Jon Fitzgibbons

The Revolt of the Provinces: Local Dimensions of the English Civil War - CALL FOR PAPERS - RHS CALL FOR PAPERS: The Revolt of the Provinces: Local Dimensions of the English Civil War A one-day conference, organised by the Lincoln Record Society, to be held at the National Civil War Centre, Newa...

Call for Papers: Revolt of the Provinces? A Conference at the National Civil War Centre in Newark exploring the local impact and legacies of the ‘English’ Civil War(s). Organised by The Lincoln Record Society. Please share! #cfp #earlymodern royalhistsoc.org/calendar/the...

From Jacobean ‘nonconformity’ to Restoration Nonconformity: three rectors, one parish, and English Church turmoil in a nutshell The parish of Ashton-under-Lyne near Manchester had only three rectors for nearly the whole of the seventeenth century: Henry Fairfax from 1619 to 1643; John Harrison from 1643 to 1662; and Thomas ...

#earlymodern #17thC I'm not on here often, but...my first ever history article is out! It's about the goings-on in 17th C Ashton-under-Lyne. I've been passionate about 17th C history for decades, but it's not my official academic field so I'm very excited :) www.tandfonline.com/eprint/MZICG...

The Revolt of the Provinces: Local Dimensions of the English Civil War - CALL FOR PAPERS - RHS CALL FOR PAPERS: The Revolt of the Provinces: Local Dimensions of the English Civil War A one-day conference, organised by the Lincoln Record Society, to be held at the National Civil War Centre, Newa...

Call for Papers: Revolt of the Provinces? A Conference at the National Civil War Centre in Newark exploring the local impact and legacies of the ‘English’ Civil War(s). Organised by The Lincoln Record Society. Please share! #cfp #earlymodern royalhistsoc.org/calendar/the...

Cromwell Association Research Grants are now available for non-affiliated researchers and post-graduate students researching aspects of Cromwell or the wider history of the 17th Century. For more details of how to apply see olivercromwell.org/wordpress/th.... Deadline: end of April 2026.

How to read early modern texts? The printed books you get to read are not Old English or Middle English, which medievalists have to contend with. The English itself is much more straightforward to make sense of. It is the spelling and punctuation that can initially throw you, as spelling was not standardised and punctuation is all over the place. But you develop an ear for it very quickly. There are some basic approaches to adopt: Keep going and do not try to get the exact meaning of each and every word upon your first reading. Perfection is not the goal upon first reading. Once you get the hang of its meanings will become clearer anyway, or the general gist of the paragraph will be clear enough. Only when you you get Much of the spelling is phonetic. It can therefore be easier to read this out loud to get the meaning more directly -- both so you don't get bogged down by the weird spelling and because punctuation is not as noticeable that way.

Spelling & characters: One thing to bear in mind is that printers often used ‘u’ and ‘v’ almost interchangeably – with ‘v’ usually at the beginning of words and ‘u’ anywhere else. This one is particularly frequent in the texts we’re reading for the seminar; your brain will quickly get used to it (to the extent that you end up spelling your own texts earlymodern-ly…) ‘i’, ‘y’, and ‘j’ can be similarly interchangeable: printers seldom use a ‘j’ but use a ‘i’ instead. Conversely, they often use a ‘y’ for a ‘i’. And instead of a 'i' for a 'j'. There are some characters that we no longer use. This is in particular the ‘long S’, which looks like an F but is very much pronounced like an S. It occurs anywhere in a word but from the final letter. ‘Y’ is often used to save space. It represents ‘th’, such as in ‘ye’ = the, and ‘yt’ = that. Some words end in “th” that commonly end in “es” in our current English. Think of Shakespeare’s ‘doth’ for ‘does’, and ‘pleaseth’ for ‘pleases’. There is a very helpful more extensive discussion in this blogpost from Oxford’s History of the Book team: https://historyofthebook.mml.ox.ac.uk/wts-yt-the-a-brief-guide-to-reading-early-printed-english/

Hey! #EarlyModern #SkyStorians: what else do you tell first-years to get them at ease with reading early modern texts? Other than: it's going to be fine; and it's really healthy for you to deal with the lack of immediate transfer of content for a bit.

