History@Portsmouth

University of Portsmouth's History Blog

Tag Archives | sixteenth century

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Not so merry England: a Swiss visitor comments on Elizabethan criminal justice

By on March 25, 2021 in Learning in Focus

English people tend to think highly of our long-established legal system.  But as second-year student Liam Fisher explains, visitors from Europe didn’t always see things the same way.  Liam’s blog is based on work he did for the second-year module: Underworlds: Crime Deviance and Punishment: 1500-1900, taught by Fiona McCall and Brad Beaven. The English justice system during the early-modern period was iconic both socially and politically, ingrained into English culture and minds as something to be proud of. While the wider European population were no strangers to barbaric forms of punishment, the extent of English glorification and creativity of punishment would no doubt come as a shock to outsiders.  […]

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Martin Guerre: a student podcast on Natalie Davis’s famous microhistory

By on March 12, 2021 in Learning in Focus

Seminar tutor Dr Katy Gibbons explains: Mandy and Beth’s podcast came out of the level 5 core module, Dealing with Debates. One strand of this module explores Natalie Davis’ book, The Return of Martin Guerre, and the questions and possibilities it raises for historical scholarship. We had some fantastic discussions online, including: how historians analyse and make use of primary evidence, the role of imagination in historical writing, and how the tale of a 16th century peasant who pretended to be someone else can help us reflect on what it is that historians do! Mandy and Beth’s podcast did a brilliant job of exploring some of these issues, weaving them […]

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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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Cut-throat communities, angry noblemen, and a noseless pirate! My journey through the joys and horrors of writing a dissertation

By on June 16, 2020 in Learning in Focus, Research in Focus

Below, the first of a series on this year’s bumper crop of student dissertations, from my own supervisee Tom Underwood.  Tom was one of the most prepared and organised students I’ve ever supervised, but as he mentions below, also still honing his dissertation down to the wire, and we were blown away with the results.  Tom is planning to continue onto an MRes, where his impressive skills at reading early modern handwriting, and patience with sifting his way through basement archives should come to further good use. – ed Whether its Errol Flynn’s smooth-talking Captain Blood, or Johnny Depp’s rum-soaked Jack Sparrow, the pirate occupies a special place within popular […]

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From Margins to Centre? An undergraduate conference on marginalised histories

By on May 5, 2020 in Learning in Focus, Research in Focus

At Portsmouth we were delighted to have not one, but two students presenting their work at the recent ‘From Margins to Centre’ conference at the University of York – a testament to the innovative and exciting research our students are devising and doing. In this blog post our second contributor, third year student Amelia Boddice, discusses the conference and where her paper fitted into the themes of the day. As well as building her employability skills, the conference prompted some thought-provoking reflections on the nature of historical enquiry: Amelia clearly got lots out of the day – just as it should be! The whole history team here at Portsmouth pitched […]

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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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