Scholar's Choice, Tudor Challenge

Edward Hall, The Union of the Two
Noble and Illustre Famelies (1550).

Undergraduate group “a” discussion leaders have been asked to provide 1-2 sentences for each of 3 documents from Key and Bucholz, Sources and Debates, ch. 2 “Reviving the Crown, Empowering the State: the Tudor Challenge,” as to what seems useful or interesting about the document, in a comment below (beginning with the one they'd most like to examine/explain/contextualize).  [By Sept. 3. Sat., Group a recommendations are due (online); document assignments & readings distributed by Sun./Mon.; Sept. 8. Thurs. Presentations.]  (Joel has already submitted same, so I provide his as the first example.)

Remembering Anniversaries: Kett's Rebellion

Samuel Wales, Under the Oak of Reformation
at his Camp on Mousehold Heath, Norwich

Robert Kett and various rebels "camped at Mousehold Heath outside the regional capital of Norfolk from 10 July until final defeat by a royal army on 27 August" 1549.  That date, 27 August, rather than the beginning of the insurrection or the execution of Kett (7 Dec.), became "an annual day for the ringing of bells in the city's many churches, and for a religious service commemorating their salvation (the latter continuing into the eighteenth century)." John Walter, ‘Kett, Robert (c.1492–1549)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004.  In the early eighteenth century, painter Samuel Wale was born, possibly in Yarmouth.  It was possibly in the 1740s that Wale "painted a historical scene in oils of the Norfolk insurrectionary Robert Kett," above or to the right, which "is now in the Norwich Castle Museum." M. G. Sullivan, ‘Wale, Samuel (1721?–1786)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2009. Our Sources and Debates in English History, 1485-1714, includes 5.8 Depositions taken before the mayor and aldermen of Norwich after Kett’s Rising (1549–50), which suggests a more short-term, and less fanciful (what is that on Kett's head?), memory of the days when discussion freely ranged over the need (the ways?) to reduce the number of gentlemen and merchants.

1688 And All That

University of Nottingham Library, has a great visual representation of William of Orange's Itinerary (specifically a "map of southern England showing the routes followed by William's headquarters, four of the main Dutch commanders, and some English detachments.")  Their set of online documents, timelines, and other sources on the invasion are also worth noting.  (Thanks, and a tip of the hat to Charlie Foy.)

1688 also has its chronology (well 1685-89) here.  There is a Williamite world (well Universe) here.  And, to be fair, a Jacobite world (including an extensive set of documents) here.

(b)log rolling

London booksellers (n.d.)

In the past, I have attempted to describe blogs related to early modern England (and Wales, and Scotland, and Ireland) here, here, and here.  I will continue to draw attention to the new and noteworthy (and Early Modern Commons has an extensive EMC Blogroll).  But I have also begun a bloglist on the lower-left of this blog with several of the more interesting of the fellow laborers.

Course(s) Correction

Amended list (on the left-hand side of this blog) of The Courses (using either Early Modern England and/or Sources and Debates) based on currently active URLs (based solely on a quick, basic search):

Say good-bye (for now) to:

• Britain in the Stuart Age, 1603-1688 (Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
• Crown and Peoples: Early Modern Britain (Anglia Ruskin, pre-course reading)
• England Under the Tudors, 1485-1603 (Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
• Religion, Conflict and the Printing Press in Early Modern Europe (Illiniois, Urbana-Champaign)
• Selected Topics in Tudor and Stuart History (Western Ontario)
• Tudor and Stuart Britain, 1500-1700 (Ohio State)
• Tudor and Stuart England (Texas, Permian Basin)

Say hello to (among others, I am trying to recall what I added yesterday):

• Britain in the Modern World, 1550-1815 (Grinnell)
• Cultural Stress in Britain: From Reformation to Revolution (Salisbury)
• Early Modern England (Georgia State)
• Elizabeth I of England (Marian)
• English Renaissance Literature (Salem State)
• History of England, 1485-1714 (Texas, Arlington)
• Reformation Britain (Utah State, 2nd)
• Reformations and Revolutions in Early Modern Britain (Northumbria)
• Selected Topics in Tudor and Stuart History (Western Ontario)
• Shakespeare’s England, 1450–1603 (Ohio)
• Tudor and Stuart Britain, 1500-1700 (UCL)
• Tudor England (University College, Dublin)
• Tudor Stuart Britain (Salisbury)
• Tudor-Stuart England (Georgia)
• Tudor-Stuart England 1485-1688 (Central Arkansas)

The (Early Modern) Revolution Will Be Crowd-sourced?