Updated CfP: Communication and Exchange in the Early Modern 1500-1850 conference: ‘A Continent in Conversation’ @ Aberystwyth University, 11-12 June 2026.

Please do check out and share our #CfP. Deadline: 27 February 2026.

#Earlymodern #Communication #History

Happy New Year from the IHR Tudor & Stuart seminar! We will be back at the IHR a week today:

Monday 19 January, 5:30pm, in-person at the IHR, and on zoom:

Holly Brewer (Maryland) @earlymodjustice.bsky.social & Elizabeth Hines (Johns Hopkins): ‘How to Steal the Spanish Silver Fleet’.

All welcome!

The ‘puritan’ MP Bulstrode Whitelocke went home on 24 December 1651 to be ‘merry’ with family and friends ‘in this time of Christmas’. It’s not clear if he broke off his celebrations to attend the House of Commons on 25 Dec.

A woman’s place was not in the home: New book challenges assumptions about women’s work in early modern history New research has revealed that women played a fundamental role in the development of England’s national economy before 1700. Far from being the unpaid homemakers and housewives of traditional historic...

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...

Mapping the Early Modern Inns of Court This collection of essays presents recent research on the Inns of Court and their place in the literary and cultural spaces of the early modern world.

Our collection, Mapping the Early Modern Inns of Court: Writing Communities, is being launched! Come and join us (in person at Middle Temple Library or online) at 6.15pm on Tuesday 9 Sept. Email MappingInns@gmail.com for more details. link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

OOOOOOOOH, news of our third Jenny Wormald Lecture has dropped just in time for the weekend. Are you excited? See more information below:

www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/scottish-h...

Just over two weeks before our CfP closes! Remember to submit your abstracts before Friday 5th September ⚔️

Known as "Smasher Dowsing", William Dowsing was a Puritan iconoclast who 'purged' over 200 churches and Cambridge colleges during the first English Civil War. We've mapped his visits onto a browsable Google Map to give a sense of the scale of his 'work'... earlofmanchesters.co.uk/smashing-chu...

We, the committee of the CHASE Medieval and Early Modern Research Network (MEMRN), are overjoyed to announce the return of our Winter Conference this year between the 14th and 16th November. Join us at the University of East Anglia and online for three exciting days of workshops, papers, social events, and adventure through the historic cathedral city of Norwich. We welcome papers on a range of topics within medieval and early modern studies for this interdisciplinary conference, including: * History and politics * Philosophy and theology * Literature, drama, performance culture and music * Latin and vernacular languages * Art history, architecture and archaeology * Manuscript studies and book history For this year's conference, we particularly encourage papers engaging with marginalised histories and communities, global intercultural contact and exchange, or conflict and diplomacy.

We invite abstracts of up to 250 words for individual research papers of twenty minutes in length (or 700 words for a panel of three people presenting on a particular subject or sub-theme). The CHASE MEMRN conference remains open to all UK and overseas postgraduates. This includes independent scholars who are unaffiliated at this time. When submitting your abstract, please include your institution (if applicable) and, if from a CHASE-affiliated university institution, whether or not you are directly funded by CHASE. All proposals should be emailed to chasememrn@gmail.com by Friday 12th September with the subject line 'Conference Paper Submission' and your name. Priority will be given to those available to present in-person, but remote presentation applications will also be considered. Please feel free to contact the MEMRN team via email or social media DM with any questions you may have. We look forward to welcoming you to Norwich as part of this proudly CHASE-funded event.

CALL FOR PAPERS!!! The MEMRN Committee are delighted to share the call for papers for our second annual Winter Conference: Fragmented Worlds, Shared Histories.

