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Brewers’ tales: making, retailing and regulating beer in Southampton, 1550-1700
Posted on April 15, 2013 | No CommentsBrewers' tales: making, retailing and regulating beer in Southampton, 1550-1700 James R. Brown Journal of the Brewery History Society, No.135 (2010) Abstract For some years now early modernists have been... -
Women, ale and company in early modern London
Posted on April 15, 2013 | No CommentsWomen, ale and company in early modern London Tim Reinke-Williams Journal of the Brewery History Society, No.135 (2010) Abstract This article explores attitudes to female ale- and beer-drinkers and the... -
L’Estrange His Life: Public and Persona in the Life and Career of Sir Roger L’Estrange, 1616-1704
Posted on March 16, 2013 | No CommentsThis dissertation examines the life and career of Roger L’Estrange, an unsuccessful soldier and prisoner for the king, royalist pamphleteer and Tory apologist, licenser of books and Surveyor of the Press, scourge of Protestant dissent and the first Whig party, literary translator and amateur musician. -
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. -
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. -
“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. -
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 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 -
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 -
More Than Just Kidd’s Play
Posted on January 16, 2013 | No CommentsTom Wareham examines the role played by a legendary yet ill-fated pirate in the consolidation of England’s early trading empire. -
The Novel-Reading Panic in 18th-Century in England: An Outline of an Early Moral Media Panic
Posted on January 6, 2013 | No CommentsThe epistemology behind this research follows from my understanding of a novel not as a literary genre, but rather as a ‘cultural form’ in Raymond Williams’ cul- tural-materialist sense (Williams, 1997), according to which cultural production (in order to be properly understood) can be studied only in relation to its specific societal and historical frameworks. -
‘Selling Consumption’: An Examination of Eighteenth-Century English Trade Cards
Posted on January 6, 2013 | No CommentsAdditionally, the cards’ aesthetic enticed consumers by using themes, images and a language that would have been associated with innovation, originality and luxury. -
An Introduction to the Coffee-house: a discursive model
Posted on January 4, 2013 | No CommentsThe distinctive features of coffee-house sociability were egalitarianism, congeniality and conversation. Although there were important differences between the coffee-houses of Istanbul and London, there were also some intriguing similarities, including the manifestation of this distinctive sociability. -
Common Woman to Commodity: Changing Perceptions of Prostitution in Early Modern England, C. 1450-1750
Posted on January 2, 2013 | No CommentsI began this project under the assumption that the modern definition and conception of the term “prostitute” had materialized by the eighteenth century. This is not a difficult conclusion to draw when examining the existing historiography of illicit sexuality in early modern England. -
Vinum Britannicum: The “Drink Question” in Early Modern England
Posted on December 31, 2012 | No CommentsThis article highlights the influence of English medical writing on the work of Benjamin Rush, concluding that Rush is best considered as a conduit for ideas already circulating in England rather than as the source of a novel approach to alcohol. -
Time and Work in Eighteenth-Century London
Posted on December 29, 2012 | No CommentsAccording to conventional wisdom workers during the Industrial Revolution toiled longer in 1850 than they had a century earlier. -
What did eighteenth-century men want?
Posted on December 27, 2012 | No CommentsWe associate the history of home and private life with women, but what did house and domesticity mean to men? More than you might think argues Professor Amanda Vickery. -
Victorian Christmas
Posted on December 25, 2012 | No CommentsThe Victorian era has long been associated with an idealized vision of Christmas. Where did this modern notion originate? -
A Look at 18th Century London through the prints of William Hogarth, Gin Lane and Beer Street
Posted on December 24, 2012 | No CommentsWhat if you could walk down that same street and cross over to the early 18th Century? -
‘Man is a dining animal’: the archaeology of the English at table, c.1750-1900
Posted on December 20, 2012 | No CommentsThis thesis covers the material culture of food and dining c.1750-1900. At first view this is a long period to attempt to cover within the remit of a doctoral thesis, which might reasonably be expected to concentrate on one specific aspect of the dining experience or a single case study within the period, or to consider a few decades only. The length of the period to be considered has been dictated by the wish to study and explain large-scale changes in dining in England in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century. -
“The Nightmare in Early Modern England.”