Worlds collide.  For following changes in a region stretching roughly from Morocco to Iran (which I follow myself at Small Ax), my current fave blog is iRevolution, which shows how innovation and technology such as Crisis Mapping or Crowdsourcing can be used both to understand the changes and to impel the changes themselves.  It has struck me how some of these techniques might be used by historians although we rarely have datasets as big as those.  For example, Analyzing the Libya Crisis Map Data in 3D (Video), would be fascinating to apply to, say, incidents mentioned for one year in one or two newspapers from the 1640s. (Blogger "A Trumpet of Sedition," who seems particularly focused on the mid-century revolutions, might consider how such techniques might help understand the revolutionary era from a post-revisionist stance.)


Now, iRevolution has posted Crowdsourcing Solutions and Crisis Information during the Renaissance which suggests how crowdsourcing was used in the past, in this case, to aggregate pamphlet reporting on the 1607 Severn inlet floods.  Turns out of course there already is a website for the Great Flood of 1607 with a great set of sources on same.

Virtual Royal Exchange - addendum to early modern blogroll

Wenceslaus Hollar, Byrsa Londinensis, vulgo
The Royall Exchange of London (1644), detail

The first is an extensive list of blogs relating to early modern England (including this one), and this and the others below should be added to our Virtual St. Paul's Churchyard, and Virtual Grub Street as relevant blogs:

• Early Modern Commons (extensive blogroll, with Aggregator)
• Hans Eworth & The London Stranger Painters (Tudor Art)
• History Woman (includes late Medieval, early modern)
• Homo Gastronomicus (late 17th & 18th century feasting)
• she-philosopher.com (not really a blog, but I borrowed the close-up detail to left, from Women booksellers, 1640 and 1644, gallery)

Update: Early Modern Architecture (again, not a blog, but a good forum for conferences, research, resources - includes weekly newsletter)

Union Jack(ed)

London Metropolitan Archives' FLickr photostream has some interesting images (mostly 19th and 20th cent.). Dirck Stoop's "The Manner how her Maties. D. Catherine imbarketh from Lisbon for England," (which they title, The Marriage of Catherine of Braganza to King Charles II, 1662) has the English Fleet flying the Union Jack, which must be one of the earliest portrayals of said flag.  The OED, has the following early reference - London Gazette, 924 (1674), "[t]hat from henceforth [subjects] do not presume to wear His Majesties Jack (commonly called, The Union Jack) in any of their Ships or Vessels, without particular Warrant" - although the practice dates from the early Stuarts.

Get Thee To...The Continent

"Painted Life," Mary Ward and Companions

An interesting database is now available - Who were the Nuns? A Prosopographical study of the English Convents in exile 1600-1800.  It is interests me, not only because it is fun to say the word "prosopographical," but because one can locate Catholic county communities.  Thus, selecting region Monmouthshire and searching for surname with wildcards (A*, B*, C*, etc.), turns up some 32 nuns with links to that "Welsh Lancashire," including an Antwerp Carmelite, known as Anne of the Angels, born in Monmouth in 1613 to the Hon. Anne Russell, and fathered by Henry Somerset 1st marquess of Worcester (Philip Jenkins, "'A Welsh Lancashire?' Monmouthshire Catholics in the Eighteenth Century," Recusant History 15, 3 (1980): 176-88; Newton E. Key and Joseph P. Ward, “‘Divided into Parties’: Exclusion Crisis Origins in Monmouth,” English Historical Review 115, 464 (2000): 1159-83).

Goldman Sachs and Goldsmith Vyner

In honor of my joining Facebook to further some committee work (and noting Goldman Sachs investment in same, as well as their role "in contributing to the worst US economic crisis since the 1930s"), I offer the following doggerel made by an anonymous critic of Sir Robert Vyner (presumably in the 1670s)

• Cursed be the banker and hanged the covetous banker
• That like a fatal rust or cancer
• That viper-like through mothers' bowels eat
• Their way to private wealth and hope to cheat
• Abused mankind with glorious words.

[The source may be BL Add. MS. 34,362, Poems 1679-1681.  But I draw it from David Allen, "Bridget Hyde and Lord Treasurer Danby's Alliance with Lord Mayor Vyner," Guildhall studies in London history 2, 1 (1975): 16.]




The Family of Sir Robert Vyner, by John Michael Wright (d.1694)

Before there were blogs

The Folger Shakespeare Library ran a vibrant exhibition, "Breaking News: Renaissance Journalism and the Birth of the Newspaper," curated by Chris R. Kyle and Jason Peacey with Elizabeth Walsh, September 25, 2008-January 31, 2009. The exhibition is still online and is a sort of catalog book of the early newspaper from 1620s to early 18th century.

