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Author Archive | Fiona McCall
Criminal punishments in Devon, 1598-1638
In the second-year UoP history module, Underworlds: Crime, Deviance & Punishment in Britain, 1500-1900, taught by Dr Fiona McCall and Professor Brad Beaven, students study the history of crime and punishment between 1500 and 1900. Students can take this option on a range of courses at Portsmouth, including History, Criminology and English Literature. In this blog post, based on his work for the module, second year UoP history student Edward Sainsbury discusses what can be learned from a detailed table of statistics on sentences given to criminals at the Devonshire assizes and quarter sessions courts between 1598 and 1638. Over the course of an almost 30-year period almost 10,000 punishments […]
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 with further research from an earlier one, she discusses how Christmas was banned during this period. Christmas was officially banned during the late 1640s and 1650s along with the rest of the church calendar. But the interdict was widely ignored. Trawling through various counties’ quarter sessions depositions for the period, I have found frequent references […]
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. The Dragon Gun was captured in Myanmar by the British Army in the 19th century and presented to the Prince of Wales. Today it can be viewed in Fort Nelson’s Art of Artillery gallery. The gun dates to the 18th century, is only one of four in the world, and has always been believed to […]
Debates about the Jews’ place in a decolonised world
On Wednesday 8 November Dr Laura Almagor (University of Utrecht) presented a paper in our History Research seminar series entitled Reinvention at Bandung: Jewish Displaced Persons and the new global order, 1943-1962. During the summer and autumn of 1945 millions of uprooted persons made their way back to homes across Europe. The remaining refugees crowded together in displaced persons camps in Germany, Austria and Italy. Six years later, 175,000 individuals, mostly Jews, still languished in the camps. In 1955, the Bandung conference convened to discuss the lingering problem of these displaced persons. Laura’s research looks at what the conference debates reveal about how displaced persons and Jewish leaders understood the […]
Disorderly baptisms in mid-seventeenth century England
Baptism is as a rite of central importance within the Christian religion. Deriving from the Gospels, it was one of only two of the original seven Catholic sacraments retained by English Protestants. In late-sixteenth and seventeenth century England, with high birth rates, and everyone required to attend church by law, it was a very familiar ritual, commonly performed before the congregation on a Sunday. It also generated much controversy, over its precise theological meaning, as well as the way, time and place in which it should be conducted. During the English Civil Wars of the 1640s, many of the existing practices of the English Church was challenged and reformed, including […]