January 26, 2013 | No CommentsThe goldsmiths experienced a great change in the second half of the seventeenth century with the development of banking. -
The Damnation Of John Donellan
Posted on January 24, 2013 | No CommentsIn August 1780 Sir Theodosius Boughton, a dissolute Old Etonian twenty-year-old and heir to a Warwickshire fortune, died in painful convulsions after taking his medicine. The following year after an inquest and trial which became a cause celebre, his brother-in-law, Captain John'Diamond'Donellan, Irish soldier of fortune and man about town, was tried for his murder -
Ideas of Civil War in Seventeenth-Century England
Posted on January 24, 2013 | No CommentsIt would take the shock of the French Revolution for the term 'English Revolution' to be used to describe the mid-century upheavals. -
‘An honest dog yet’: Performing The Witch of Edmonton
Posted on January 24, 2013 | No CommentsAt the climax of Dekker, Ford, and Rowley’s 1621 tragedy The Witch of Edmonton, the devil treats a young morris dancer named Cuddy Banks to a discourse on the relationship between the everyday world in which Cuddy lives and the demonic realm over which he himself reigns. -
Eighteenth Century Labrador Inuit in England
Posted on January 23, 2013 | No CommentsIn the late 18th century, a number of Labrador Inuit were at different times taken to England. Their lives, journeys, and likenesses were unusually well documented through writings and portraiture -
Alchemy and Economy in Seventeenth Century England
Posted on January 22, 2013 | No CommentsThis essay examines two seventeenth-century approaches to gold, alchemy and economics, both of which esteemed gold as ‘valuable’ and pursued it practically. -
The concept of male honour in seventeenth century England
Posted on January 21, 2013 | No CommentsThe aim of this thesis is to demonstrate the importance of honour to men as a value and power system in seventeenth century England.