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Early Modern History
Cambridge has many extraordinary early modern buildings.
The Wren Library, Trinity College
© Cambridge 2000
They remind us that if we do not know anything about this period in history (ca. 1450-1750), we do not understand much of what surrounds us. For architectural forms could express complex ideas. When Gonville and Caius College, for instance, was rebuilt in Renaissance style during the 1560s and 1570s, its entrance gateway was styles in a simple way and named the Gate of Humility, then followed a more elaborate Gate of Virtue, and then a highly ornate Gate of Honour, from which students exited to receive their degrees. Fame was the spur to study, and architecture visually celebrated education and the maturing in spirit of young men.
The Gate of Honour, Gonville and Caius College
The Early Modern Subject Group welcomes you to be fascinated by facts and artefacts relating to this extraordinary period in history, and to explore the lives of men and women in Britain and across Europe and the New World during these centuries. You can learn about themes as varied as The Inquisition or Elizabeth I, The Civil Wars, Manliness in England, The First Global Economy or the Scientific Revolution. And find out about the Renaissance, of course! During their third year, undergraduates can choose from a range of popular early modern courses - Cromwell, The Cultural History of Early Modern Cities, Luther, Hobbes; and soon there is going to be a Specified Subject on Gender in Early Modern History.
We are also very pleased to be able to offer an MPhil programme in Early Modern History, This MPhil is a nine-month course covering the three terms of the Cambridge academic year. In the first term, students on the course will be offered an intensive training programme consisting of classes, seminars, workshops, individual and group assignments. Each student will take three compulsory training modules and select three from a list of five options. Those who satisfactorily complete this programme of study will move on to a personal study, a research project, closely supervised by one of Cambridge's outstanding group of early modern scholars. They will be expected to submit a dissertation of between 20,000 and 25,000 words at the end of the Easter Term (approximately the middle of June).
The course is designed for those who have completed degrees in which History is the main or at least a substantial component and who want to deepen their understanding of the period of British and/or Continental European History between the beginning of the sixteenth and the early eighteenth centuries and more particularly for those who want to come to a deeper understanding of how the history of that period has been studied and how traditional and innovative methods can be used to explore that history.
The course involves an intensive training programme and the application of that training to a substantial piece of historical research and historical writing. It is well suited to the needs of those who are considering undertaking historical research at a doctoral level and for those who seek simply to explore history and the craft of the historian at levels much deeper than those appropriate for an undergraduate degree. This MPhil will be the normal means by which those without an appropriate Master's degree will prepare for the PhD in the early modern period at Cambridge.
M.Phil course handbook
Reaching the end of an M.Phil research day 2004
You might well have come across some of the publications of Subject Group members - recent highlights include Mary Laven´s Virgins of Venice: Enclosed Lives and Broken Vows in the Renaissance Convent, Penguin 2002 and John Guy´s `My Heart is my Own´: The Life of Mary Queen of Scots, Harper Pereenial 2004.
Early Modern History Historians in the Faculty of History
There is more information on the specialisms of those who teach undergraduates and graduates below:
Dr S Alford
King's College | | Dr Alford works mainly on the politics of England in the second half of the sixteenth century. His major interest at the moment is the life and career of William Cecil, Lord Burghley (1520-98), Queen Elizabeth I's secretary, treasurer and councillor. He is writing a biography of Burghley for Yale University Press and has published The Early Elizabethan Polity: William Cecil and the British Succession Crisis, 1558-1569 (Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Kingship and Politics in the Reign of Edward VI (Cambridge University Press, 2002).
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Dr M Calaresu
Gonville and Caius College | | Dr Calaresu is currently completing a monograph study of the Neapolitan enlightenment; Eighteenth-century antiquarianism, collecting and historiography in Italy and Spain. She has published the following: Enlightenment and revolution in Naples: From Vico to Pagano (forthcoming Cambridge University Press); 'Constructing an intellectual identity: Autobiography and identity in eighteenth-century Naples', Journal of Modern Italian Studies 6(2), 2001, 157-177; 'The end of the Grand Tour and the cosmopolitan ideal: Neapolitan critiques of French travel accounts (1750-1800)', in J.Elsner and J.P.Rubiés (eds), Voyages and visions: Towards a cultural history of travel (London, 1999), 138-161; 'Images of ancient Rome in late eighteenth-century Neapolitan historiography', Journal of History of Ideas (1997), pp.641-61.
