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I’m really proud to announce that my John Roberts article has finally been published. After more than 13 years of work, today the article was published in Volume 12 of Law, Crime and History. ‘Patronage, Recusancy and Malfeasance in the Early Modern Prison System: A New Source Related to Saint John Roberts and Robert Cecil’…

This is third in a series of three posts about the Social History Society Conference. On Wednesday I woke up early and couldn’t get back to sleep. This gave me plenty of chance to ponder what we’d heard so far. That morning I chaired a panel in the Environment, Heritage, Spaces, and Places strand: ‘Landscape, Environment…

This is the second in a series of three posts about the SHS conference in Durham. Day 2 broke dull and damp, but breakfast was excellent, and afterwards I wandered down in the rain to the venue for the first panel. I had planned to go to one of the panels with two early modern…

It’s been a busy spring and summer. This is the first in a short series of posts about the Social History Society Conference in Durham. At the beginning of July it was off to Durham for the Social History Society Conference. I drove up, because the trains would have taken me twice as long and…

This is the fifth and last in a series of short posts about the Sound Faith: Religion and the Acoustic World 1400-1800 conference at the University of York from 12-14 June 2024. The final panel was ‘The Soundscape of the English Parish Church and Beyond’, chaired by Ros Oates. It opened with a very engaging online paper…

This is the fourth in a series of short posts about the Sound Faith: Religion and the Acoustic World 1400-1800 conference at the University of York from 12-14 June 2024. Day 2 started with Panel 5: The Sound of Manuscript and Print in which I was speaking with Katherine Butler (Northumbria University) and Alexander Fisher (University…

This is the third in a series of short posts about the Sound Faith: Religion and the Acoustic World 1400-1800 conference at the University of York from 12-14 June 2024. There was then a tea, coffee & cake break before the second keynote: Felipe Ledesma-Nuñez (Harvard)’s ‘Coya Huarmi: Reconstruction of a Song, a Vessel, and…

This is the second in a series of short posts about the Sound Faith: Religion and the Acoustic World 1400-1800 conference at the University of York from 12-14 June 2024. On the official first day, I was up early editing blog posts (I did say I was treating the trip in part as a writing…

This is the first in a series of short posts about the Sound Faith: Religion and the Acoustic World 1400-1800 conference at the University of York from 12-14 June 2024. I arrived in York on Thursday at about 11 in the morning, having decided to treat the trip as a sort of writing retreat. I…