In an informative piece published by Modern British History, Dr. Nick Thomas looks at the disjuncture between the preparation for study that UK students receive at the secondary level and the challenges and expectations of university study in History.  “The gap between A level and degree is now a chasm,” Nick writes in this insightful analysis, “not so much intellectually but in terms of the assumptions about learning that are being brought to bear. The result is bafflement, confusion, and often resentment, on both sides, with students sometimes disengaging from their studies.”  You can read the rest of the article here.

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This article surveys and examines the translations into English of Luther’s works during the early modern period. Certain themes emerge, with anti-Catholicism, devotion, and consolation particularly noted as safe and unobjectionable Lutheran topics for English audiences. English reformers chose to integrate certain divines from the European mainland at certain points, with Luther playing key roles. The reign of Elizabeth (1558–1603) was a highpoint for English translations of Luther, and these coincided with other efforts by some in England as well as Germany to emphasize unity among Protestants while downplaying divisions. A flexible and contingent deployment of Luther in English continued into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when developments such as the Civil Wars, the Restoration, and German immigration provided moments of relevance for Luther. The article draws on and points to the considerable scholarship that has reshaped English Reformation studies over the past few decades, and it offers reflections on how the particularity of early modern England can be seen in relation to the heterogeneity of Reformation Europe.

The full article can be accessed here.

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Based on various previous research projects, with UoN colleagues in History (Diana Popescu), in Computer Science (Paul Tennent), and others, Maiken and the team at the National Holocaust Museum and have curated an exhibition that is coming to Nottingham for one week, starting at 12 pm Sunday 3 March and remaining available Mon 4 March — Friday 8 March, 12-6pm. Location is Smithy Row, just off Old Market Square, in front of the Exchange.

The exhibition is an experiment. The main concept is that traditional museum exhibition always talk to the same people: demographics who regularly go to museums, and also, on this particular topic, people who are already interested in Jewish culture or Holocaust history. This, the organizers feel, is not enough. So they are putting the museum, quite literally, on the streets. It has already been to London and Manchester: now it is here for one week. The following week, it moves to Birmingham University campus.

Link to Exhibit

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Nathan Richards has completed a fascinating film that explores the legacies of the Biafran War (1967-70).  Please click on the first link to learn more about this project and on the second one to explore the film itself.

A Sojourn to the Vault – FV

https://intheshadowofbiafra.com

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After being awarded his doctorate at the University of Oxford in 1966, Michael Jones taught for a year at the University of Exeter before joining the History Department at the University of Nottingham in September 1967 as an assistant lecturer. Promoted Reader in 1984 and Professor of French Medieval History in 1991, he retired in 2002 but has continued to be active in his main field of research, the history of the medieval duchy of Brittany. Thanks to particular political circumstances Brittany was able to develop into a largely independent and sovereign power within the kingdom of France at the end of the Middle Ages, with its own institutions, policies and traditions, before its definitive incorporation into the crown between 1491-1532. His work has especially traced the complicated political, social and cultural consequences of the confrontation between the Montfort dukes of Brittany and the Capetian and Valois kings of France. In addition for over 40 years he has worked in conjunction with Professor Gwyn Meirion-Jones on a major interdisciplinary study of surviving seigneurial residences in Brittany (manoirs, châteaux) with a wealth of publications.

In retirement, he has also worked on local Nottinghamshire history, of which the major output has been an edition with colleagues of The White Book (Liber Albus) of Southwell (Pipe Roll Society, N.S. 61, 2 vols., 2018) and studies of Norwell in central Nottinghamshire where he now lives, a prebendal village owned by the church from Anglo-Saxon times until 1952. He edited Nottingham Medieval Studies from 1989-2008, and from 1990-97 he was one of the two literary directors of the Royal Historical Society, being responsible for seeing 12 volumes of the Camden Series through the press as well as several Handbooks, including revising C. R. Cheney’s invaluable Handbook of Dates for Students of English History (2000), the book most frequently stolen from the old PRO!