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Dr C Dodds
Sidney Sussex College | | Caroline Dodds works on Aztec history, with a particular interest in issues of gender. She is developing a book based on her doctoral thesis, 'Warriors and Workers: Duality and Complementarity in Aztec Gender Roles and Relations'. She teaches early modern European history, with a particular emphasis on New World expansion, and is currently planning a research project which extends her research into the colonial period and comparative perspective.
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Dr E Foyster
Clare College | | Dr Foyster's field of research is the social history of Britain from the seventeenth to the mid nineteenth century. She specialises in family and gender history, and has particular interests in the history of marriage. As well as the recent publications listed below, she has published on topics such as children and marriage breakdown, remarriage, parenting, and male aggression. She is currently writing a book for CUP on 'Marital Conflict and Violence in the English Family, 1660-1857'. She is editing a four volume series for Edinburgh University Press with Chris Whatley entitled Everyday Life in Scotland from medieval times until the present day and has published the following: Manhood in Early Modern England (London, 1999) ; 'At the limits of liberty: married women and confinement in eighteenth-century England' Continuity and Change 17 (2002); 'Creating a veil of silence? Politeness and marital violence in the English household' Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 12 (2002); 'Gender relations' in B. Coward, (ed.), A Companion to Stuart Britain (Oxford, 2002).
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Dr M Gaskill
Churchill College | | Dr Gaskill's general research interests are the social and cultural history of Britain, and the history of mentalities and popular beliefs. His expertise lies in the history of witchcraft prosecutions, and more recently in spiritualism and psychical research in the twentieth century. Currently, he is editing a volume of contemporary printed works relating to the East Anglian witch-hunt of 1645-7. He is also planning a book about the place of the supernatural during the First World War. Manhood in Early Modern England (London, 1999) Dr Gaskill has published the following: 'At the limits of liberty: married women and confinement in eighteenth-century England' Continuity and Change 17 (2002); 'Creating a veil of silence? Politeness and marital violence in the English household' Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 12 (2002); 'Gender relations' in B. Coward, (ed.), A Companion to Stuart Britain (Oxford, 2002) and Witchfinders: a Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy (London, 2005).
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Dr M Goldie
Churchill College | | Dr Goldie's research interests are British political, intellectual, and religious history, 1660-1750. He is currently working on an intellectual biography of John Locke. And leading a team to publish Roger Morrice's Entring Book, a major late seventeenth-century diary. Dr Goldie is co-editor of the Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450-1700 (1991); editor of John Locke: Two Treatises of Government (1993); editor of John Locke: Political Essays (1997); editor: The Reception of Locke's Politics (6 vols., 1999); and editor of John Locke: Selected Correspondence (2002).
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Professor J Guy
Clare College | | Professor Guy's research interests are in Early Modern British History (emphasis on politics and political culture). His current project: is on Neoplatonism, friendship and the education of women (with particular reference to Thomas More's circle). Professor Guy has published 'My Heart is my Own' The Life of Mary Queen of Scots (Harper Perennial, 2004); Thomas More (Hodder Arnold, 2000); The Tudors - A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2000); Tudor England (Oxford University Press, 1990) and a monograph series co-editor (with John Morrill and Anthony Fletcher): Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History (CUP).
