Mark Jones

Really looking forward to hearing this fascinating paper today!

Sheffield Centre for Early Modern Studies - Events Upcoming events If you would like to be notified about upcoming events, email scems@sheffield.ac.uk to be added to our mailing list.

This Thursday (9th October) at 1pm, our Early Modern Discussion Group will be recommencing!

Our first paper will be presented by our very own Cameron Whiteside on 'The Commission on Fees: its "Recommendations" and "Regulation" of Manuscript Production.'

Please see the website for how to join!

Rubricated capital H, fifteenth century French chancery hand

Finally made the move over from the cesspit of X, hello everyone! I offer a nice rubricated 'H'enry from my research into the Trésor des Chartes as proof of identity!

Slightly delayed but thank you to the organisers of the @henrysweetsoc.bsky.social colloquium in Reims!

Great to hear lots of fascinating papers and present some of my work on ‘riot’!

Call for Papers This two-day interdisciplinary symposium will invite scholars to re-consider practical texts written between c. 1558 and 1642 as productive sources for literary criticism. In a period best known today for its poetry and drama, practical texts such as Gervase Markham’s The English Husbandman were ‘almost literally read to pieces’, Thomas Tusser’s Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry ‘led the market’ as ‘a Tudor best-seller’, and cookery books enjoyed a staggering 70% reprint rate. That these texts occupied such a prominent position in the publishing industry is testament to their importance in early modern life. Yet despite this, literary criticism has been slow to embrace such texts as more than merely contextual sources for canonical texts by poets and dramatists such as Shakespeare and Spenser. Critics continue to frame Tusser’s work as an agricultural manual or almanack rather than a book of poetry, for example, while literary scholars tend to note his significance in the same breath as they denigrate the quality of his verse: an ‘agrarian book of jingles’ or ‘collection of doggerel’. Other practical texts such as receipt books and surveying texts have been interrogated primarily as a means of understanding early modern culture and society. Less common are studies of practical texts as works of literature, studies that centre the practical text rather than positioning it as context for the work of more canonical writers. This symposium seeks to address this gap, and invites contributors to consider how studying non-traditionally canonical texts can help scholars to reassess established positions. It is designed to lead to an edited collection, provisionally aimed at Routledge’s Studies in Renaissance and Early Modern Worlds of Knowledge series, so speakers are encouraged to propose papers suitable for extension into a 6000-8000 word chapter. Recent scholarship by Katarzyna Lecky, Jessica Rosenberg, and Kyla Tompkins has begun to demonstrate

CFP: Reading the Practical in #EarlyModern Literature

University of Sheffield, 16-17 April 2026
Deadline for submissions: 24 November 2025
All info: www.rensoc.org.uk/event/readin...
#SkyStorians #EarlyModernEvents @sheffieldcems.bsky.social

Text: LTE Site of the Week- Bamford Edge, England. Photo of a large rock outcropping where people are standing. Text: Running since 2004. Rob Marrs, Liverpool University. Icon for heath.

Bamford Edge, #England is the #LTESiteOfTheWeek.

Rob Marrs from @liverpooluni.bsky.social is comparing the effectiveness of 3 different #bracken control methods at this #heath site.
bit.ly/BamfordEdge

Watch his webinar where he talks on the 2 LTEs he manages bit.ly/3kUOhly @leverhulme.ac.uk ‬🌎

The organisers of the UKDHHH outdid themselves today - what a brilliant day of talks, and a masterclass in accessibility

Very much looking forward to speaking on ‘riot’ this evening!

Learn about #earlymodern millers!
Millers played a crucial role in the food system, but in popular literature they were plagued by reputations of fraud and lechery. In this short piece, I explore the relationship between reputation and reality and how it changed over time.

An exciting date for your diaries: the first Birkbeck-QMUL Historical Studies Graduate Symposium will take place on 18 June, on the theme of "methodologies in historical research". BBK PhD students @bbkhistorical.bsky.social & @qmul.ac.uk do send your proposals for 5 or 15 minute papers by 30 April!

Venice had another griffin last week. Thanks to the University of Warwick and the organisers for the Cultural Legacies of Corruption in Europe and its Empires, 1500-today, for the invite to give a paper on the 'Corruption Records of the Court of Chancery'.

Shifting and Permanent States: Experiencing Disability in the Seventeenth-Century British Navy "For the men and boys of the late seventeenth-century British navy, disability was a category of self-definition..."

How did people conceptualize disability in the past?

In the latest for Broadsides, Anna Conner explores disability and identity in C17 naval petitions.
#skystorians #histmed

www.nacbs.org/post/shiftin...

History UK Disability and History Project The History UK Disability and History Project was launched in November 2023 in response to the History UK EDI report which identified disability as an important aspect of EDI work worthy of further…

📣Call for participants: History UK is continuing its focus groups on disability and history in HE in April. Any students/staff with experience in teaching disability history OR studying history with a disability, come and talk to us! #DisabilityHistory #DisHist
www.history-uk.ac.uk/projects/his...

SCEMS Spring 2025 events lineup 👇

Really looking forward to these workshops and events this semester!

SCEMS events will be starting up again next week and we're off to a busy start! 🧵

Early Modern London: New Work and Approaches
Thurs 6th March, 10am - 5:30pm

This workshop, headed by Ian Archer (Oxford), will cover a range of topics, inc. the Inns of Court, translation, and London's Bridewell.

‘Playing fields not battlefields’: pacifism, non-violence and sport in inter-war Britain Whilst scholars have tended to focus on hegemonic internationalist sporting practices and their promotion of peace, this study illustrates that peace activists promoted sport as a means to create a...

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Delighted to have my paper - ‘Playing fields not battlefields’: pacifism, non-violence and sport in inter-war Britain- published in Sport in History.

@sportinhistorypod.bsky.social
@bshsnews.bsky.social

Never mind Christmas - it's almost World Braille Day!
Excited to be kicking off the new year with the Braillists Foundation down in Worcester #Braille200
www.braillists.org/uncategorise...