Crime and Punishment in Early Modern London and the Home Counties Crime and punishment in early modern London and the home counties is a rich area of study. Students will encounter not only the changes in the law across the period, but also the very real human stori...

There's still space on my Summer course. I promise a week of highway robbery, pickpockets, pirates, burglary, murder, execution, & more. It'll be great fun!
Crime & Punishment in Early Modern London & the Home Counties | Oxford Lifelong Learning, University of Oxford share.google/sEp55JVrpBtZ...

REED Online (ereed.org) and REED: Patrons and Performances (library2.utm.utoronto.ca/otra/reed/) are usually my first points of call on companies' touring. Gurr's Shakespearian Playing Companies has lists of payments for performances on tour for each company, though they should be checked... (1/2)

A man of property Just outside the City of London, in the secluded streets once occupied by the monastic precinct of the Black Friars, is an unassuming warehouse building

As a supplement to the piece in The Times Literary Supplement (@thetls.bsky.social), www.the-tls.com/regular-feat..., here’s a (rather long!) thread on Shakespeare’s house in the Blackfriars, what we knew, and what we now know, with some links to key documents. (1/20)

Radical Histories - Manchester University Press The Radical Histories series encourages innovative and field-defining research in the history of individuals, groups, movements and ideas which challenged the political, social and cultural status quo...

I'm pleased to announce I'm a founding co-editor of the new @manchesterup.bsky.social book series, Radical Histories.

Do let me know if you have a proposal for a book that fits our inclusive remit on radical histories.

manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/series/radic...

A high res scan of Shakespeare's property plan is now available to view on @thelondonarchives.bsky.social collections catalogue. Just type in the document reference CLC/522/MS14570/001

search.lma.gov.uk/scripts/mwim...

The secularisation of future expectations in practice: An empirical study of divine appeals in Early Modern English letters In the wake of Reinhart Koselleck’s seminal work on temporality (1979), historians studying past futures in Western Europe have argued that our current understanding of the future dates back to the period between 1500 and 1800. The medieval, Christian conception of time was largely cyclical in nature; the future was, above all, in the hands of God. By 1800 however, the future had become open, uncertain and constructible; people were left with the feeling that time had not only been accelerating, it had also become secularised. As recent studies have emphasised the gradual nature of this shift, this paper zooms in on the pluritemporal mindscape of early modern societies by charting secular and religious types of future thought in a large body of English letters written between 1450 and 1700. Did fifteenth century people appeal to God more often than seventeenth century people did? In which domains of their lives was religious future thinking the strongest? Did the secularisation of time proceed at the same pace across all communities, despite their differences in religious practice? We address these questions by querying nearly 5000 early modern letters for divine appeals and systematically annotating them for variables like human and divine agency, temporal orientation and domain of life. Our results indicate that while the more formulaic divine appeals found in the opening and closing sections of letters were growing less popular over time, the ones in the letter bodies fluctuated in particular with the religious denominations of the letter writers. The observed rise in mentions of divine entities in the first half of the seventeenth century is mainly caused by a small group of puritan letter writers whose involvement in the civil wars throughout the 1640 made their lives particularly perilous. The other letter writers in the corpus, by contrast, displayed progressively lower rates of divine appeals as time went by, a finding that is in line with previous research that saw the early modern period as one characterised by the increasing secularisation of future thought as well as a shift from religious practice to religious faith.

Early modern letters are full of phrases like “God willing” or “By God’s grace.” Sara Budts’ analysis of 5,000 letters shows these weren’t clichés but ways to navigate faith, agency, and uncertainty. From 1450–1700, people balanced divine will with human action in shifting ways.

A man of property Just outside the City of London, in the secluded streets once occupied by the monastic precinct of the Black Friars, is an unassuming warehouse building

Found a Shakespeare thing; wrote about it in @thetls.bsky.social: www.the-tls.com/regular-feat....

Do any #earlymodern #skystorians know of online courses available along the lines of Spanish or Portuguese 'for historians'?

Chatted to a friend about this cause 屯 (tun) in early modern Chinese means “town” as a noun and “amass” (for military use) as a verb. The character can be traced back to oracle bones (c. 1200 BC). What a beautiful coincidence.

CFP: Knowing by Example

https://www.hsozkult.de/event/id/event-161138

Nuremberg, 08.10.2026-09.10.2026, Gyburg Uhlmann, Chair and Professor of Classics, UTN
Dana Jalobeanu, Professor of Early Modern Philosophy, UTN
Tobias Hirsch, Postdoctoral Researcher in Classics, UTN, Bewerbungsschluss: …

'Comely'. Reminds me of an estate steward in the 1550s recommending to his lord as a chaplain 'my neyghbour beyng a talle man & a very honest pryst'.

In that order: 1) good looking for your entourage, 2) religiously acceptable.

#earlymodern

Cover of The Experience of Work in Early Modern England

If this seems like your sort of thing, you can read the whole thing for free #OpenAccess here: www.cambridge.org/core/books/e...

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...

My highest praise to @adapalmer.bsky.social; her Inventing the Renaissance book is an extraordinary achievement, scholarly yet deeply engaging, honest yet deeply optimistic. This is exactly the kind of public intellectual work we need more of. Yeah, it's really long;it's really worth it. Go read it!

Detail of the provenance mark reading: Catrina Leoners hoort dit bouck toe, die het vindt die doet haer weer om een appel of een peer die het en doet

First page in the manuscript with a decorated letter A in blue and red and border decoration in green and red

Finder’s fee: seasonal fruit.