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Dr C Jackson
Trinity Hall | | Dr Jackson is working on the history of ideas in early modern Europe, especially 17th/18th century Scotland; the concepts of kingship, law and sovereignty in early modern Scotland and the politics of multiple monarchy in 17th century Britain. She has published the following: Restoration Scotland, 1660-1690. Royalist Politics, Religion and Ideas, (Boydell, 2003), 258pp. and has forthcoming publications as follows: 'Judicial Torture, the Liberties of the Subject and Anglo-Scottish Relations, 1660-1690' in T. C. Smout ed., 'Anglo-Scottish Relations 1603-1914', Proceedings of the British Academy, 127 (2005), pp. 75-101 and (with Mark Goldie) 'Dutch Tyranny and Whig Jacobitism' in Esther Mijers & David Onnekink eds., William III: Politics and Culture in International Context, (Ashgate, 2005).
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Dr S Kusukawa
| | Dr Kusukawa's research interests are in early modern natural philosophy (Protestant & Scholastic); early and (Trinity College) libraries modern scientific illustrations; the 5 senses in De anima commentaries; history of the book. She has published the following: The transformation of natural philosophy: the case of Philip Melanchthon, Ideas in context series, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995; A Wittenberg university library catalogue of 1536, Cambridge: LP publications in conjunction with Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1995; Philip Melanchthon: orations on education and philosophy, edited, and translated with C. F. Salazar, Cambridge texts in the history of philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; Philosophy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: conversations with Aristotle, co-edited with Constance Blackwell, Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999; Leonhart Fuchs on the importance of pictures', Journal of the history of ideas 58-3 (1997),- 403-427; 'The Historia Piscium (1686)', Notes and Records of the Royal Society 54-2 (2000), 179-197 and 'Incunables and sixteenth-century Books', in Scientific books, libraries and collectors, ed. A. Hunter, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000, pp. 115-163.
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Dr M R Laven
Jesus College | | Dr Laven works on the social and cultural history of early modern Europe, and especially on Italy. Particular interests include gender, religion and sociability. Her first book used court records to reconstruct the experiences of women in the convents of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Venice; it has been translated into several languages and was awarded the John Llewellyn Rhys prize for 2002. Her current projects include a textbook on the Counter-Reformation, and a study of the Jesuit mission to China.
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Dr S Mandelbrote
Peterhouse | | Mr Mandelbrote's research interests focus on the intellectual history of early modern Britain and north-western Europe, in particular the history of religious and scientific ideas.
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Professor J S Morrill
Selwyn College | | Professor Morrill has research interests across the early modern period. His current major research interests lie in the political, religious, social and cultural histories of England, Ireland and Scotland from the later fifteenth to the mid eighteenth centuries. There are two areas of concentration: state formation and the religious dynamics of the crisis of the mid seventeenth century. He is examining the changing relationship between the constituent polities within the archipelago consisting of Britain, Ireland and their adjacent islands (Channel, Scilly, Hebrides, Orkney etc); and is undertaking a series of detailed case studies of the 'religious psychology' of several people who lived through the civil wars - most notably Oliver Cromwell.
Professor Morril's most recent books include: The Nature of the English Revolution (Longman, 1994), (with Brendan Bradshaw); The British Problem 1534-1707 (Macmillan, 1996); The Oxford Illustrated History of Tudor and Stuart Britain (Oxford University Press, 1996); Revolt in the Provinces: The English People and the Tragedies of War 1634-48 (Longman, 1999).
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Dr J C Muldrew
Queens' College | | Dr Muldrew's research has focused primarily on investigating the economic and social role of trust in the development of the market economy in England between 1500-1700, concentrating on the centrality of reputation to financial credit and the insecurity of wealth in a world of innumerable debts. In this work he has examined the relationship between the actual working of economic contracts and obligations in relation to the development of natural law theory and commercial society. He has also written articles in the field of legal history concerning debt litigation and its relationship to the nature of community, and articles on the cultural nature of money, and wages in the early modern period. His current project involves examining the development of the concept of self-control and its effect on the structure of community as well as how banks came to be trusted in eighteenth century England.
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Dr W O'Reilly
Trinity Hall | | Dr O'Reilly has worked on a range of topics in early modern European colonial American and Atlantic history, and is particularly interested in migration, colonialism and imperialism in a comparative settling. He has supervised PhD dissertations on British views of empire, 1560-1725, Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Emigration to Argentina, and the Portrayal of Bosnia and Bosnian Women in English-Language Texts, 1600-1914. His current research work focuses on central European views of the Atlantic political and cultural worlds in the eighteenth century.
