The Politics of Touch: Shaking hands in Early Modern England

CREMS Seminar

John Walter

Professor of History, University of Essex

I read history at the University of Cambridge. After a period as a Thouron scholar at the University of Pennsylvania I returned to Cambridge, where I held the Eileen Power Memorial Studentship in Social and Economic History, and undertook doctoral research on radical movements in the English Revolution and the tradition of popular protest in early modern England. I was appointed as Lecturer in History in 1976 and Professor in 2000. I research and publish in the field of early modern British history. My book on crowd actions in the English Revolution, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution, completed with an award under the British Academy Humanities Research Board scheme, was awarded the Royal Historical Society’s Whitfield Prize.

Research Interests

My central research interest is popular political culture in early modern England. This is research which has focused on crowd actions but which seeks to integrate the various branches of historical research social, economic, political and cultural. In this work I endeavour to bring together intensive archival research, often with a micro—historical focus, with theoretical interests in the nature of political society, the nature of early modern state and society, and the spaces therein for the exercise of popular political agency. This has resulted both in a series of articles, some of which have been collected in my 2006 Crowds and Popular Politics as well as in my 1999 monograph Understanding Popular Violence. My most recent work in this field seeks to re-integrate the sources and methodologies of social and cultural history employed in a social history of politics with a re-invigorated political history. Within this work, I am especially interested to think imaginatively about the forms and focus that political action might take beyond the politics of the crowd: hence my currents research interests extend to the politics of food and of gesture, on which I am currently publishing.

Publications

• Crowds and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2006).
• Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution: The Colchester Plunderers, (Cambridge, Past & Present Publications, Cambridge University Press, 1999; Electronic ed. 2002 http://www.NetLibrary.com, paperback ed, 2005).
• With Michael J Braddick (eds) Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society, (Cambridge University Press, 2001).
• With R. S. Schofield (eds) Famine, Disease and the Social Order in Early Modern Society, (Cambridge University Press, 1989).

• ‘The politics of protest in seventeenth-century England’, in B. Bowden & Michael T. Davis, eds., Riot, Resistance and Rebellion in Britain and France, 1381 to present (forthcoming Palgrave, 2012).
• 'Gesturing at authority: deciphering the gestural code of early modern England’, in M. Braddick, ed., The Politics of Gesture: Historical Perspectives (Past and Present, Supplement, 4, 2009) (download pdf or view online).
• ‘"The pooreman’s joy and the gentleman’s plague": a Lincolnshire libel and the politics of sedition in early modern England’, Past & Present 203 (2009), pp. 29-67 (download pdf or view online)
• 'Politicising the popular? The 'tradition of riot' and popular political culture in the English Revolution', in Nicholas Tyacke, ed., The English Revolution c. 1590-1720: Politics, Religion and Communties (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 95-110
• 'Faces in the crowd: gender and age in the early modern crowd', in Helen Berry & Elizabeth Foyster, eds., The Family in Early Modern England (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 96-125
• "Affronts & Insolencies": The Voices of Radwinter and Popular Opposition to Laudianism’, English Historical Review, CXXII, no. 495 (2007), pp. 35-60.
• Comment: From Richmondshire to the early modern English State', in D. Bates & K. Kondo, eds., Migration and Identity in British History: Proceedings of the Fifth Anglo-Japanese Conference of Historians (Tokyo, 2006).
• 'La société anglaise du XVIIe siècle: structure sociale et changement social', in H. Fréchet, ed., Questions D’Histoire : Les Sociétés Anglaise, Espagnole et Française au XV11e Siècle (Editions Du Temps : Nantes, 2006), pp. 13-38.

Refreshments available 15 minutes before the start