Birkbeck Conference on Lilburne in October

John Lilburne: Life, Thought, Legacy
London Renaissance Seminar

Organiser: Dr Jerome de Groot, University of Manchester

24 October 2009 at Birkbeck College, Malet Street, London

2-2.45
Life:
Jason Peacey (UCL):
‘To repair to Westminster: public politics and the trial of John Lilburne’

3-3.30
Thought:
Phil Baker title tbc.,
Rachel Foxley (Reading):
‘How to criticize John Lilburne’

3.45-5
Legacy:
Jerome de Groot (Manchester) and Jason McElligott (TCD):
‘Lilburne’s legacies’
Ted Vallance (Roehampton):
‘John Lilburne and the historians’

For information please contact:

jerome.degroot@manchester.ac.uk
or
wiseman.susan@gmail.com

Ann Hughes

 

 

 

On the left of the picture.

Brian Manning

Christopher Hill

On Kimmel and Absolutism

Anonymous said…I am afraid that Kimmel’s work was seriously out of touch with the historiography of the period when it was written, let alone now when the focus of historical research has moved on so rapidly. No one has ever supposed that the localist emphasis of the work of John Morrill and, before him, of Alan Everitt on the post-1640 period was a sufficient explanation of the pre-1640 origins of the conflicts in England. And although Charles I’s attitudes to kingship were and remain important, studies of his psychology have yet to be written: studies of his opponents’ psychological attitudes cannot be written because the material simply does not exist. There was no struggle between ‘Anglicans’ and ‘Presbyterians’ in the Stuart period although there was one between supporters of Presbyterian and Independent forms of Church government on the Long Parliament’s side in the 1640s. Elizabeth’s I’s legacy at her death in 1603 was certainly not one of inflation, war debt, factionalism and corruption: her debts were equivalent to about one year’s royal income and more than counter-balanced by the debts owed to her regime by Henri IV of France and the Dutch. The peaceful accession of James VI of Scotland to the English throne testified to England’s stability. Much of Kimmel’s analysis is based on secondary works rather than on primary sources and ignores the importance of the problems of ‘multiple kingdoms’ under discussion by seventeenth-century historians from the mid-1980s onwards. Unfortunately, some of his claims are not well founded: there were no ‘classes’ in the Marxist or sociological senses in early modern England and no threat of social upheaval of the kind attributed to the Levellers or Diggers, both extremely ephemeral phenomena unjustifiably given exaggerated prominence by later Marxist theologasters.

Tuesday, June 02, 2009 9:21:00 AM

 

Pasted from historymike

Sir Benjamin Rudyerd

John Pym in the 1630s

Saffron Gardens, Horndon-on-the-Hill

Looking West across the garden

From the North looking towards the South Wall

The South wall looking from the East

When Queen Elizabeth I visited her troops at West Tilbury in August, 1588, she stayed overnight in the house of Robert Rich at Saffron Gardens, Horndon-on-the-Hill. The walls of this property survive, although they are in need of repair. 

Kevin Sharpe on the purposes of a university education

The THES also contains a piece by Kevin Sharpe reflecting upon the comments by students at Bristol, Manchester and other universities in the U.K. on the lack of teaching contact with academic staff. He has some critical comments to make about the arrival of concerns about ‘course delivery’, ‘consumer satisfaction’, etc., in a brave new educational world in which the present government aims to get 50 per cent of eighteen year-olds into higher education. These expectations are contrasted with the benefits of Oxbridge-style tutorials in the 1960s when teacher-undergraduate contact lasted for only one hour a week and in which contact with one’s peers studying the same or other subjects was vital for developing students’ critical capacities. This is sound enough even if it does look backwards to his own time as an undergraduate and postgraduate in Oxford in the late-1960s and early-1970s. What it partly overlooks is that the expansion of  higher education has brought with it an expectation amongst many students that universities should replicate the pattern of teaching they experienced in school, in other words, that they should be largely spoon-fed, and should then emerge with first-class honours degrees. That is not possible if universities are to remain true to their functions as institutions of higher education. Unfortunately, the incumbent administration at Westminster long ago lost sight of the enduring values of  learning and sees education as a tool of social engineering. Many universities have foolishly gone along with this process in the hope of securing more resources and a more secure place in the world of advanced institutions. But growth may also be a prelude to severe contraction as the ghastly experience of California clearly shows.

Ferrell under fire

 

 

 

 

 Lori Anne Ferrell’s book, The Bible and the People, was reviewed in The Times Higher Education Supplement last week by Joachim Schaper of Aberdeen University. He was impressed by the wide range of topics she attempted to address in a book of only 273 pages but also worried by its “remarkable factual errors”, one of which concerned the sources Jerome used to produce his Vulgate text of the Bible. It will be intriguing to see what her response will be.