History@Portsmouth

University of Portsmouth's History Blog

Tag Archives | seventeenth century

BM Athenian Society 1690s cropped further

UoP History research seminar: the attack on female deviance under Godly rule, 1645-1660

By on March 12, 2021 in Events, Research in Focus

    On 10th March 2021 the paper in our UoP History Research seminar series was by UoP history lecturer Dr Fiona McCall, who gave a paper on female deviance during the English interregnum, including fighting in church, sexual harassment, drinking, swearing and cursing, adultery and witchcraft.  This paper has been recorded for those unable to attend on the day, see below. We hope to upload further recordings of History Research papers in the near future. Click here for a link to the recording of the seminar (you will need the password: %MT6U8&S)  

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The Impact of Civil War on English Parishes

By on February 9, 2021 in Research in Focus

In November 2020 the University of Warwick Network for Parish Research organised an online symposium on ‘Remembering the Parish’. Fiona McCall, Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Portsmouth, presented a paper, ‘Remembering the ‘Wickedly Wicked’ Times’, looking at loyalist memories criticising the interregnum religious regime.  She was one of four speakers on the memories of the civil war in English parishes; there is a feature on these papers here on the My-Parish website.

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John Lacy as Mr Scruple in the Cheats by John Michael Wright cropped

How people despised and feared the puritans

By on December 3, 2020 in Research in Focus

An article on animosity to puritans was published by history lecturer Dr Fiona McCall recently in The Conversation as part of the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the Mayflower in the United States. She shows how puritans were often depicted as fools until they had a shot at government, and then the humour got darker. https://theconversation.com/mayflower-400-how-society-feared-and-ridiculed-puritans-144232   Fiona specialises in the religious and social history of seventeenth-century Britain, and is currently writing a book, Ungodly Religion in the English Parish, 1645-1660, looking at how and why English people rejected puritan religious extremism in the 1640s and 1650s.    

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Elizabeth I seeks friends amongst the Eastern Islamic powers

By on July 23, 2020 in Learning in Focus, Research in Focus

After a talk with his eventual dissertation supervisor Dr Katy Gibbons, third-year UoP student Richard Grainger was inspired to enrich his knowledge of twentieth-century orientalism in a dissertation which applied his theoretical understanding to the study of a period when Islamic nations were the more dominant powers. The university’s history department prides itself on delivering a socially and culturally favoured degree curriculum. The emphasis on ‘history from below’ has been particularly enjoyable from my view. One particular historical approach of interest is postcolonial studies, which focus on the cultural impact of empire on the colonised. Edward Said has been influential, and often controversial within this area of study. In Said’s […]

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Coping with epidemic disease in the seventeenth century

By on June 30, 2020 in Learning in Focus

Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down like a flower [1] One of the first school history projects I can remember doing, before leaving Australia at the age of fourteen, was to create my own facsimile newspaper reporting on the great plague of 1665. Who would have thought at that stage that I would have ended up as a seventeenth-century historian? I spent hours poring over a London bill of mortality, copying the forms of 17th century handwriting and the strange unfamiliar fatal diseases: ‘apoplexie’, ‘ague’, ‘chrisomes’, ‘dropsie’, ‘griping’ in the […]

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Women in Totnes church 620 x 320

New conference: Disruptions and Continuities in Gender Roles and Authority, 1450-1750

By on January 31, 2020 in Events, Research in Focus

The new Disrupted Authority research group at the University of Portsmouth – SASHPL are organising an interdisciplinary conference linking issues of gender and authority in the early modern period, to be held at Portsmouth on the 29-30 June 2020.  One keynote speaker will be Professor Ann Hughes, from Keele University, whose book Gender and the English Revolution is essential reading for those wanting to understand issues of gender in the seventeenth century.  There is a call for papers for academics and postgraduates, across a range of disciplines, to send in abstracts for potential twenty-minute papers to present at the conference. If you want to know more, see the conference webpage […]

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