My Favourites
Early Modern scholars discuss their favourite primary and secondary sources...
Prof. Vivian Nutton
14:08, Mon 25 Jul 2022
Vivian Nutton discusses his enjoyment of working with different primary sources in a long and distinguished career, including an illustrated manuscript of Galen commissioned by a French royal surgeon, and the particular pleasure of finding unexpected marginalia. In spite of the thrills of the archive, he explains why he still thinks digitisation is valuable. Finally he expounds what makes Owsei Temkin's 'Galenism' and Louis Robert's 'A travers I'Asie Mineure' great secondary sources.
(MP3 format, 7.0 MB)
Prof. Rita Copeland
14:08, Mon 25 Jul 2022
Rita Copeland, Professor of Classical Studies and English at the University of Pennsylvania, talks about the reception of Aristotle's 'Rhetoric' in medieval Europe and how she finds appeal in its subsequent, long-term impact. She discusses its focus on emotions and explains the absence of moral judgements by its practical focus on achieving catharsis in the audience. She also explains why she thinks everyone should read Erich Auerbach's study of literary thought, 'Mimesis: the Representation of Reality in Western Literature', and the attempt by Ernst Robert Curtius to present a unified literary heritage to post-war Europeans, 'European Literature in the Latin Middle Ages'.
(MP3 format, 8.9 MB)
Dr. Cesare Cuttica
14:08, Mon 25 Jul 2022
Cesare Cuttica is Marie Curie Fellow in Intellectual History in the Department of History at the University of Sussex. He is interested in seventeenth-century English political thought, particularly patriarchialism and the defence of divine right. He explains why he thinks size matters when it comes to primary sources and discusses the interpretative role of the historian.
(MP3 format, 6.6 MB)
Dr. John Watts
14:08, Mon 25 Jul 2022
John Watts from the University of Oxford discusses his enjoyment of working with textual sources which reveal political language and the framework of related discourses in the late medieval period.
(MP3 format, 5.4 MB)
Prof. Bernard Capp
14:08, Mon 25 Jul 2022
Bernard Capp, Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Warwick, discusses his satisfaction at finding personal voices in early modernity.
(MP3 format, 4.6 MB)
Prof. Andrew Pettegree
14:08, Mon 25 Jul 2022
Andrew Pettegree from the University of St. Andrews discusses his accidental discoveries of a broadsheet listing books for sale in Emden (Germany) in 1566, and forty (catalogued as two) unknown news pamphlets from Rouen (France), 1538-44. He also mentions his feeling of "liberation" at being told by Yale University Press that he should focus on the past, rather than historiographic matters, in his The Book in the Renaissance.
(MP3 format, 1.8 MB)
Catherine Kovesi
14:08, Mon 25 Jul 2022
Catherine Kovesi is a senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne. She works on luxury in Renaissance Italy and in particular the regulation of consumption. Here she discusses her passion for hand-written archival documents, first developed when writing her undergraduate thesis, as well as current work on the cultural history of the economy.
(MP3 format, 2.2 MB)
David Rollison
14:08, Mon 25 Jul 2022
David Rollinson is an associate at the University of Sydney. His research focuses upon popular politics in Early Modern England, most recently resulting in Commune, Country and Commonwealth: The People of Cirencester, 1117-1643. Here he discusses the value of lists in local study, and methods of examining the long-run history of local communities.
(MP3 format, 1.8 MB)
Prof. Thomas F. Mayer
14:08, Mon 25 Jul 2022
Thomas Mayer is professor of history at Augustana College, Rock Island, IL. He has published extensively on Cardinal Reginald Pole (1500–1558), and is currently working on Galileo's trial. Here he discusses the decree registers of the congregation of the holy office, as well as the nature and utility of the historical profession.
(MP3 format, 3.4 MB)
My Favourites - Richard Whatmore
14:08, Mon 25 Jul 2022
Richard Whatmore is professor of intellectual history and the history of political thought at the University of Sussex. He is also the director of the Sussex Centre for Intellectual History and editor of the journal History of European Ideas. Here, Richard discusses his favourite primary and secondary sources, including J.G.A. Pocock's The Machiavellian Moment.
(MP3 format, 11 MB)
My Favorites – Prof. Anthony McFarlane
14:08, Mon 25 Jul 2022
Anthony McFarlane, Professor of Latin American history at the University of Warwick discusses his favourite primary and secondary sources including; Juicios Criminales, Archivo General de la Nación, Bogotá, Colombia. The specific primary document discussed is located in the Spain’s main military archive: Francisco Douché to the Conde de Ricla, San Lorenzo el Real, 25 October, 1772, Servicios Históricos Militares (Madrid), Guerra, Ultramar (Mexico), Caja 95. Professor McFarlane also discusses a favourite secondary source: John H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492-1830, Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 2006.
(MP3 format, 21 MB)
Peter Lake
14:08, Mon 25 Jul 2022
Peter Lake is Professor of the History of Christianity at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. Here he discusses his favourite primary and secondary sources, including Shakespeare's history plays and Patrick Collinson's Elizabethan Puritan Movement (1967).
(MP3 format, 12 MB)
My Favourites – Prof. Karen O’Brien
14:08, Mon 25 Jul 2022
Professor Karen O’Brien, Pro-Vice-Chancellor at the University of Birmingham and formally professor of English at the University of Warwick, discusses her favourite primary and secondary sources including; Edward Gibbon, The history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1788), Ernst Cassirer, Philosophie der Aufklärung, (1932) (The philosophy of the enlightenment, translated from the German by Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove in 1951) and Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: genres of historical writing in Britain, 1740-1820, (2000).
For more information on these sources and the history of the Enlightenment see professor O’Brien’s books: Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon (Cambridge University Press, 1997) and Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
(MP3 format, 11 MB)
My Favourites - Prof. John Styles
14:08, Mon 25 Jul 2022
Professor John Styles of the University of Hertfordshire discusses his favourite primary and secondary sources.
(MP3 format, 13 MB)
My Favourites - Prof. Mark Greengrass
14:08, Mon 25 Jul 2022
Mark Greengrass, emeritus professor at the University of Sheffield, joins us to talk about his favourite primary, secondary and digital sources.
(MP3 format, 10 MB)
My Favorites - Prof. Steven Pincus
14:08, Mon 25 Jul 2022
Steven Pincus Professor of history at Yale University discusses his favourite primary and secondary sources, including; The Papers of Sir Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, 1661-1724, at the British Library, Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict and London's Overseas Traders 1550-1653, (Cambridge, 1993) and C. A. Bayly, Imperial meridian : the British Empire and the World, 1780-1830, (London, 1989).
For more on these sources and Britain’s Political economy see Prof Pincus’ new book, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (London, 2009).
The Harley papers can be found in the British Library’s Portland collection, Additional Manuscripts 70001-70523: http://catalogue.bl.uk/F/?func=full-set-set&set_number=077774&set_entry=000002&format=999
(MP3 format, 8.3 MB)