We are delighted to report that Arts & Culture Exeter have selected project Co-Investigator Laura Sangha to host a Creative Fellow during this academic year. The creative fellow will undertake a 4-5 week placement to explore and unlock creative approaches to historic wills c.1540-1790 alongside Laura and the rest of the wills team.
The creative fellowship is open to to practitioners of any artform, including visual, digital, sound and performing arts, craft, design, film, literature and music. The artist is a peer, opening up new approaches and conversations with their hosts while developing and enriching their own creative practice. This scheme encourages mutually beneficial exchange, where both the host and the creative practitioner gain new insights and potential ways of working.
Download the full details and apply (pdf).
On 19 September 2024 we circulated our second newsletter reporting on what we have been up to over the last few months. Click on the image below to view the pdf. If you would like to receive future copies of our newsletter directly you can sign up to our mailing list.
Plaintext version
We are delighted to report that in July 2024 Harry Smith and Emily Vine (the two postdoctoral fellows on the project) had an article accepted for publication by Transactions of the Royal Historical Society. The article is the first publication from the project, it will be published towards the end of this year, and it will be freely accessible to all readers.
Harry Smith and Emily Vine, ‘Material and Digital Archives: the case of wills’.
The range of digital sources available to historians has expanded at an enormous rate over the last fifty years; this has enabled all kinds of innovative scholarship to flourish. However, this process has also shaped recent historical work in ways that have not been fully discussed or documented. This article considers how we might reconcile the digitisation of archival sources with their materiality, with a particular focus on the probate records of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury (PCC). The article first considers the variety of digital sources available to historians of the United Kingdom, highlighting the particular influence of genealogical companies in shaping what material is available, how it has been digitised and how those sources are accessed. Secondly, we examine the PCC wills’ digitisation, what was gained and what was lost in that process, notably important material aspects of the wills. This article does not seek to champion archival research in opposition to digitally based scholarship; instead, we remind historians of the many ways in which the creation of sources shape their potential use, and call on historians to push for improvements in the United Kingdom’s digital infrastructure to avoid these problems in future.
UPDATE: BOTH WORKSHOPS ARE NOW FULLY BOOKED
From exploring the history of a family, to tracing expanding global trade, to gaining a practical insight into peoples’ lives, wills are a remarkably rich historical resource. In this hands-on workshop participants will engage with English wills from 1540-1790 as we consider the wealth of information that these documents contain about the past.
The workshop is organised by a of team of researchers from the University of Exeter and The National Archives who work on ‘The Material Culture of Wills, England 1560-1790’ project. The team will provide an overview of the project and will present aspects of their own research on wills.
Participants will also have the opportunity to engage with some of the most interesting wills the team and our expert volunteers have encountered so far, to transcribe alongside like-minded researchers, and to share experiences of working with wills or conducting local or family history research drawing on wills.
Monday 17 June, The National Archives, Kew: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/896410406657
Friday 21 June, Digital Humanities Lab, University of Exeter: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/906238352307
The deadline for our funded PhD studentship focused on global commodities in wills has been extended to 1 May 2024. If you are interested in applying the project Principal Investigator, Professor Jane Whittle, gives lots more detail in this blog post about how the studentship would work. In the post Jane emphasises that the studentship is very flexible, and she highlights just some of the areas that the succesful candidate could focus on in their exploration of global commodities (maritime, trade, material culture, gender, status, occupations, rural/urban differences etc).
We are delighted to report that we have recently been awarded funding from the University of Exeter’s Public Engagement Springboard fund that will allow us to organise two in person workshops for project volunteers – one will take place in Exeter, the other at The National Archives in Kew.
These workshops will take the form of ‘Transcribathons’, where volunteers will come together to transcribe wills and to learn more about the project from the members of the Team. The events will be in late June 2024, they will be free to attend, and lunch will be provided.
More details to follow soon!
‘The Material Culture of Wills, England 1540-1790.’
Exeter Centre for Early Modern Studies seminar
Speakers: Dr Laura Sangha and Dr Emily Vine
Date: Wednesday 28 February
Time: 15:30 – 17:00
Venue: University of Exeter, Forum Seminar Room 6 AND online via Zoom – joining details below. If you sign up to our project mailing list we will also circulate the link there.
In the pre-modern period, most will-makers described in detail some of the items they bequeathed to particular relatives and friends. For instance Elizabeth Brickenell, a widow of Exeter, left a friend her third best petticoat in 1569, while in 1603 William Radcliffe of London left his sister ‘a gold ring with a picture of death’s head, for all her unkindness’. Bequests in wills thus provide evidence not only of what people owned, but also, by choosing objects to bequeath and describing them in particular ways, of people’s attitudes towards those possessions.
