For their first year module, Beliefs, Communities and Conflicts, 1400-1750, UoP history students are asked to do a practical activity and then write a report about it, reflecting reflecting critically about how it relates to the themes explored in the module. This, the first of two posts, looks at what students learned from trying to reconstruct early modern cosmetics. The tutors on this module were Dr Maria Cannon and Dr Fiona McCall. Rosie Wells chose to adapt the recipe for Rose Lip Balm from Italian doctor Giovanni Marinelli’s Gli ornamenti delle donne (The Ornament of Ladies) (1562) a manual on female beauty containing recipes at first purporting to be taken […]
Tag Archives | Elizabeth I
The challenges faced by Catholics under Queen Elizabeth I
UoP History’s Katy Gibbons has recently published a chapter in volume 1 of the Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism. This major multivolume work seeks to explore the complex and contested stories and experiences of Catholic communities in Britain and Ireland across 5 centuries, and to bring together aspects of their stories that are often approached separately. Katy’s contribution explores the many challenges faced by Catholics in England, Wales and Ireland in the reign of Elizabeth, and how their responses were shaped by the specific local, national and international context. In particular, it considers the linguistic, political, ecclesiastical and legal frameworks in which Catholics negotiated their existence as […]
Elizabeth I seeks friends amongst the Eastern Islamic powers
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 […]
Forget gory Gunpowder – Jacobean England had a bloodcurdling appetite for violence
Dr Katy Gibbons, Senior Lecturer in History, has published an article in The Conversation. Here she reflects on responses to the violent scenes in the recent BBC 1 series Gunpowder, in particular the depictions of executions of Catholics by the Protestant authorities. This discussion reflects her research interests in early modern Catholicism in England and Europe, which is one theme in her final year special subject unit, ‘Conflict, Conspiracy, Consensus: Religious Identities in Elizabethan England’. To read the article, click here