Dr Maria Cannon is a Lecturer in Early Modern History and specialises in late medieval and early modern family history. She co-ordinates the Level 5 core unit ‘Introduction to Historical Research’ where students are introduced to the range of historical sources available for their independent research and the kind of issues associated with using different types of evidence. In this blog she reflects on one of the examples discussed under the theme of ‘Personal Sources’. In February 1477 a young woman from a Norfolk gentry family wrote to the man she was engaged to marry. Margery Brews greeted her fiancé John as ‘my ryght welebeloued Voluntyne’, the earliest surviving use […]