Posted on December 10, 2012 | No CommentsThis paper was held at Victoria College by the Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies and dealt with the idea of the nightmare and its evolution from demonic possession to medical malady. -
Changes in Russian diplomacy under Peter the Great
Posted on December 9, 2012 | No CommentsDiplomatic relations among the nations of Western Europe had given rise to the exchange of permanent representatives, but no such development occurred in Russia until the 18th century. -
A Fortunate Dialect: Class, Language, and Survival in Defoe’s Moll Flanders
Posted on November 25, 2012 | No CommentsMoll expresses her own sense of gentility to the reader by using the language of the upper class, but then, in the same breath, translates the implications and semantics to those of the lower class. She uses this adaptability as a survival tool. -
Undermining Apprenticeship: City, Law and Growth in early modern London
Posted on November 20, 2012 | No CommentsThis paper describes a very different, and entirely neglected, side of apprenticeship in London: the city’s system of contract dissolution. I suggest easy dissolution played a vital role in sustaining apprenticeship in London, and was apparently echoed in a weaker form elsewhere in England. -
Space, place, and popular politics in northern England, 1789-1848
Posted on November 20, 2012 | No CommentsThese studies underline the crucial role of space and place in this volatile and revolutionary period. They argue that space is socially constructed, which in itself helps to shape behaviour of those who inhabit or imagine the space. -
Violence and duelling between exiled courtiers: the case of the Caroline Stuart Court in exile, c. 1649-c. 1660
Posted on November 19, 2012 | No CommentsYet, though we can clearly say that the duel was not unique to the exiled Caroline Stuart Court, we must still concede that such acts of violence occurred quite frequently there. This was especially true from 1656-59, when Charles II’s Court was in the Spanish Netherlands, and this tendency to conflict was even remarked upon by contemporary observers. -
Some Bloody good reads for Halloween!
Posted on October 30, 2012 | No CommentsSome Bloody good reads for Halloween! -
The Napier papers
Posted on October 22, 2012 | No CommentsThe Hon. George Napier married en secondes noces Lady Sarah Bunbury, daughter of Charles, 2nd Duke of Richmond, and divorced wife of Sir Thomas Bunbury: she was the famous beauty to whom George III had once proposed. -
English Xenophobia in the 18th Century: the Case of Lord Bute
Posted on October 22, 2012 | No CommentsThe covert manipulator, in other words, of the political strings chiefly responsible for the difficulties which marked the opening years of George III’s reign. -
The Case for the Union 1707
Posted on October 19, 2012 | No CommentsAndrew Fletcher’s First Discourse Concerning the Affairs of Scotland, published in 1698, makes the case for an independent Scotland, and also initiates the debate on Union, on whether Scotland should go it alone or join England. Pamphlets on both sides soon appeared in large numbers. -
For Something More Than King and Country: The Persistence of the Mercenary Tradition in Seventeenth Century Scottish Military History
Posted on October 15, 2012 | No CommentsWhy was it that the Highlanders came into the military service of a regime that had previously treated their society as a pariah? -
The Glasgow Royal Infirmary: Aspects of Illness and Health Care in the Victorian City
Posted on October 15, 2012 | No CommentsSince the opening of the Royal Infirmary, Glasgow’s growth had been dramatic. In 1791 the population of the city and its suburbs numbered 66,000; a century later it had swollen to three quarters of a million. During this time the Royal endeavoured to treat diseases and mend bodies of a mushrooming populace: in-house medical and surgical wards were extended; vaccination services commenced in 1857. -
Becoming British? Navigating the Union of 1707
Posted on October 15, 2012 | No CommentsThis paper will take one extended family, the Humes of the Merse (Berwickshire) and use it as a lens through which to view the process of “Brittification;” the four main areas addressed will be the legal, religious and educational ramifications of union for ambitious Scots and the issue of self-identification. -
Did Slavery make Scotia great?