Early modern provenance mark on the flyleaf in a 16th-century illuminated manuscript: ‘This book belongs to Catrina Leoners. Whoever finds it should return it to her for an apple or a pear…’

#rarebooks #earlymodern #bookhistory 💙📚📜

One of the First Comedy Double Acts? Meet Richard Tarlton, Elizabethan England's biggest celebrity, and his wife Kate in their stand-up venue...

Today’s new post is a quick read on Tudor “stand up” routines, celebrity clowning, and husband and wife duos:

open.substack.com/pub/shakespe...

Photo of a 17th-century sheep stealing case from the North Yorkshire quarter sessions.

10 April 1678 #OTD Alice Thornton brought a case at the quarter sessions in Thirsk against her former servant, John Calvert, for stealing sheep. In late 1677 Thornton had owned 32 ‘fat’ sheep (i.e., ready for slaughter) but they all mysteriously disappeared from the meadow near her house. 🗃️ 📜

Just a reminder of the lectureship that we’re currently advertising at Glasgow - closing date is the 14th April. Link below 👇

Fascinating
Mayflower hero was secretly sold into slavery, hidden files reveal

www.thetimes.com/article/1306...

Early modernists! I'm writing about Frost Fairs and keep seeing claims that Elizabeth I played archery on the frozen Thames, but can't find source besides Holinshed who says in 1587 'diuerse of the court being then at Westminster, shot dailie at pricks set vpon the Thames'. Is there another source?

Look, this is a grey squirrel of a solecism and I hate it. The correct expression is ALL MOUTH AND TROUSERS, implying front, bravado, brashness with nothing of substance within. The needful idiom here is ALL GONG AND NO DINNER. Something that promises much but delivers nothing.

The Poetry and the Poetics of Difficulty Date: 27 April 2026 Location: Sala de Video 2 (Mód. IV, 202) Fac. Filosofía y Letras, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid Visit website → madrid-ems.com The Road to a Critical Edition of George Chapman’s The Shadow of Night & Ovid’s Banquet of Sense (MHRA, 2026) A talk by the editor, Zenón Luiz-Martínez (Universidad de Huelva), of this important new edition of two early poems by George Chapman. Hosted by the Madrid Early Modern Seminar. 27 April 2026, Sala de Video 2 (Mód. IV, 202), Fac. Filosofía y Letras,Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Full details at the link. All welcome!

#EarlyModern #BookLaunch! The Road to a Critical Edition of George Chapman’s "The Shadow of Night & Ovid’s Banquet of Sense" (MHRA, 2026)

A talk by the editor, Zenón Luiz-Martínez, hosted by the Madrid Early Modern Seminar. 27 April 2026. All Welcome #Skystorians

rensoc.org.uk/announcement...

Interview with the Vampire:

COVENT GARDEN is DONE. Will be PUBLISHED by YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS in SPRING 2027, if everything lines up. Blow me, that was some work. 140,000 words (may well not be allowed to leave it that long tbh). If you want 400 years of London social history, this will probably tickle your fancy.

Bodies and Narrativity Across the Early Modern World This book explores the intricate connections between the body and narrative across the early modern world. It examines how bodily aspects shaped the creation of stories and vice versa. The writing, te...

Now published in the series Connected Histories in the Early Modern World -

Bodies & Narrativity Across the Early Modern World
Ed. by Vitus Huber
www.routledge.com/Bodies-and-N...

In addition to print and ebook, the volume is available in Open Access format: www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-edi....

Beauty recipe books – both manuscript and printed – crystallised as a distinct genre in sixteenth-century Italy, going on to be translated, adapted and plagiarised in many European languages. Usually explicitly aimed at a female audience, they largely consisted of compilations of recipes dealing with multifarious issues that affect the appearance – from hairstyles to scabies, from fatness to athlete’s foot. Long treated as a marginal element of the ‘book of secrets’ tradition, recent research has shown they make for fascinating reading, giving us insight into intimate worlds of anxiety about appearance and the everyday health concerns thought to mar attractiveness. This talk takes three complementary approaches. Analysis of dedicatory letters and verses show sometimes surprising ways in which cosmetic knowledge and practice were framed, and offers evidence for how authors imagined their readership. Text mining of several thousand recipes reveals recurrent beauty problems, as well as the range of ingredients, techniques and equipment expected from diverse users. Finally, an evaluation of the plentiful readers’ marks on around 80 copies of Giovanni Marinello’s Ornamenti delle donne (Venice, 1562, 1574 and 1610) suggests how readers actively engaged with the texts, the identity of readers and owners, and which recipes drew the most attention.

I'm giving a talk! It's online for ePublic of Letters, on “Why were beauty tips so popular in sixteenth-century Italy? Readers, Makers and Realms of Knowledge in Early Modern Cosmetic Manuals". April 15th, noon eastern U.S., 5pm UK, 6pm continental Europe. RSVP here: forms.gle/DNLMPQuBGcEi...

Goodness they ARE experimenting with genre.

CEMS KCL Blog — Home CEMS KCL Blog -- Events, projects, articles, and workshops from The Centre for Early Modern Studies at King's College London. Join the Mailing List to stay up to date with our regular programme of pub...

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@jamie-gemmell.bsky.social @hsmurphy.bsky.social @kingscollegelondon.bsky.social @kingsartshums.bsky.social

31 Mar 1631: d. John Donne, #poet & cleric in the deanery of St Paul’s London #otd having earlier posed in his own shroud (BM/NPG) A striking man in his day. Among other things.

CFP! Conference "Growing Up in the Early Modern World: Children, Institutions and Belonging"
26 November 2026
Macquarie University, Sydney
Deadline 15 July

#earlymodern