In this talk project Co-Investigator Dr Laura Sangha and Early Modern Research Fellow Dr Emily Vine will introduce ‘The Material Culture of Wills’ – a project using cutting edge digital technology to transcribe 25,000 manuscript wills to examine these changing attitudes to material culture in England in the 250 years before the Industrial Revolution. The key research question is: how did people’s relationship with their possessions change in an era of rapidly increasing trade and commercialisation?with their possessions change in an era of rapidly increasing trade and commercialisation?
Topic: Exeter CEMS English Wills and Attitudes to Possessions c. 1540-1790
Time: Feb 28, 2024 15:30 London
Join Zoom Meeting
https://Universityofexeter.zoom.us/j/92392163667?pwd=TEI3SjV0eS91c2FuV0p4WFdVR3prZz09
Meeting ID: 923 9216 3667
Password: 046908
‘I geve and bequeth to thee my third best petycote’: English Wills and Attitudes to Possessions c. 1540-1790′.
An Online University of Reading Early Modern Research Centre Seminar.
Speaker: Dr Laura Sangha
Date: Monday 26 February
Time: 13:00 -14:00
Venue: Online via Teams only. If you join Reading EMRC mailing list you will receive a link to join on the morning of the talk, or you can email emrc@reading.ac.uk.
In the pre-modern period, most will-makers described in detail some of the items they bequeathed to particular relatives and friends. For instance Elizabeth Brickenell, a widow of Exeter, left a friend her third best petticoat in 1569, while in 1603 William Radcliffe of London left his sister ‘a gold ring with a picture of death’s head, for all her unkindness’. Bequests in wills thus provide evidence not only of what people owned, but also, by choosing objects to bequeath and describing them in particular ways, of people’s attitudes towards those possessions.
In this talk project Co-Investigator Dr Laura Sangha will introduce ‘The Material Culture of Wills’ – a project using cutting edge digital technology to transcribe 25,000 manuscript wills to examine these changing attitudes to material culture in England in the 250 years before the Industrial Revolution. The key research question is: how did people’s relationship with their possessions change in an era of rapidly increasing trade and commercialisation?with their possessions change in an era of rapidly increasing trade and commercialisation?
Sign up to our mailing list for notifications about future events.
‘I geve and bequeth to thee my third best petycote’: English Wills and Attitudes to Possessions c. 1540-1790′.
Speaker: Dr Laura Sangha
Date: Tuesday 13 February 2024
Time: 19:00 – 20:30
Venue: Lecture Theatre, Roland Levinsky Building
Ticket information: £6, £4 Concession, FREE to University of Plymouth students via SPiA and Historical Association members.
In the pre-modern period, most will-makers described in detail some of the items they bequeathed to particular relatives and friends. For instance Elizabeth Brickenell, a widow of Exeter, left a friend her third best petticoat in 1569, while in 1603 William Radcliffe of London left his sister ‘a gold ring with a picture of death’s head, for all her unkindness’. Bequests in wills thus provide evidence not only of what people owned, but also, by choosing objects to bequeath and describing them in particular ways, of people’s attitudes towards those possessions.
In this talk project Co-Investigator Dr Laura Sangha will introduce ‘The Material Culture of Wills’ – a project using cutting edge digital technology to transcribe 25,000 manuscript wills to examine these changing attitudes to material culture in England in the 250 years before the Industrial Revolution. The key research question is: how did people’s relationship with their possessions change in an era of rapidly increasing trade and commercialisation?with their possessions change in an era of rapidly increasing trade and commercialisation?
Sign up to our mailing list for notifications about future events.
We are currently advertising two Leverhulme Trust funded PhD studentships, to start in September 2024. The studentships include full tuition fees and maintenance allowance, and are available to UK candidates.
The successful applicants will join a project team that are using cutting-edge digital humanities techniques to automate the transcription of 25,000 wills from the National Archives. They will be provided with a pre-populated database of these wills to analyse for their PhD research. The PhDs will be jointly supervised by Professor Jane Whittle and Dr Laura Sangha (Archaeology and History, University of Exeter). Please follow the links below for full details.
Global Commodities in Early Modern Wills [DEADLINE NOW PASSED]
Gender and the Material Culture of Wills: England 1540-1790 [DEADLINE NOW PASSED]
