Drawing on the memoirs of French Protestant prisoner Jean Marteilhe, Nora Baker explores a dramatic maritime incident that turns social hierarchies upside down. The story offers a fascinating glimpse into how Huguenots remembered experiences of persecution, imprisonment, and survival.
The Moment of Trevor Griffiths’ Comedians: When Jokes Became Lead Pellets
Marking fifty years since the premiere of Trevor Griffiths’ Comedians, Stephen Wagg reflects on the changing role of comedy in modern society. He traces the rise of alternative comedy, the decline of a shared national comedy culture, and the growing influence of comedians in shaping political and social conversations.
Call for an Editor | Continuity and Change
Continuity and Change aims to define a field of historical sociology concerned with long-term continuities and discontinuities in the structures of past societies. Emphasis is upon studies whose agenda or methodology combines elements from traditional fields such as history, sociology, law, demography, economics or anthropology, or ranges freely between them. There is a strong commitment … Continue reading
The State Bibles
The State Bibles: The Anglo-Dutch Politics of the King James Version and the Statenvertaling, by Esther van Raamsdonk, published by the British Academy, is the first extended comparative study of two key bible translations of the early modern period – the King James Version (1611) and the Dutch Statenvertaling (1637).
Writing to win the prize: prize contests in 18th-century Europe
Essay competitions in the long eighteenth century, edited by Avi Lifschitz and Martin Urmann, recently published in the Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment Series.This book is the first to provide a preliminary, and necessarily incomplete, overview of this phenomenon across national and linguistic borders, institutional settings and media outlets. In this blog post, Avi Lifschitz and Martin Urmann explore how these essay competitions paved the way for one of the pillars of modern academia, the blind peer review, alongside the issues of the practice, which on the surface seemed egalitarian.
