Monthly Archives: November 2018

‘Now, who the Divell taught thee so much Italian?’ Language-learning for historians of early modern England

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[This guest post comes from John Gallagher of the University of Leeds. He also can be found on twitter talking about language, education and mobility.]

In an English-Italian phrasebook written in 1578, one character complained about the rudeness of the English towards foreigners, muttering that ‘fewe of these English men delight to haue their chyldren learne diuers languages, whiche thing displeaseth me’. He and his fellow-speakers discussed how best to learn languages, how fast it could be done, and whether it was worthwhile, with one speaker complaining that ‘I reade, write, and speake three or foure tongues, and yet I finde no profite’.[1] Four centuries ago, the usefulness of language-learning was already up for debate.

Early modern England, like England today, was multilingual. It was a country where Latin (and Greek and Hebrew) was heard in schools and universities, where Law French and Latin were spoken in the courts, where Dutch and French were languages of London courtrooms and fenland towns. While English tourists polished their Italian at home and abroad, soldiers and sailors encountered languages from Swedish and Spanish to Ottoman Turkish or Akan. From Ireland to India and from the Americas to Japan, England’s global expansion was shaped by multilingual meetings.

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Irish/Latin/English phrasebook compiled for and used by Elizabeth I of England (Wikimedia Commons)

Studying a language other than English can be of enormous value to historians. For students of early modern England, language skills can highlight new voices, new sources, and new perspectives on familiar histories. The UK – and the historical profession – seem to be facing a language crisis, so it couldn’t be more important to support our students in developing language skills or in putting ones they already have to use in their work as historians. From students who want to start a language from scratch to those who come to us with excellent Welsh, Polish, or Punjabi, as teachers we can always do more to show our students how their skills and interests can enrich their work as historians of all places and periods.

With this in mind, and partly prompted by Rebecca Rideal’s twitter discussion on the topic, I’ve put together some suggestions for students, researchers, and teachers who are interested in the rich and multilingual histories of early modern England and the early modern world (and hopefully many that will be of use beyond this period). Here are some resources that might be helpful to any early modernist seeking to learn a new language, or looking to brush up on one they’ve studied before: Continue reading →

A Page in the Life of Sarah Savage: Love Among Women

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[In our mini-series ‘A Page in the Life’, each post briefly introduces a new writer and a single page from their manuscript. In this post, Amanda E. Herbert (@amandaeherbert) introduces us to a diary-writing woman and her extraordinary relationship with a female friend. Amanda has explored the diary in more detail in her new Gender & History article, ‘Queer Intimacy: Speaking with the Dead in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, and her book on Female Alliances.]

Sarah Henry Savage (1664-c.1751) had a very hard time making friends.  A middling-sort Nonconformist from Cheshire at the turn of the eighteenth century, she lived at the edges and borders of early modern life: financially, spiritually, socially, and geographically, Sarah Savage didn’t – and sometimes, deliberately chose not to – fit into the traditions and standards which governed her society.[1]

Sarah Savage - Wrenbury on Speed map of Cheshire

Sarah Savage’s hometown of Wrenbury in Cheshire on John Speed’s map of 1614

But Savage had one great friend: Jane Ward Hunt.  Hunt and Savage shared a social network, a common faith, a sense of family by fostering children at one another’s homes, and perhaps most importantly, their time: in Savage’s papers, she recorded that the women exchanged visits, walks, sermon-notes, meetings, and countless letters over the course of their friendship.  Savage and Hunt shared what I have termed a ‘queer intimacy’:  a relationship which distorted traditional gender roles and gendered writing practices, and which was imbued with love, longing, and same-sex desire, with its many nuances, silences, and degrees of feeling.  Savage’s and Hunt’s bond was particularly and peculiarly shaped by spiritual strangeness: religious dissent, and its concomitant refusal to conform, its celebration of difference.

When Jane Hunt died unexpectedly in early middle age, Savage was utterly bereft.  She wept constantly.  She suffered from insomnia and, when she did manage to sleep, endured troubled dreams about Hunt and their lost alliance.  She wrote guiltily in her diary that she felt she was mourning excessively, but could not control her emotions; although she believed that she ‘should lay aside every Weight that would hinder my joy’, Savage noted sadly, this was an impossible task, for ‘well may this world be stiled a vale of Tears’.[2]

Continue reading →

Seventeenth-century England: A Symposium to celebrate Professor Bernard Capp’s 50 Years at Warwick

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Laura Sangha

On Saturday 20 October I had the great pleasure of returning to my alma mater to attend ‘Seventeenth-Century England’, a symposium to mark and celebrate Professor Bernard Capp’s fifty years at the University of Warwick. All of the many-headed monster co-authors were fortunate enough to benefit from Bernard’s advice and knowledge when we were postgraduates at Warwick in the 2000s, so this review of the Symposium is our way of joining the chorus of congratulations and commendations that characterised the day.

Fifty years’ service.

Professor Capp was appointed as Lecturer in History in 1968, when Harold Wilson was Prime Minister, the Kray twins were arrested, the M1 was completed, and the Race Relations Act was passed. The University of Warwick had admitted its first undergraduates just four years earlier.

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Alexandra Walsham exhorting us to undertake our own ‘generation work’

Whilst at Warwick Professor Capp became established as one of the leading historians of early modern England, his teaching and publications demonstrating an extraordinary breadth of research interests and expertise. The Symposium organisers, Peter Marshall and Naomi Pullin, did an excellent job of creating a programme that gave space to all the themes that underpin this work. Many papers explored gendered aspects of the seventeenth-century as well as the ‘religious marketplace’ of the age. Amanda Flather discussed the impact of Laudian ceremonialism on women worshippers, explaining how matters of conscience could be corrosive of female obedience. Tim Reinke-Williams regaled us with the masculine ‘banter’ of the early modern jestbook and laid bare the emotions that structured them. Ann Hughes’ paper on dissenting culture in Restoration England revealed the ways that religion connected single women to broad social networks and kinship. Hughes’ focus on the Gell family of Hopton Hall and the siblings in the family connected neatly to Alexandra Walsham’s paper on the ‘revolutionary generation’ of the 1640s and in particular the Fifth Monarchy Men, religious radicals bonded in solidarity by their conception of Christian history and the conviction that they were the ones to carry out a turbulent age’s vital ‘generation work’. Continue reading →