Please share widely! Sponsored by @chase-dtp.bsky.social

The Letters of Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scots: new Camden volume published - RHS The Society is very pleased to announced publication of its latest Camden series volume: The Holograph Letters of Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scots (1489-1541), edited by Helen Newsome-Chandler. This vol...

New: 'The Holograph Letters of Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scots (1489-1541)' bit.ly/4mtRQgS

The Society's latest Camden volume of primary sources presents the 115 holograph letters of Margaret Tudor. This new edition, by Helen Newsome-Chandler, is an unprecedented epistolary archive 1/2 #Skystorians

📣Call for Papers 📣

I am delighted to announce that 'Speech/less in the Early Modern World' will be held 23 April 2026 at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge.

Please share far and wide and do consider submitting a proposal! 🙊

Link to PDF version: bit.ly/4lZz80R

AHRC project sheds light on the life of 17th century memoirist Research into a manuscript discovered at Durham Cathedral has provided fresh insights on the life of writer and memoirist Alice Thornton thanks to AHRC funding.

Read about some of our findings on Thornton and her four manuscripts in this @ukri.org post on our #AHRC funded project:
www.ukri.org/news/ahrc-pr...

Oliver Cromwell’s ‘Other House’ and the perils of Lords ‘reform’ - The History of Parliament His wishes were answered in March 1657 when MPs presented Cromwell with a new written constitution, The Humble Petition and Advice, which created an ‘Other

In a new guest article for article for #HistParl, Dr Jonathan Fitzgibbons explores the status of the 'Other House' during Oliver Cromwell's rule, and 1650s experience of House of Lords reform.

historyofparliament.com/2025/03/25/o...

Oliver Cromwell’s ‘Other House’ and the perils of Lords ‘reform’ - The History of Parliament His wishes were answered in March 1657 when MPs presented Cromwell with a new written constitution, The Humble Petition and Advice, which created an ‘Other

New blog for @HistParl - does Oliver Cromwell’s ‘Other House’ offer some lessons for those looking to reform the House of Lords? historyofparliament.com/2025/03/25/o...

Oliver Cromwell’s voice The past two centuries have witnessed the publication of no fewer than three editions of Oliver Cromwell’s writings and utterances. All have approached the problem of recovering and presenting Crom...

My article on Oliver Cromwell’s voice and the various editions of his writings and speeches is out now in the latest issue of Seventeenth Century doi.org/10.1080/0268...

Oliver Cromwell’s voice The past two centuries have witnessed the publication of no fewer than three editions of Oliver Cromwell’s writings and utterances. All have approached the problem of recovering and presenting Crom...

My article on Oliver Cromwell’s voice and the various editions of his writings and speeches is out now in the latest issue of Seventeenth Century doi.org/10.1080/0268...

But why is he so bitter?

If you’re in Newark on 13 Feb, come and hear about Charles I and why he wasn’t all that bad (maybe) palacenewark.com/whats-on/ins...

12th century depiction of a ‘hairy star’, thought to be Halley’s Comet - engraved in the west front of Crowland Abbey

Crowland Abbey, west front

Cromwell was here, probably! Great to finally visit Crowland Abbey today - highly recommended!

Oliver Cromwell’s voice The past two centuries have witnessed the publication of no fewer than three editions of Oliver Cromwell’s writings and utterances. All have approached the problem of recovering and presenting Crom...

My latest article, available for free in The Seventeenth Century, exploring the merits and potential limitations of the various editions of Oliver Cromwell’s writings and letters (plus a little bit of Bulstrode W) doi.org/10.1080/0268...

Oliver Cromwell’s voice The past two centuries have witnessed the publication of no fewer than three editions of Oliver Cromwell’s writings and utterances. All have approached the problem of recovering and presenting Crom...

My latest article, available for free in The Seventeenth Century, exploring the merits and potential limitations of the various editions of Oliver Cromwell’s writings and letters (plus a little bit of Bulstrode W) doi.org/10.1080/0268...