Solitude in Early Modern Britain

Led by Dr Naomi Pullin (Department of History), this project addresses the social history of solitude and loneliness in the 17th and 18th centuries. It explores how time spent alone (and in company) was understood, described, and experienced by early modern men and women living in Britain in their everyday lives. Using diaries, letters, journals and printed texts, the project asks what solitude can tell us about how society and culture were organised in the past. Central to this, is how the gender of the writer shaped their perceptions of solitude and the world around them.

Dr Pullin is working on a monograph provisionally entitled A Social History of Solitude in Early Modern Britain. She has also a forthcoming chapter 'Religion and Solitude' in Bloomsbury's A Cultural History of Solitude in the Early Modern Era, ed. Andrew Mattison; and with Kathryn Woods co-edited Negotiating Exclusion in Early Modern England, 1550-1800 (Routledge, 2021).

Dr Pullin has also produced a blog post on eighteenth-century conceptions of solitude for the

DIGIT.EN.S Encylopedia of British Sociability in the Long Eighteenth Century.

Furniture Of My Imagination

This was a collaboration between Naomi Pullin and Coventry-based artist Paul Daly, a funded project that formed part of Coventry Creates as part of Coventry UK City for Culture 2021. The output of the collaboration was a film made in response to 18th-century diary excerpts. The title was taken from a poem uncovered by Dr Pullin by diarist Gertrude Saville.

Read more about the collaboration here.

Female Foes: Conflict, Dispute and Identity in the Early Modern British Atlantic

Female Foes was a Leverhulme Trust-funded early career fellowship (2017-2021) led my Dr Naomi Pullin. Problematising recent research into female sociability, the project investigated how an emerging culture of civility and politeness in the early modern British Atlantic enhanced discussions about enmity and hostility. Focusing on women’s antagonisms in Britain and North America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it offered a new model of inquiry into female relationships by showing how female antagonism and conflict shaped early Atlantic culture. The project, which focuses on Britain and its North American colonies in the period 1650 to circa 1775 questions: who is an enemy and how they might differ from friends? How might women become enemies? How was enmity between women experienced? By centring the discussion around these central issues, this project set out to develop an important counter-narrative to traditional histories of female sociability, that embraces the tensions within and negative consequences of friendship formation.

More about the project can be found here:https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/people/staff_index/pullin/foes/