Past & Present Supplement Series
About the series
The Past & Present Supplement series was launched in 2006 to provide a forum for publishing the proceedings of Past and Present conferences and other symposia, and collections of essays reflective of the broad themes and ethos of the journal itself. One volume will appear every year, which will be sent out free to subscribers, but which can also be purchased by non-subscribers as a book. This will also be available on line and will be, like the journal, fully searchable.
Proposals
We welcome detailed proposals for possible future Supplements. Please contact Publications Editor Renaud Morieux on rm656@cam.ac.uk
Orders
If you are interested in ordering any of the supplements please fill out this form.
2021: Beyond Truth: Fiction and Disinformation in Early Modern Europe
Supplement 16
Edited by Emma Claussen and Luca Zenobi
About
Over the last few years, the phrase ‘fake news’ has become ubiquitous. Scholars and commentators alike have raised alarm over the spread of disinformation. Worries about the corrosive effects of social media feature regularly in articles and opinion pieces, often in explicit contrast to older means of communication, such as newspapers and printed books. Yet despite what this bleak picture may suggest, fake news is nothing new. Today’s versions may be culturally and technologically specific, but hoaxes, lies and fabrications have been around for as long as people have exchanged information in any shape or form, told stories, and generally talked and written to each other. The aim of this Supplement is to study another major juncture marked by new technologies, genres and regimes of truth: the early modern period.
2020: Mothering’s Many Labours
Supplement 15
Edited by Sarah Knott and Emma Griffin
Table of Contents
About
Why is maternal labour, and the wide variety of figures who undertake it, a neglected history? Certain strands of historical enquiry, most notably Black women’s history, have paid sustained attention to the topic. But, more generally, we know far less than we should about the rich history of maternity. This neglect comes at a cost to our understanding of the basic workings of past societies, and of the fundamental place of reproduction and childcare in economic and social life.
2019: Global History and Microhistory
Supplement 14
Edited by John-Paul A Ghobrial
About
What is global history? What is it good for? And, as Dominic Sachsenmaier asked many years ago, who is it for? Global history is definitely not in crisis, but it certainly is a family at war with itself. How can microhistory and its methods help to address some of the problems and challenges that face a global history? The contributors to Global History and Microhistory offer a working example of what the past looks like when these two fields are brought together in practice.
2018: The Global Middle Ages
Supplement 13
Edited by Catherine Holmes and Naomi Standen
About
This supplement is about the Global Middle Ages, but it is not just for medievalists. Catherine Holmes and Naomi Standen seek to engage with global historians of all periods, and regional specialists from all world regions, whether established academics or students. Arguments presented in this volume were first developed by the members of a network project called 'Defining the Global Middle Ages', organized at the Universities of Oxford, Birmingham and Newcastle, which ran between 2012 and 2015.
2017: Cultures of Lutheranism: Reformation Repertoires in Early Modern Germany
Supplement 12
Edited by Kat Hill
About
The year 2017 is Lutherjahr, and the interest in histories of the Reformation evoked by the five-hundredth anniversary of 1517 invites an opportunity to re-examine the reformer's legacy and construct a new cultural, and indeed collaborative, approach to the history of the Lutheran Reformation. The essays in this volume emerged from a conference uniting scholars working on diverse aspects of this rich Lutheran culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
2016: The Social History of the Archive
Supplement 11
Edited by Liesbeth Corens, Kate Peters and Alexandra Walsham
About
Archives are the factories and laboratories of the historian. Along with private studies and public libraries, they are the loci of our apprenticeship as scholars and the warehouses from which we acquire the materials to build the history we write. Until recently scholars of the early modern period rarely paused to consider how and why these repositories came into being, despite the fact that these processes have fundamentally shaped and coloured our knowledge of the past. Too often we mine the documentary sources they house without scrutinizing the decisions about selection, arrangement, preservation and retention taken by those responsible for the care of their contents over successive generations. We still fall into the trap of approaching them as if they provide a transparent window through which we can view societies remote from us in time.
This Supplement issues a call for deeper critical awareness of the ways in which archives construct the history that we write. It provokes further discussion and debate about the conceptual and methodological problems that hinder our attempts to reconstruct past societies.
2015: Heritage in the Modern World
Supplement 10
Edited by Paul Betts and Corey Ross
About
The invention of usable pasts has been fundamental to the making of modern identities across the world. From the origins of historic preservationism in early eighteenth century Europe to the popularization of new heritage industries after the Second World War, efforts to conserve and protect a collective inheritance have been a crucial field for articulating new forms of cultural identity, community and belonging. This volume reconsiders how, why and in what guises these diverse conservation practices emerged, grew and interrelated in a global perspective. It brings together scholars working not only on Europe and its colonial territories but also on Latin America, China, Japan, the Soviet Union and North America in order to examine the extent to which the various attempts to define, protect and mobilize ancestral pasts were part and parcel of an increasingly global and interconnected approach to heritage in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
2014: Cultures of Intoxication
Supplement 9
Edited by Phil Withington and Angela McShane
About
This Past & Present Supplement recovers the configuration of factors—social, political, cultural, material—that have combined to shape and inform intoxication in the past, in the present, and over time. For some contributors this has meant hazarding the feelings and perceptions induced by intoxicants and the circumstances of their consumption: in the symposia of ancient Greece, for example, or the dance floors of contemporary San Francisco and Hong Kong. For others it has involved deconstructing the manner in which 'experience' and 'cognition' are themselves defined and represented, be it in the 'countercultural' theories of the 1960s, the virulent colour schemes of contemporary brain scans, the symbolism of Renaissance painting, or the conduct literature of early modern England.
