A jester laughing in a woodcut from 1503. The woodcut features a text: ha ha ha ha.
* ha ha ha ha *
The year is 1503, and this jester is laughing at you from his woodcut, reader!
Front cover for book titled 'Captured Consent: Contract Labor in English Charity, Colonization, and War, 1600–1700' by Sonia Tycko, with an image of an indenture
Excited to see Sonia Tycko's book rethinking early modern consent and contract labour is now available. This is an important intervention for histories of coerced labour.
'Captured Consent: Contract Labor in English Charity, Colonization, and War, 1600–1700'
Thanks to @jwhittle.bsky.social, @markhailwood.bsky.social, @aucointaylor.bsky.social, @hkrobb.bsky.social (via @tomlukejohnson.bsky.social), for reminding me that my kids are slackers. 🗃️
Lovely discussion of *The Experience of Work in Early Modern England* in the LRB:
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Parchment bag with long handle containing a 15th century searchers account for King's Lynn (or Bishop's Lynn as it would have been) TNA E 122/181/39. The bag contains a textual inscription describing the account and a modern call archival catalogue number.
Behold King's Lynn [TNA E 122/181/39]
A screenshot of a working version of the project database. The cells of the datasheet are grey, with the top row highlighted blue. The datasheet shows lists of testator names, their occupation, location and archive reference.
📢 In Case You Missed It! 📢
We've been busy - catch up with our latest 'Project Progress Update' Blog Post 👇
sites.exeter.ac.uk/materialcult...
Find our more about our recent milestones, and the building of our project database 💻📜
@uniofexeterhass.bsky.social @leverhulme.ac.uk #skystorians
We're now welcoming abstracts for our 2026 conference, on the theme of 'Violence in the Medieval and Early Modern North'! The deadline is 15 January.
In "Energy, Ecology and Gender in the Middle-Class Home of the Eighteenth-Century Low Countries," Wout Saelens examines the impact of fossil fuel usage on housewives and maidservants who bore the burden of new discomforts accompanying this new energy regime 🗃️ #envhist doi.org/10.3828/whpe...
A Significant Milestone The Social History Society was founded at Lancaster University in 1976 and held a conference that year on the theme of ‘Elites in Society’. The SHS was the brainchild of Harold Perkin (the first Professor of Social History in Britain), who quietly promoted a form of social history that looked beyond class based analyses. Alongside a regular newsletter, the society’s conference was the glue that bound together its increasingly diverse membership. As the SHS’s conferences grew, they moved from a focus on a single theme to a programme that incorporated different strands of social history. The SHS conference is now one of the largest gatherings of social historians in Britain, and incorporates work that spans time, space and various historical approaches. There are few conferences that are as diverse or as open to new ideas. From the outset, the SHS has sought to offer a constructive space for postgraduate historians to present and gain feedback on their work. The society still prides itself on giving postgraduates the same platform as more established colleagues. Thankfully, however, some things have changed. The first SHS conferences were held in the depths of winter (according to late founder member Eric Evans, this was because no other conference was foolhardy enough to organise events at that time of year so they could guarantee and audience). Since 2018, the conference has adopted a summer timetable, allowing outdoor events including walking tours and an unforgettable night at the Black Country Living Museum’s 1950s fairground. We are delighted to be returning to our roots at Lancaster to celebrate our 50th anniversary.
The @socialhistsoc.bsky.social conference will be at Lancaster in July. Call for papers just released. I'll put putting together a proposal, so hope to see some of you there! #EarlyModern 🗃️
Details here: socialhistory.org.uk/events/confe...
*Law and Narrative in Fifteenth-Century Petitions to the Irish Parliament* Dr Sparky Booker - 4 December 2025 2.31 Iontas Maynooth University
Bígí linn | Join us for the 2025 Paul Walsh Memorial Lecture, the final Early Irish research seminar this year, Thursday 4 December at 17:00, Room 2.31 IONTAS.
*Law and Narrative in Fifteenth-Century Petitions to the Irish Parliament*
Dr Sparky Booker (Trinity College Dublin)
Fáilte roimh chách!
Last week, VOICES PI Professor Jane Ohlmeyer delivered a lecture at the Institute of Historical Research entitled: 'Making a living in early modern Dublin: Women and work'. Find out more at the link below:
@janeohlmeyer.bsky.social @ihr.bsky.social @tlrhub.bsky.social @tcddublin.bsky.social
Pudding season approaches; #Thanksgiving is here.