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Dr U Rublack
St John's College | | Dr Rublack's research focuses on early modern Europe, and especially on Germany and the Holy Roman Empire. She is particularly interested in the structures of state, religion and society, cultural exchange, and attitudes to gender, the body, emotions and the self. She has completed a textbook on the European Reformation for Fischer Verlag, Germany and Cambridge University Press. She is also preparing a substantial monograph which is entitled 'The Politics of Appearances in Early Modern Europe' and looks at the meanings of dress in this period. Her other publications include 'The crimes of women in early modern Germany', Gender in early modern German history' and 'Reformation Europe'.
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Dr R W Serjeantson
Trinity College | | Dr Serjeantson's field of research is the intellectual history of early modern Britain and northern Europe from the sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries. His research interests are principally in the history of knowledge and human understanding, in education and political thought, and in the history of relations between the natural and the moral and political sciences of the early modern period. He is also editing volume III of the Oxford Francis Bacon for O.U.P.
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Dr A Shepard
Christ's College | | Dr Shepard's research broadly addresses the social, cultural and economic history of early modern England. Her work to date has focused principally on gender relations, with particular emphasis on the history of masculinity. This has involved extensive work with early modern court records, leading to an interest in legal history, particularly in relation to the jurisdictions of the university courts. Dr Shepard's current project is on perceptions of worth and social status in early modern England, using the responses of witnesses in church courts to the frequently asked question of how much they were worth. I am using this material to explore both the distribution of wealth (particularly in relation to the life cycle) and the language of social description in early modern England. She is also planning a large-scale study of the nature of violence (both legally sanctioned and illegitimate) in early modern Britain.
Dr Shepard has published works 'Communities in early modern England, networks, place, rhetoric' and Meanings and Manhood in early modern England'.
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Dr D L Smith
Selwyn College | | Dr Smith's research interests lie mainly in British political, constitutional and religious history in the early modern period, especially during the seventeenth century. He has published textbooks on the history of Britain and Ireland from 1603 to 1707, and on the Stuart Parliaments, 1603-1689. Much of his primary research has focused particularly on Royalism, and he has published a monograph on Constitutional Royalism and the search for settlement in the 1640s. However, Dr Smith is equally interested in the other 'side' during the revolutionary period, and has produced two books on Oliver Cromwell. He is also involved in cross-disciplinary research spanning historical and literary studies, and has published collaborative work with two prominent literary scholars at the University of Chicago. Dr Smith is increasingly interested in biography, and was an associate editor for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography as well as the contributor of 23 articles. Dr Smith is currently writing a book entitled 'Parliaments and Politics in the Cromwellian Protectorate, 1653-1659' for Cambridge University Press. Future plans include further research on the nature of Royalism, Royalist political and religious thought, and Royalist literature.
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Dr P Warde
Pembroke College | | Dr Warde works on the environmental, economic and social history of early modern Europe, especially Germany. His interests focus in particular upon the use of wood as a fundamental resource in pre-industrial society, and the implications for property rights, legal change, state development, economic change and the management of resources (especially common lands) that arise from this basic characteristic of the early modern world. He is currently also engaged in research on credit and poor relief in early modern south-west Germany, the structure of peasant economies and peasant marketing practices, energy consumption in early modern Europe, and the economic and ecological implications of common pool resources in the pre-industrial period. |
For Early Modernists in other Faculties, see the Register of Early Modernists [PDF]
Languages
The reading of foreign languages is encouraged by the History Faculty. It is not only a useful extra skill but it also makes the sources from the past and modern writing about it more accessible.
Themes and Sources
Every History undergraduate takes one of the Themes and Sources options in his or her first year. A number of these cover part of the Early Modern periods.
Graduate Seminars
The Subject Group also offers graduate students a broad range of Graduate Seminars which are based on different methodologies and illuminate the cultural, social and economic and political history of the period.
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