Posted on October 5, 2012 | No CommentsIn the last few years, however, the research agenda has changed dramatically. Studies have now started to be published on the Scottish connection with the West India sugar colonies and the extent of Scottish involvement in slave trading itself or, by proxy, in Bristol, Liverpool and London. A new interest has also developed in the impact of the slave-based economies on Scotland which connects with older work on the relationship between the imperial trades and Scottish economic development -
The 1738–41 Harvest Crisis in Scotland
Posted on October 5, 2012 | No CommentsTo demonstrate this, the harvest and mortality crisis or macroeconomic depression of 1738–41, a hitherto largely unexplored event in Scotland’s eighteenth-century economic history, has been chosen. -
Captain John Deane: Mercenary, Diplomat, and Spy
Posted on October 4, 2012 | No CommentsIn 1710 the trading vessel Nottingham Galley set out from London bound for Boston on a perilous late season voyage. -
The Myths of the South Sea Bubble
Posted on September 23, 2012 | No CommentsThe South Sea Bubble of 1720 looms large in popular depictions of eighteenth-century Britain. -
The “Gin Epidemic”: London’s Public Health Crisis
Posted on September 19, 2012 | No CommentsGin was an easy target to blame for what was happening among the working class poor and, once the authorities found their source, they neglected to see the big picture and the other reforms that needed to be made. -
Literary servants’ vanishing act in the eighteenth century
Posted on September 19, 2012 | No CommentsWhere are the servants in Jane Austen's novels? What causes servants to vanish from the literary landscape between the publication of Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740), or Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews (1741) and Austen's Sense and Sensibility (1811). -
Promises broken: Breach of promise of marriage in England and Wales, 1753-1970
Posted on September 15, 2012 | No CommentsThe primary basis for this study was are 875 breach of promise cases between 1750 and 1970. -
Within Ourselves… – The Development of British Light Infantry in North America During the Seven Years’ War
Posted on September 14, 2012 | No CommentsThe first British regulars to appear in North America were those accompanying a small British expedition to wrest Manhattan from the Dutch in 1664 -
England’s Domestic Chemists: Science and Consumerism in Eighteenth-Century Recipe Collections
Posted on September 9, 2012 | No CommentsThis historical re-appraisal of the eighteenth-century recipe collection aims to uncover the often unassuming roles of England's domestic chemists. -
Jane Austen and the History of England
Posted on September 4, 2012 | No CommentsAlthough it is suggested frequently that Jane Austen embraced a particular understanding of English history, historians have only just begun analyzing exactly what this understanding of history might have been, or how her particular understanding of English history shaped her oeuvre. -
‘Queen Lilies’? The Interpenetration of Scientific, Religious and Gender Discourses in Victorian Representations of Plants
Posted on September 3, 2012 | No CommentsTo establish the continuity of the ideas involved, the first half of this article outlines modes of thinking that Victorian women inherited from Linnean botany, and from Romantic responses to it, across a broad range of social practices: in systematics, field study, flower painting and illustration, and popular botanical writing. -
The Occupational and Organizational Structures of the Northamptonshire Worsted and Shoemaking Trades, circa 1750-1821
Posted on September 2, 2012 | No CommentsNorthamptonshire, along with other agricultural counties in southern England, went into industrial decline sometime in the second half of the eighteenth century. -
The Culture of Crime: Representations of the Criminal in Eighteenth-Century England
Posted on September 2, 2012 | No CommentsAs the title of this study should suggest, this dissertation aims to account for this increasing representation of criminality in England throughout the eighteenth century. And as the title of this opening chapter indicates, this introduction aims to account for the methods and biases that inform this study and are utilized throughout. -
“Putting to Hazard a Certainty”: Lotteries and the Romance of Gambling in Eighteenth-Century England
Posted on September 1, 2012 | No CommentsI hope to enrich our understanding of the early decades of the Financial Revolution by examining a financial instrument that has received much less attention, at least from literary scholars with interests in financial and economic history: the lottery. I focus on the lottery to show the deep foundations of the Financial Revolution in gambling. -
His Britannic Majesty’s Army in Germany
Posted on August 29, 2012 | No CommentsFrom the point of view of the eighteenth century specialists and British army historians, this campaign is of specific interest in that it is a prime example of the use of German auxiliaries, and debates about the efficacy British troops on campaign. -
A Homelie Herbe: Medicinal Cannabis in Early England
Posted on August 25, 2012 | No CommentsTransformed almost overnight from outlaw to commercial opportunity, cannabis is the sub- ject of urgent investigation on the part of commercial scientists, as companies on both sides of the Atlantic scramble to patent profitable analogues. I suggest that a rational consideration of its venerable history in England, coupled with the evidence of its therapeutic properties (newly confirmed in the language of biochemistry), leads to the inescapable conclusion that the prohibition of medicinal cannabis in England is an historical anomaly that should be rectified as soon as possible.