2013: Transnationalism and Contemporary Global History
Supplement 8
Edited by Matthew Hilton and Rana Mitter
About
Edited by Matthew Hilton and Rana Mitter, this collection shifts attention away from the west to the non-western world, providing a forum for new voices from China, India, Kenya, and re-emergent societies in Eastern Europe. Exploiting newly opened archives and newly recorded oral history, the transnational histories in this volume see 1945 as the centre of a transitional period in which ideas and institutions endured. Exploring international institutions that tackled hunger and legal rights alongside ideas about global social welfare, they show that transnational processes could provide liberation in ways that the nation-state could not enable, but that they could also create a new and oppressive kind of imperialism. The essays here propose innovative and sometimes provocative approaches toward the transnational history of the mid-twentieth century, challenging the geography, the chronology, and the processes, of an interconnected global history.
2012: Ritual and Violence: Natalie Zemon Davis and Early Modern France
Supplement 7
Edited by Graeme Murdock, Penny Roberts, and Andrew Spicer
About
This collection of essays, edited by Graeme Murdock, Penny Roberts, and Andrew Spicer, developed from a one-day conference—'Religion and Violence in Early Modern France: The Work of Natalie Zemon Davis'—which was held in June 2008 at the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon. Five of the papers published here were initially delivered on that occasion, but the conference also sought to learn from the differing perspectives of violence outside sixteenth-century France. This concern is also reflected in this collection, which seeks to offer new insights and approaches to the relationship and significance of religion and violence as well as paying tribute to the immense contribution made in this field by the writings of Natalie Zemon Davis.
2011: Postwar Reconstruction in Europe: International Perspectives 1945-1949
Supplement 6
Edited by Mark Mazower, Jessica Reinisch, and David Feldman
About
This collection of essays offers new insights into the aftermath of the Second World War. Rather than treating the years 1945 to 1949 as mere precursors of the Cold War, it takes them to be a crucial period in the reconstruction of European states and the re-modeling of European societies. Contributors explore key arenas, such as the revival of material production, the re-foundation of the state, its legitimacy and its monopoly of armed force, the legacies of empire, the treatment of dislocated populations and refugees, and the role of international organisations. As a result, the volume sets European reconstruction in a genuinely global framework for the first time.
2010: Relics and Remains
Supplement 5
Edited by Alexandra Walsham
About
Edited by Alexandra Walsham, this wide-ranging collection of essays is the first to explore the relic as a religious and cultural phenomenon in a broad comparative and interdisciplinary perspective. It considers the ways in which human remains and material objects have become the focus of worship, celebrity, curiosity, and conflict in a range of eras and cultures stretching from antiquity to the twenty-first century, and from Western Europe to the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, the Indian subcontinent and China. The contributors assess when and why bodies and belongings are revered as sacred by the adherents of different faiths, alongside the dynastic, ideological and ethnic contests and rivalries they have served to stimulate in a range of past societies. They examine the politics and economics of the identification, creation and use of relics and remains and their significance and function in the spheres of memory, history, and heritage. Bringing together historians, archaeologists, anthropologists and scholars of religion, the volume seeks to stimulate further research on this neglected but intriguing theme.
2009: The Politics of Gesture: Historical Perspectives
Supplement 4
Edited by Michael J. Braddick
Table of Contents
FREE Introduction
About
Edited by Michael J. Braddick, this volume brings together essays which range in time from early medieval to contemporary history, and in space across East and South Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas. Together, they explore self-presentation in face-to-face encounters, seeking to understand who is communicating what and with what success: the politics of non-verbal forms of expression. The aim is to open up discussion of the politics of gesture, adding a more explicitly political dimension to cultural histories of gesture while broadening the range of politics which have been addressed through studies of ritual.
2008: The Religion of Fools? Superstition Past and Present
Supplement 3
Edited by S.A. Smith and Alan Knight
About
This supplement examines superstition in three aspects: superstition in a non-Christian context, superstition in Christendom, and superstition in the modern world. The text was edited by S.A. Smith and Alan Knight.
2007: Rodney Hilton's Middle Ages: An Exploration of Historical Themes
Supplement 2
Edited by Christopher Dyer, Peter Coss and Chris Wickham
About
This collection of essays, based on original research, is an exploration of the sort of themes which Rodney Hilton worked on, in the light of recent research: particularly lord-peasant relationships, revolts, and urban/commercial development. It aims at summing up where these themes are at present and where they will go in the future. The volume was edited by Christopher Dyer, Peter Coss and Chris Wickham.
2006: The Art of Survival: Gender and History in Europe, 1450-2000
Supplement 1
Edited by Ruth Harris and Lyndal Roper
About
The first in the series of Past & Present supplements was published in Autumn 2006 and edited by Ruth Harris and Lyndal Roper. The Art of Survival: Essays in Honour of Olwen Hufton discuss gender and history in Europe from 1450 – 2000.
