Why Study Early Modern History at UEA?

The School of History has one of the strongest concentrations of early modern historians in the UK. We are capable of supervising MA and PhD work in most areas, but are particularly strong in social, cultural and economic history. Staff have published work and supervised postdoctoral research in a wide variety of areas, including witchcraft and magic; popular culture and religion; the Reformation; the Renaissance; the English Revolution; crime, law and state formation; families, women and gender; demography, social relations and change; urbanization and industrialization; energy, fuel and environmental history; material culture; gentry, nobility and court culture; popular politics and government; riot and rebellion; custom and popular memory; oral culture, literacy and education; the history of mentalities.

By studying early modern history at postgraduate level you will be joining a long-established community of historians - comprising postgraduates, post-doctoral researchers and members of faculty - whose work is dedicated to the period c.1500-1750. There is a thriving postgraduate seminar at which both MA and PhD students present aspects of their work. In addition, postgraduates and teaching staff from the School frequently collaborate in putting on day-schools, workshops and conferences.

The UEA Library holds an extensive collection of work dealing with the early modern period. It also provides electronic access to Early English Books Online and Eighteenth Century Collections Online. The Norfolk Record Office, housed in a new, state-of-the-art building, is located in Norwich and holds one of the richest manuscript collections of any county record office in England. Other major record offices at Ipswich, Bury St Edmunds, Cambridge and Chelmsford are located within easy travelling distance.

Content and Structure of the Course

Society and Culture in Early Modern England (60 credits)

This year-long module covers a wide range of issues in the social and cultural history England, c.1500-1750. Weekly two-hour classes are spread over both semesters and examine issues such as methodology and interpretation in social and cultural history; the nature of early modernity; senses of place, belonging and local identity; custom and popular memory; social relations and social conflict; crime, the law and legal culture; magic and popular religion; witchcraft and witch-trials; gender relations and gender identities; literacy, print and oral culture; and changing senses of the self. Assessment is based upon a 5,000 word essay, focussing on a question that has been tailored to the specific needs and interests of the student in question.

The Controversies and the Classics (30 credits)

This bi-weekly reading group runs over the course of the year. It includes a number of members of the School and focuses on key texts in the development of historical writing about the early modern period, locating that work within its historiographical and methodological context.

Dissertation Module (90 credits)

The taught component provides students with the historiographical background, methodology, acquaintance with source material, and intellectual inspiration necessary to write a 14-16,000-word dissertation. This is based on original research, usually a combination of archival and contemporary printed collections. Some students work on the archival sources in local record offices; others work on nationally-focussed topics, concentrating on contemporary printed works available via Early English Books Online and Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Each student has a dissertation supervisor responsible for guiding primary research, structuring and organizing written work, and reading drafts. Many students take the MA purely out of a fascination with the early modern period; others will want a postgraduate qualification which will help them in careers in teaching, administration, heritage industries or research. Many MA students subsequently progress onto PhD programmes either at UEA or at other institutions. One purpose of the MA is to prepare students for doctoral studies, should they decide to take such a route.
3. Course Tutors and Research Interests

Dr Silvia Evangelisti– gender, culture and religion; female monastic communities; material culture; history of childhood
Dr Malcolm Gaskill – witchcraft and witch-trials; crime and the law; popular culture and mentalities; colonization of early modern America
Dr Polly Ha - sixteenth and seventeenth century religion; the Reformation and puritanism; transatlantic culture
Dr Suzannah Lipscomb - sixteenth-century French history; gender; Henry VIII and Tudor politics; public history
Dr Vic Morgan – Renaissance; family, household and kinship; history of Norwich; ideas, beliefs and culture of Shakespeare’s England
Dr Paul Warde - energy and economic development; climatic, environmental and social change; institutional regulation of resources and welfare support
Dr Fiona Williamson– seventeenth-century English social history; urban social space and popular politics
Prof. Andy Wood – popular politics and political culture; mental worlds of the poor; riot and rebellion; social memory and custom