Our Sources and Debates in English History, 1485-1714 includes selections from MS. newsletters - 4.2 A Spanish newsletter about Hawkins and Drake (December 1569) and 8.8 Selections from newsletters (1675–82), as well as selections from early modern newspapers - 8.9 Selections from Whig and Tory newspapers (1679–82). Selections from the many newsbooks of the 1640s, however, must be searched for elsewhere. Early English Books Online (EEBO) has those collected and bound by George Thomason, and a modern edition of selections is to be found in Joad Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks 1641-1649 (Oxford University Press, 2005). 

EME Plugged

Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History, 2nd ed. is now available as a CourseSmart eTextbook.

Talking Heads / Housing Coffee

Perhaps because of the publication Brian Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (Yale University Press, 2005); Markman Ellis, The Coffee House: A Cultural History (Phoenix, 2005), etc., but more probably because of the expansion of blogs (and the decline of newspapers) had everyone scrambling back to an earlier age and technology of communication shift (from newsbooks to newspapers, from taverns to coffeehouses).  In any case, the last five years have seen numerous online musings:  Coffee-houses vs. Salons; a review of Cowan considering the Coffeehouse Mob; a discussion of the public sphere From the Coffee House to the World Wide Web (though I am unsure how the image Hogarth's Treating fits, given that that is clearly a tavern/private dining room); Notes on Coffee (though perhaps it should be titled Notes on Habermas); a long article "Coffee and Civilization," by Scott Horton (Harper's, August 20, 2007); and recently "Coffee Society."

The concluding chapter of Bucholz and Key, Early Modern England discusses coffee-houses quite a bit, in relation to London's mercantile and insurance developments, aristocratic sociability, and, of course, the nascent public sphere. I worry whether coffeehouses can be all things to all people; but they certainly were a prominent early modern feature.  (We don't use the picture at left in Early Modern England or Sources and Debates, though I believe it is circa 1705.)  For more on coffeehouses and modernity, see Drinking as Enlightenment? (below).  To resist the Whiggish idea that coffeehouses developed everything new about the modern public sphere, see Philip Withington, Society in Early Modern England (Polity Press, 2010), 235, where everything "associated with the Enlightenment coffeehouse had been promulgated through the council chambers and parish vestries of England for the previous one hundred years"!

Virtual St. Paul's Churchyard - addendum

Six month's ago, we noted a Virtual Grub Street? of blogs devoted to aspects of early modern England.  Perhaps it is time to add a few more:

• Early Modern History Blog (perhaps we are all a bit samey with the naming; this one is Tudor-focused)
• Georgian London (a book in progress, 18th-century material culture)
• In Pursuit of History (formerly The Gentleman Administrator; includes early modern history)
• Renaissance Diary (conferences, events)
• Women in Medieval and Early Modern History (links to broadsides, ballads, and other primaries)
  

Early Modern London Re-visioned

Received notice of an exhibition at the Guildhall Art Gallery. London’s Water: 400 Years of the New River, which, they note, "a display charting the history of the river and the New River Company’s role in supplying water to the capital."

The work to the right, new to me, is an anonymous work titled "A Prospect of the City from the North, c.1730."  (The link to the City of London's Collage provides a larger image and a fuller description.)

Drinking as Enlightenment?

• People often credit their ideas to individual “Eureka!” moments. But Steven Johnson shows how history tells a different story. His tour takes us from the “liquid networks” of London’s coffee houses to Charles Darwin’s long, slow hunch to today’s high-velocity web. ("Where good ideas come from: Steven Johnson"; TEDGlobal, July 2010, Oxford, 17:46)

This podcast (blog talk?) begins in early modern England, as all digital humanities should I suppose.  Dr. Johnson (not that one) makes a couple of suspect claims.  First, the Oxford coffeehouse probably dates from 1654 not 1651 (as most claim); and the first coffeehouse in the British Isles was probably in London about the same time [Brian Cowan, "Publicity and Privacy in the History of the British Coffeehouse," History Compass 5, 4 (June 2007): 1180–213]. Second, coffeehouses (like taverns) often had private rooms and/or high-backed boxes as well as a public table(s) [John Barrell, “Coffee-House Politicians,” JBS 43, 2 (2004): 206-32].  So we cannot state that coffeehouses always privileged openness ("connecting) over proprietariness ("property").  The talk does point to the importance of examining spaces, sociability, and networks, however.  Then and now.

Toleration: A Natural Development in England and Western Civilization?

