Dr Charmian Mansell
Assistant Professor of Early Modern British History
Office: Room 3.38 Faculty of Arts Building
Phone: 024761 51618, internal extension 51618
Email: Charmian.Mansell@warwick.ac.uk
Term Time Office Hours:Thursdays 2.30-3.30pm and Fridays 10-11am (both in-person in FAB 3.38). Please book your meeting with me using this link (you will need to login through your university account).
Please email me if you would like to arrange a meeting outside these times or would prefer to meet on Teams.
Research
I am an historian of early modern England specialising in the histories of work, gender and society. My research is primarily concerned with recovering everyday experiences and identities of ordinary people from legal records.
My book, Female Servants in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 2024) reconstructs the lives and work of over a thousand women in service between c.1530 and 1650, drawing on a database of 30,000 church court witnesses. It asks: what was it like to be a woman in service in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England? Through the excavation of experiences of over a thousand female servants, the book demonstrates that service was a flexible, economically significant, and largely unregulated institution within the English pre-industrial economy. Female Servants in Early Modern England has been recognised with four major prizes: the American Historical Association’s Morris D. Forkosch Prize, the Sixteenth Century Society’s Natalie Zemon Davis First Book Prize, and the British Agricultural History Society’s Thirsk Prize.
My latest project is titled ‘Everyday Travel and Communities in Early Modern England’. The initial stages of this project was supported by a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Cambridge between 2019 and 2024. I am interested in tracing everyday, quotidian journeys made by early modern people – men and women, rich and poor – that took them beyond the boundary of parish. The project stretches the geography of community and its features, expanding our understanding of the spatial horizons of early modern people. Using court depositions to reconstruct the routine journeys that structured work, sociability, and economic life between 1550 and 1750, the project marks a step-change in shifting attention from long-distance migration to everyday mobility. It identifies who travelled, how far, why, and by what means, and maps patterns of movement across different landscapes. Rather than viewing rural society as static, it shows that these routine movements were crucial to the formation of early modern societies, economies, and habitats.
I am a series editor for Women on the Move, a transdisciplinary book series with Manchester University Press that focuses on unveiling the presence and multiplicity of experiences of women in migration processes. I serve on the Publications Committee of the Economic History Society and am a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
Academic Career
2024 – 2026 Lecturer in Early Modern History │ University of Sheffield
2019 – 2024 British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow │ University of Cambridge
2023 – 2024 Research Fellow on 'Legacies of the British Slave Trade' project | University College London
2018 - 2019 Lecturer in Early Modern British History | Queen Mary University of London
2018 Postdoctoral Research Associate on 'Women's Work in Rural England, 1500-1700' project | University of Exeter
2017 Women in Humanities Postdoctoral Writing Fellow | University of Oxford
2016 - 2017 Economic History Society Junior Research Fellow | Institute of Historical Research
2017 PhD in History | University of Exeter
Fellowships and Honours
2025 - Fellow of the Royal Historical Association
2024 Folger Library Visiting Fellowship | Folger Library, Washington D.C.
2024 Huntington Library Visiting Fellowship | Huntington Library, Pasadena
2016 - Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (formerly Advance HE)
Awards for Female Servants in Early Modern England:
2026 Winner of the Women’s History Network First Book Prize 2026
2026 Shortlisted for the Economic History Society’s First Monograph Prize 2026
2025 Winner of the American Historical Association Morris D. Forkosch Prize 2025
2025 Winner of the Sixteenth Century Society Natalie Zemon Davis First Book Prize 2025
2025 Winner of the British Agricultural History Society Thirsk Prize 2025
2025 Shortlisted for the Royal Historical Society First Book Prize 2025
Publications
Monographs
C. Mansell, Female Servants in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press: 2024) –open access here.
Articles
C. Mansell, ‘The Labour of Care in Early Modern England’, The Historical Journal 67:1 (2024), 21-41, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X23000444
C. Mansell, ‘Beyond the home: experiences of female service in early modern England’, Gender and History, 33:1, (2021), 24-49, https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0424.12494
C. Mansell, ‘The variety of women's experiences as servants in early modern England: evidence from church court depositions’, Continuity and Change, 33:3 (2018), 315 – 338, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0268416018000267
Digital Outputs
M. Bennett, L. Chambers, J. Dawkins, N. Draper, C. Mansell, W. Pettigrew, N. Radburn, E. Smith, K. Thomas, ‘The Register of British Slave-Traders’ (2026), https://britishslavetraders.org/
C. Mansell and M. Hailwood (eds.), ‘Court Depositions of South West England, 1500-1700’ (University of Exeter, humanities-research.exeter.ac.uk/womenswork/courtdepositions, 2018).
Book Chapters
C. Mansell, ‘Objecting to Youth: English Society, Service and the Statute of Artificers, 1564-1641’ in J. Whittle & T. Lambrecht (eds.), Service and The Labour Laws in Europe, c.1400-1900, (Boydell, 2023).
C. Mansell, ‘Defining the boundaries of community? The expulsion of pregnant unmarried women in early modern England’ in N. Pullin & K. Woods (eds.), Cultures of Exclusion in Early Modern Britain, 1600-1750, (Routledge, 2021).
C. Mansell, ‘Female servants and the village community in south-west England 1560-1640: the labour laws reconsidered’ in J. Whittle (ed.), Servants in Rural Europe, c.1400-1900, (Boydell, 2017), pp.77-94.
Selected Other Publications
C. Mansell, Reviews of periodical literature published in 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022: 1500-1700 forThe Economic History Review(see Vols. 74:1 (2021), 251-294; 75:1 (2022), 249-255; 76:1 (2023), 353-361).
C. Mansell, ‘Women in Early Modern England’, essay for Adam Matthew Digital Resource Early Modern England: Society, Culture and Everyday Life, 1500-1700, (May 2020).
Teaching
I currently teach on the following modules:
- HI275 The British Problem: Empire, Conflict and National Identities 1558-1714Link opens in a new window (undergraduate second-year option module)
- HI113 Europe in the Making 1450-1800Link opens in a new window (undergraduate core module)
- HI9KO History Writing: Theory and Practice (postgraduate core module)
- HI2K9 Historical Research (undergraduate second-year core module)
Research Supervision
I am keen to hear from potential postgraduate students interested in early modern history, and particularly on topics relating to gender, labour, migration, mobility in sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe.