1. Early Modern ‘History from Below’
‘Making History’ – Block 2
Early Modern ‘History from Below’
Aysu Dincer, Peter Marshall, Penny Roberts
N. A. Abildgaard, ‘An Allegory of Europe’ (late 18th century)

2. What can a film like Martin Guerre tell us about early modern lives and culture?

3. The political topography of Europe c
The political topography of Europe c. 1500, including the familiar (England), less familiar (Holy Roman Empire) and unexpected (Ottoman Empire)
The village of Artigat in South-West France (setting for ‘Martin Guerre’)

4. Siege of Constantinople
1453
Jean Chartier
c. 1475
The broad transition from the ‘Middle Ages’ c

5. Some of the ‘big’ themes of early modern history (clockwise from top left):
Expansion and cultural exchange(Columbus ‘discovers’ the New World)
Iconoclasm and confessional tensions (Reformations)
Newton and the widening of intellectual horizons (‘Scientific Revolution’)
Growth of warfare and state building (Battle of Lepanto / ‘Military Revolution’)

6. The Awakening of the Third Estate - French print 1789
The broad transition to ‘modernity’ c
Outlook

7. Simplifying dramatically, characteristics of European ‘early modernity’ include …
socially, a hierarchical and patriarchal structure built on households, estates and corporations, in which a growing emphasis on merit enhanced the standing of middling groups in general and the professions in particular;
economically, within a still largely agricultural system, the existence of early forms of industrial production and the increasing importance of global trading networks catering for an emerging consumer society;
religiously, the differentiation of Christianity into ‘confessions’ and, in the longer term, a reluctant acceptance of pragmatic co-existence;
culturally, a widening of spatial horizons; a move from received knowledge towards experimentation; frictions between social disciplining and popular customs; and a gradual supplementation of face-to-face exchange with various forms of written and long-distance communication;
politically, ever larger-scale warfare, state formation and a power shift away from the periphery towards the centre, albeit in practice through processes of negotiation rather than unilateral commands.
From: B. Kümin (ed.), The European World (2nd edn, 2014), ‘Introduction’

8. Early Modern Research
Opportunities

9. A Wider Variety of Sources
Expansion of court administration and bureaucracy: tax collection, finances, government spending, expenditure on warfare. Also diplomatic records, ambassadorial sources
Parish records: births, deaths, marriages
Wills: a person's wealth, family, communal and work relationships
Crime: coroners records, records from the Old Bailey.
Personal records: collections of letters, spiritual journals, diaries (Samuel Pepys), conduct books (such as Castiglione's Book of the Courtier)
Material culture: buildings, objects, clothing, paintings
A better connected world!

10. Printing with moveable type

11. Easier to read

12. Digitisation
Early English Books Online (EEBO) (nearly all books printed in England )
18th Century Collections Online (ECCO
Early European Books Online (aiming to cover all European books up to 1701)
Old Bailey Online (records of London’s main criminal court, )
Early Dutch Books online

13. Locating London’s Past https://www.locatinglondon.org

14. CHALLENGES Documentary survival – what survives?
statistically meaningful?
Whose voices? –
authorities, elites, men,
‘exceptional normal’
Problems of reconstruction - ‘world we have lost’ understanding of messages/symbols/experience
Palaeography/language/dating/
badly inventoried