Charles de Gaulle once said (about Jean-Paul Sartre and his firebrand politics), "We do not imprison our Voltaires."  He appeared to have forgotten that Voltaire was indeed imprisoned for a satire on the French government.  But "we" in the past were always more tolerant and more independent-minded in our own memories than the facts warrant.  Perhaps that is why journalist Christopher Caldwell claims Lockean tolerance for the entire culture of early modern Europe.  Writing in the Financial Times against the Cordoba mosque complex proposal for lower Manhattan, he notes:

• Including Islam within the fold of traditional western religious tolerance is not business-as-usual. It is an experiment. Our Lockean ideas of religious tolerance had their origins in the 16th century (the peace of Augsburg) and the 17th (the peace of Westphalia). Those understandings regulated relations between Christian sects and were steadily liberalised. Judaism later proved assimilable into this system in the US, but not, to put it mildly, everywhere in the west.
• Islam – which is, like Christianity but unlike contemporary Judaism, an evangelising and expansionist religion – is a bigger challenge. ("A mosque that wrecks bridges," August 6, 2010) 

The idea that 17th-century Europe or even England was the home of "traditional western religious tolerance" is not the argument of John Marshall's extensive study of John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge, 2006).  To quote just the abstract of this important work, Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration (1685, pub. 1689) developed in the midst of "debates over toleration for Jews and Muslims as well as for Christians; the limits of toleration for the intolerant, Catholics, atheists, ‘libertines’, and ‘sodomites’, and the complex relationships between intolerance and resistance theories."  In Sources and Debates in English History, 1485-1714, 2nd. ed., we include an extract of his Letter (9.23), but also The trial of Daniel Dammarree for his role in the Sacheverell Riots (April 1710, 9.15) [he helped tear down a mosque, whoops, Dissenter meeting house], as well as an extract from The Toleration Act (9.4), whose full title, "An Act for Exempting their Majesties’ Protestant Subjects, Dissenting from the Church of England, from the Penalties of Certain Laws," 1 Will. & Mary, c. 18, 1689) suggests how limited "traditional western religious tolerance" was.  (Note: I was alerted to Caldwell's take on the past by Andrew Sullivan, "Who Let the Dogs Out," Daily Dish,9 Aug. 2010)

The Stuarts: an unsuccessful monarchy. Discuss.

Jeremy Black gave a paper with the title above (I added "discuss") at The Maritime Lectures series at Greenwich on A Declaration of Indulgence: assessing the Stuart restoration and its legacy, earlier this year. Surely that can only be the case if one discounts William and Mary and Anne?  A bit Jacobite not to consider them Stuarts, yes?  (By the way, the program for the conference has this nice portrait miniature of Charles II blown-up.  Who is the painter?)

When EEBO and ECCO become Verbs

Another day, another blog:

• Early Modern Online Bibliography (EEBO, ECCO, and Burney Collection Online)

should be added to our list Virtual Grub Street? The Bibliography of Online Document Archives at the end of the 2nd ed. of Sources and Debates lists EEBO and ECCO as important source collections, even though we know that many schools and universities cannot afford to subscribe to these massive databases.  In my own course, I have students work with EEBO for at least one assignment, Sources and Debates, Revolutionary England, Essay on 1640-60.  I am working on a podcast on how to search EEBO and use the materials, although through Early Modern Online Bibliography I learned of the University of Warwick's English and Comparative Literary Studies' Video guide to using EEBO.

When Worlds Collide: Early Modern Word Up

It is with some surprise that I discover in the latest email newsletter from UK music magazine Word a link to the new London Lives 1690-1820: Crime, Poverty and Social Policy in the Metropolis.

According to the Project Staff:

• London Lives makes available, in a fully digitised and searchable form, a wide range of primary sources about eighteenth-century London, with a particular focus on plebeian Londoners. This resource includes over 240,000 manuscript and printed pages from eight London archives and is supplemented by fifteen datasets created by other projects. It provides access to historical records containing over 3.35 million name instances. Facilities are provided to allow users to link together records relating to the same individual, and to compile biographies of the best documented individuals. 

Eventually it will be integrated with an even larger set of databases, as described in Connected Histories: Sources for Building British History, 1500–1900.  London Lives should be added to the bibliography of online works in the 2nd ed. of Sources and Debates (and would be useful for students working on late Stuart social and cultural issues, ch. 9).

One caveat, the organizers promise a wiki to help markup and transcription.  A quick test of my father's name reveals the following:

• From a Court holden at the said Hospital of Bridewell on Friday the 6th. of March 1746/7 
• Edward BellamyEdward Bellamy      being Charged by the Oath of Harry KeyHarry Key      at the Wheatsheaf in Cornhill Linnen Draper being a Disorderly Personand Pilferring and Old Hall of small Value his Property. 

That clearly should be "an old hatt" (Bellamy appears to have stolen Harry's hat).  Amazingly, London Lives provides a photo of the original MS. minute book on the same webpage (with a handy zoom) and, indeed, that is what is written.  Amazing source.