Early Modern Resources

Includes extracts from Swift, Addison, The Tatler, Smollett, Boswell: vivid and illuminating materials providing insights into the city (Norton Topics Online)

Text of Abraham Cowley’s essay on 17th-century English agriculture (Modern History Sourcebook)

In the 17th century, there existed, just outside the City of London, an area famed and feared for its lawlessness, the ‘sanctuary’ or ‘liberty’ of Whitefriars, colloquially known as Alsatia. The project here is to gather the documents and materials, analyse them and seek to understand the part it played in the making of London.

essay by Liam Brunt (U. Oxford)
Discussion papers in economic and social history, 32 (1999)

An essay about theatregoing experiences in London around 1600 (Andrew Gurr)

Searchable database of information from the Bath Chronicle 1770-1800 (Bath & North East Somerset Council)

Essay on early years and development of the East India Company (Chris Godat) (pdf)

seminar paper by Nigel Goose, examining the problems with this source for demographic analysis
Institute of Historical Research e-seminars (1996-98, exact date unknown)

Essay about the East India Company at the BBC website (Peter Marshall)

A collaborative, interdisciplinary research project on the South Sea Bubble (which burst in 1720), focusing on its cultural history and influence on the arts, includes bibliography, essays, historical outline (David McNeil et al)

Online essay exploring the motivations for charitable bequests in 17th-century Suffolk (Leslie McGranahan)

essay by Vanessa Harding (Birkbeck ePrints)
In Imagining early modern London: perceptions and portrayals of the city from Stow to Strype, 1598 -1720 (Cambridge UP, 2001)

An essay looking at clothing, the second-hand clothes trade and theft in the early eighteenth century (Melissa Johnson)

online exhibit of images that ‘trace society’s changing attitudes toward money from the Reformation and the Church’s injunctions against usury, to the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of modern capitalism’ (Baker Library, Harvard College)

Online exhibit of coins, including state, national and imported coins (University of Notre Dame)

Online exhibit (University of Notre Dame

An examination of the management of common land since the 17th century using historical methods of enquiry, and an examination of modern governance mechanisms and the emergence of sustainable land management as a discrete objective for the future of our Commons.

article by Vanessa Harding (Birkbeck ePrints)
From London Journal, 26:1 (2001).

A site focusing on the industrial revolution in Lancashire from the mid eighteenth century: includes timeline, important figures, workers, transport, Lancashire dialect, links, bibliography

Country houses in the British Isles from the late medieval period to ca. 1850, together with an index to all the families so far traced as having occupied them. Organised by region (England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, islands) (Robin Alston)

With sections on population, industry, religion among others in a southern English market town, an excellent local history site (Dartford Archive)

Book extract: chapter from book by Jane Whittle, published by Oxford UP (2000)

An online ‘manual’ created in the course of various cultural heritage-projects, aimed at non-specialists and specialists, including teachers. The aim is ‘to show how the emerging self-consciousness of the Late Middle Ages tried to represent and define itself in objects.’ There are four sections – arms and armour; heraldry; costumes; jewellery – with surveys of developments, some illustrations, and glossaries of terms, general and for each section (Department of Medieval Studies, Central European University, Budapest)

Seventeenth-century town and city maps (George Welling)

Annotated bibliography of Selected Sources on the Archeology of Old World Dutch Material Culture in the 16th, 17th, and 18th Centuries (Paul R Huey)

Seminar papers, including papers on tea traders, coffeehouse debates, Quakers, urban workers (Library Company of Philadelphia)

essay “deals with the early period in the industrialisation of North Staffordshire and concentrates on the major industry in the area, pottery manufacture” (Lorna Scammell)

Aims to bring together scholars and practitioners working with early modern dress and textiles in different disciplines and settings to identify common areas of understanding and to develop new research tools; includes discussion list

The Centre for Early Modern Exchanges is dedicated to the study of the diverse cultural, historical, economic and social exchanges between England and Europe, European countries, the Old World and the New in the period 1450-1800.

Bibliography of Secondary Texts Relating to Early Modern Literature and Geography (Joanne Woolway Grenfell)