In 2002 he was awarded the Order of the Ermine by the Institut Culturel de Bretagne in recognition of his contribution to Breton history and culture. In 2006 he was elected ‘correspondant étranger’ of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, one of the five academies that make up the Institut de France (the French equivalent of the Royal Society, British Academy and Royal Society of Arts combined), and in 2017 he was promoted ‘Associé étranger’, becoming ‘Membre de l’Institut’.

The Mélanges now published in his honour as an issue of Annales de Bretagne et des Pays de l’Ouest (Bretons du Moyen Âge, entre Guerre et Paix, ed. Yves Coativy, Anne Curry and Fréderique Lachaud), is a further tribute, chiefly from his continental friends and colleagues, to his contribution and its influence on those currently working on late medieval France and England.

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In May 2023 the Jockey Club, organisers of the Epsom Derby, which has been run almost every year since 1780, gained an injunction against the animal rights group Animal Rising to try and prevent them invading the race when it is run on 3rd June. The group threatens to stop the race because of what they see as cruelty in horse racing, staging a second protest following their demonstrations at the Grand National steeplechase in April, which delayed the start of that race by fifteen minutes and led to several arrests.

Horse racing has often been controversial, and the Derby was the scene of the famous suffragette protest of 1913 that ended in the death of Emily Wilding Davison, but it has not always attracted criticism for reasons of animal welfare. In a new article for Parliamentary History, available on Nottingham’s RIS repository, Harry Cocks explains that in Edwardian Britain horse racing was attacked by Radical Liberals and other progressives because of its links to gambling, which was then illegal outside racecourses. Betting was seen as having a degrading effect on the working class and white collar punters who formed its main market. The reliance on chance, not to mention the effects on the household budgets of the poor, were seen as undermining the moral sense, and in that regard, to be anti-progressive. In response to this, racing became a political matter, being defended by Conservatives (and some Liberals) as part of the birth right of freeborn Englishmen entitled to their historic pastimes. In that respect, racing (and sport in general) became a Tory cause, and helped the party – in the doldrums electorally after 1902 – appeal to a new mass electorate in cities. Sport was a valuable resource in the development of a popular Conservatism that spread the party’s appeal beyond its aristocratic base.

The defence of racing, and of gambling, was one of the main purposes of the late-Victorian and Edwardian sporting press, the most important of those titles being the Sporting Times (established 1861), the Sportsman (1865) and the Sporting Life (1859), the Winning Post (1904), and others. These titles sought to unite the older traditions of the aristocratic, landed party, with the newer quasi-democratic electorate brought in by the third Reform Act of 1884. The masthead slogan of the Sporting Times (“High Toryism, High Churchism, High Farming, and Old Port for ever”) was a celebration of Tory traditions. However, the paper, and its fellow sporting titles, also tried to appeal to a mass public through defending racing and gambling from moral campaigners – who they denounced as “faddists.” The sporting press was vital in the founding of the Sporting League (1894) and the National Sporting League (1905), both of which aimed to defeat Radical Liberal schemes to curb racing. Some of those involved, such as the rambunctious proprietor of the Winning Post, Robert Sievier, also became Conservative politicians. He was joined in that enterprise by men like Thomas Henry Dey, bookmaker, local councillor, and staunch member of the Canonbury (N London) Conservative party. In this way, the sporting press and racing itself became allied to an emerging popular Conservatism that was to help revive the fortunes of the party.

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The wars which ravaged the British Isles between 1639 and 1651 took a huge toil on civilian communities. Staffordshire, located in the English Midlands, was unfortunate enough to be considered strategically important to both Charles I and Parliament. The petitions of maimed soldiers and war widows not only reveal the extent of suffering within Staffordshire but also offer insights into how and why the increased need for welfare provision continued to cause problems for the county’s rulers long after the fighting had ended. These problems were exacerbated in 1660 when the restoration of the monarchy forced Staffordshire’s justices to consider how best to deal with ageing, disabled and needy parliamentarian pensioners (now viewed as rebels), at the same time as they were required to discharge the Stuart dynasty’s moral obligations to hitherto neglected royalist veterans and widows. Using material gathered as a co-investigator in the AHRC project ‘Conflict, Welfare and Memory during and after the English Civil Wars, 1642-1710’, David J. Appleby has provided a wealth of fresh insights into the experiences of the common people of a war-torn county, and their difficulties in negotiating with local and national authorities. War relief was essential for the survival of veterans, widows and their families, but Appleby argues that the process of petitioning compelled each claimant, their family, neighbours and those in authority to place their physical and mental trauma within competing national ideological frameworks. The provision of post-conflict welfare consequently perpetuated such bitter divisions and political instability that it should be considered an important factor in the decline of traditional culture of neighbourliness, which in turn helped drive a seismic shift in the relationship between individuals, local communities and the state.