Closing my seasonal series of posts marking the publication of our new book, I revisit a case where food takes the plate
Featuring industrious duckwives, wisemen & gossiping quarrymen
#earlymodern
ludicrushistories.wordpress.com/2025/11/27/t....
Screenshot of Ellen Paterson's new article: 'Contemporary Parliamentary History and Petitioners in the Long Parliament, c. 1640–1642'
New article from Ellen Paterson on how petitioners 'evoked and confronted the parliamentary past' in their economic disputes is the tumultuous years preceding the outbreak of civil war.🗃️
#OpenAccess #PowerOfPetitioning
Read it here: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
NEW PUBLICATION
Our @historians.org American Historical Review article presents a pathbreaking methodology to analyse the invisible biochemical traces that #earlymodern users left behind on the surface of paper recipes
doi.org/10.1093/ahr/...
Late 17th-century English needlework showing typical labours of the month. Focus shows a woman picking apples in October, and a woman spinning in November.
Line graph titled Autumn Sectors shows an indexed monthly distribution of Commerce and Food Processing Tasks where 100 is the monthly average and both Commerce and Food Processing rise during the autumn quarter of October, November and December to an annual height of over 140 in December.
Cosy season is well upon us
Curl up w/ a warm drink & NEW post on CUP's blog:
The #Autumnal Experience of Work in #EarlyModern England
This seasonal celebration of our new book features apples & pears, cider & ale, meat & markets, & the #Christmas milling craze
cambridgeblog.org/2025/11/the-...
I thought I would mark the occasion by making an interactive dashboard of the London Lives Westminster Coroners Inquests. sharonhoward.github.io/mindseye_of/...
Really pleased to announce the launch of the all-new, all-dancing, London Lives website - www.londonlives.org It has been thoroughly re-engineered to facilitate more types of search, and redesigned for phones and tablets. The team very much hopes peope like it. 1/
This episode of the MERL's podcast is amazing. It made me want to read @timjerrome.bsky.social 's book but I don't think it's written yet.
And they've got someone on talking about folklore tomorrow for Halloween.
A spooky blog post from Taylor on the magiconomy and all the miraculous and magical work performed in early modern England.
To mark #Halloween & publication of 'The Experience of Work in #EarlyModern England', (now available in print & free online), this blogpost revisits the magiconomy.
🧙🎃
Highlights include a magical service paid for with bacon and pigeons.
🥓🪶
#history
ludicrushistories.wordpress.com/2025/10/30/t...
Join the @ihr.bsky.social Digital History seminar on 4 November (12:00 GMT on Zoom) to celebrate the winning entry for the 2025 Richard Deswarte Prize in Digital History and to learn about gender and lottery rhymes in the medieval/early-modern low countries ihrdighist.blogs.sas.ac.uk/2025/09/tues...
📢TODAY📢
Tune in to hear @bhamhistory.bsky.social and @emilymayvine.bsky.social discuss our unique methodology 👇
Weds 22 Oct, 5pm
Zoom
#EarlyModern 🗃️ #DigitalHumanities @cemsexeter.bsky.social @uniofexeterhass.bsky.social @uoearchhist.bsky.social @dhlabexeter.bsky.social
I was prepared for the order to be cancelled and was instead pleasantly surprised, not quite sure what I’m going to do with 7 copies!
Deadline extended to 1 Nov.
Please share with UGs interested in #legalhistory or #womeninlaw. Don't have to be studying legal history, topic is open.
Chance to connect with Selden's Sister, who also run PG mentoring scheme.
£100 in Hart Publishing vouches up for grabs!
So excited to finally have hold of the book!
Eagerly awaiting my CUP delivery this week but WhSmith delivered the goods- though now listed as out of stock since I nabbed them at the bargain price of 16.99!
New book by our editor Roey Sweet and Richard Ansell!
Great news!! My special issue on Writing for Third Parties: Commercial Manuscript Production in the Late Middle Ages (Queeste, @amsterdamupress.bsky.social) is now available in open access.
Looking much forward to your reactions!
www.aup-online.com/content/jour...
Another post on 'The Experience of Work in Early Modern England' - a reminder that work in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was very much a family affair...
manyheadedmonster.com/2025/10/09/t...
Many congratulations to my colleagues in the Forms of Labour project team on the publication of their new monograph! 🗃️👏🎉
Brilliantly, The Experience of Work in #EarlyModern England is available open access:
www.cambridge.org/core/books/e...
news.exeter.ac.uk/faculty-of-h...
Delighted to see our new book - The Experience of Work in Early Modern England - out now, and open access (free!)
doi-org.bris.idm.oclc.org/10.1017/9781...