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Research in Focus

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Creating an identity through clothing: a Renaissance merchant’s fashion book

For the second year UoP History module, The Hidden Lives of Things, taught by Dr Katy Gibbons and Dr Mary Cannon, for their assessment, students have to produce an ‘object biography’ for a historical artefact.  Sadie White chose a sixteen-century German fashion book. Described as “The First Book of Fashion,” Matthäus Schwarz of Augsburg’s Klaidungsbüchlein or Trachtenbuch […]

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Tombfinders: Working with the Napoleonic past

As part of the Working with the Past Module, four second year undergraduates from the University of Portsmouth’s BA History program (Izzy Turtle, Emily Harris, Damiana Kun and Rebekah Money) have been working with the Napoleonic & Revolutionary War Graves Charity (NRWGC) on a dedicated project to locate Napoleonic era veterans, locating and assessing their […]

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Homosexual relationships in the time of King James I

A blog on homosexual relationships in the time of King James I was published today by our own Dr Fiona McCall in the Conversation. https://theconversation.com/mary-and-george-homosexual-relationships-in-the-time-of-king-james-i-were-forbidden-but-not-uncommon-223522 Fiona teaches the second year UoP option Underworlds: Crime, Deviance and Punishment in Britain, 1500-1900 which looks at sexual offences and attitudes in the early modern period.  Her research looks […]

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Christmas under the puritans

Dr Fiona McCall is a Senior Lecturer in early modern history, teaching a third-year module on the British Civil Wars, the first-year Beliefs, Communities and Conflicts module and a second year option, Underworlds. Her research investigates traditionalist resistance to puritan values in English parish churches during the 1640s and 1650s, and in this post, updated […]

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The Dragon Gun: secrets of a local South-East Asian treasure

On 29 November 2023 we were pleased to welcome Thomas Davies, Assistant Curator of Artillery at the Royal Armouries: Fort Nelson, to the University of Portsmouth as part of our History Research Group Seminar series. Thomas presented his paper on the Dragon Gun, the iconic cannon housed at Royal Armouries: Fort Nelson on Portsdown Hill.  […]

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