Dr David J. Appleby, ‘“Members of one another’s miseries”: the culture and politics of war relief in seventeenth-century Staffordshire’, in Ian Atherton, Matthew Blake, Andrew Sargent and Alannah Tomkins (eds), Local Histories: essays in honour of Nigel Tringham, Collections for a History of Staffordshire, 4th series, vol. 27 (Staffordshire Record Society, 2023 for 2022), pp. 175-190.

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With support from the Institute for the Study of Slavery (ISOS), Cambridge University Press has launched an exciting new book series, “Histories of Slavery and its Global Legacies.” Like ISOS, the series is global in its remit and seeks to break down traditional geographical and disciplinary boundaries in order to advance the scholarly understanding of the history of enslavement and its many legacies. More information on the series, including editorial contacts for the submission of proposals, can be found on the announcement flyer or via the ISOS website.

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Dr. Samantha Knapton’s new book on the history of migration and displacement in post-WW2 Europe has just been published with Bloomsbury Press.  The author, who is one of the new staff in the department, had this to say about the work:

“At the end of the Second World War, up to 60 million displaced persons (DPs) were on the move throughout Europe. Jointly the responsibility of Allied governments and the newly created United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), they were sorted into transit and assembly centres and awaited their future to begin. Polish DPs were the largest displaced group across allied-occupied Germany, the majority of which were in the British zone of occupation, but confronted with significant border changes and a new Soviet-backed government recognized by the Allies many were unwilling to go ‘home’.

My work argues that the concepts of migration and displacement are often separated from the construction of international humanitarianism and the process of (military) occupation. Yet, between 1945 and 1951 these victims of war became the joint responsibility of humanitarian workers (‘carers’) and military officials (‘protectors’) in occupied Germany. The everyday experiences of clothing, feeding, sheltering, and transporting these DPs were shared by those on the ground implementing policies. Policies which were largely created during wartime for peacetime purposes by those who would never actually experience their effects. Occupiers, Humanitarian Workers, and Polish Displaced Persons in British-occupied Germany uses the voices of those ‘in the middle’ (welfare workers, liaison officers, and military officials) to understand experiences of Polish DPs in British-occupied Germany and the effects of ad-hoc policy implementation on post-war Anglo-Polish relations and international humanitarianism. Through a combination of official records and personal collections from diaries and memoirs to oral histories and fictional works, my work combines the top-down and bottom-up perspectives by providing a glimpse at those working in between and their impact on the post-war world.”

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It was common in medieval Europe for kings to retain a number of household knights in their personal service. Doing so provided them with a small group of loyal servants who could perform a variety of valuable functions at the king’s command. In my recent book, I focus on the household knights of one of late-medieval England’s longest-reigning and most successful monarchs, Edward III, to ask three fundamental questions of this often under-studies and under-appreciated group: who was chosen to serve as a household knight? What did they do? And how were they rewarded for their time in service? In answer to these questions, my research found that these hardened soldiers, of whom there were usually about 30 at any one time, were often recruited from a select group of families with a track-record of royal service, or else because they were distinguished warriors. Similarly, I found that these knights permeated almost all aspects of a medieval monarch’s reign: they assisted in the raising and equipping of royal armies; they offered leadership for these armies once on campaign; they acted as trusted councillors and administrators at the centre of government; and they maintained the king’s authority and landed interests throughout his kingdom. Studying this group thus took me to the heart of key question about the ways in which wars were fought and kingdoms ruled in late medieval Europe and enabled me to provide a more nuanced picture of late medieval kingship than was previously possible.

Link to book: https://boydellandbrewer.com/9781783275649/the-household-knights-of-edward-iii/

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