In November 2024 our own Dr Maria Cannon published an edited collection Adulthood in Britain and the United States from 1350 to Generation Z in the Royal Historical Society’s New Historical Perspectives series published by the University of London Press. Laura Tisdall, Senior Lecturer at Newcastle University, was Maria’s co-editor. The collection looks at how ideas of adulthood have changed over the centuries and addresses two central questions: who gets to be an adult, and who decides? The chapters in the collection cover more than 600 years and two continents and are focused around four key themes: adulthood as both burden and benefit; adulthood as a relational category; collective versus individual […]
Tag Archives | seventeenth century
Too close for comfort: the relationship between the Church and the military during the Interregnum
UoP Senior Lecturer in history Dr Fiona McCall had the following post published today on the website of the Ecclesiastical History Society, in which she discusses the extraordinary role of the military in Interregnum religious life.
Getting creative with early modern history
In a previous post, Dr Katy Gibbons looked at how second-year students studying the Debating the Past module, translated Natalie Davis’s book The Return of Martin Guerre into other media: emojis, memes and poetry. Our first-year students in the Beliefs, Communities and Conflicts: Europe 1400-1750 module are also set an assessment asking them to employ the imaginative use of media to explore a theme relating to their studies on the module. Below we look at two great responses to this. Having initially thought about crocheting an item or artwork from the early modern period (!), Megan Conway decided to produce a comic. Visual formats often make it easier to take in […]
Homosexual relationships in the time of King James I
A blog on homosexual relationships in the time of King James I was published today by our own Dr Fiona McCall in the Conversation. https://theconversation.com/mary-and-george-homosexual-relationships-in-the-time-of-king-james-i-were-forbidden-but-not-uncommon-223522 Fiona teaches the second year UoP option Underworlds: Crime, Deviance and Punishment in Britain, 1500-1900 which looks at sexual offences and attitudes in the early modern period. Her research looks at the relationship between sex and religion during the interregnum (amongst other things).
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 […]