Happy Christmas everyone! Now, while many folk will be enjoying turkey this holiday season, for historians the traditional festive dish is beef, served HOT.
So, to help us all survive the annual Beef Season, here’s a game we can play. Points every time you see one of the following:
Something is described as ‘performative’. 10 points.
Seeing as we’re all discussing economic history, let me tell you all about the transition from feudalism to capitalism. It’s a helluva ride, I’ll tell ya.
In the 17th century, everyone lived under the yoke of feudalism. Men were all called Henry, women were called Widow. You were married to three of your cousins.
Then, out of the blue, a young radical who could read several letters made an angry comment to village idiot Piers Plowman. ‘I’m a capitalist, thou fool!’
The thing is, Mark Rylance, is that no-one who had *any* knowledge of 16th/17th century England could think a hereditary earl was more capable of writing Shakespeare's plays than a middling sort townsman.
The literature on the vibrancy of middling sort culture in the period is so vast that it would take wilful ignorance, and snobbishness of quite stunning proportions, to think this way.
Mark is a man of the left. Does he think Gerrard Winstanley, John Lilburne, Richard Overton, William Walwyn somehow incapable of thinking creatively about politics and society because they are mere middling folk?
Well since Jo Johnson has decided to ruin Boxing Day, let’s have a little think about this article in the Times.
There's ultimately two substantive points here: Johnson believes that universities need to be forced to protect 'freedom of speech', and a group of Oxford academics has recently been involved in an attack on it.
It's worth noting that academic freedom of speech is already protected by the Higher Education Act of 1988, something I learnt when my institution used it to protect my academic freedom of speech from a homophobic attack.
So there’s a Daily Mail hatchet job on a number of my colleagues today. I don’t know everyone in it, but I know a few of them, and here’s some of the things they didn’t mention.
Joanna Innes is a leading expert on eighteenth century social policy. She’s been an inspiration to everyone working in that field (myself included).
A number of her articles have massively developed the field of eighteenth century social, governmental and intellectual history.