CREMS staff have undertaken, are engaged with, or are currently planning groundbreaking projects on a range of early modern topics of international significance. A small selection of these are explored below.
Tara Hamling has just published a new book, A Day at Home in Early Modern England, 1500-1700, co-authored with Catherine Richardson, and which provides an outstanding new scholarly resource exploring the materiality of everyday life. This builds on her work as Co-Investigator for an AHRC-funded research network, Ways of Seeing the English Domestic Interior, 1500-1700 (2012-2013) and continues to inform Tara's work in partnership with the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust on the Material Culture and Cultural Heritage of Shakespeare's England. Jonathan Willis has just published The Reformation of the Decalogue: Religious Identity and the Ten Commandments in England, 1485-1625 and shares his research via his blog, The Many Headed Monster. Karen Harvey, author of History and Material Culture: A Student's Guide to Using Alternative Sources, has just published a new edition of this widely-used text book and is currently writing about Mary Toft, a woman at the centre of a hoax that claimed she gave birth to seventeen rabbits.
Richard Cust and Andrew Hooper received AHRC funding for a major project to research and edit the records of Court of Chivalry for the period 1634-1640. The projected resulted in an online searchable database of records from the court's heyday, The Court of Chivalry, as well as the companion volume R.P.Cust and A.J.Hopper (eds), Cases in the High Court of Chivalry, 1634-1640 (Harleian Society, new series vol. 18, 2006). Richard, a leading authority on early Stuart political culture, is currently writing, research and talking about the material culture of lineage as well as concepts of masculinity amongst the early modern English gentry.
Gillian Wright is currently working on a monograph on English women's poetry, the research for which has been supported by a British Academy small project grant. Hugh Adlington talks about his research in person here. Peter Auger is a founder member of the Early Modern Boundaries network and is an advocate for international collaboration. Cultural Value in Twenty-first Century England: The Case of Shakespeare, written by Kate Rumbold and Kate McCluskie of the Shakespeare Institute, is now available in paperback. Simon Smith is also a member of both the Shakespeare Institute and CREMS and has just published his new book on musical response in the early modern playhouse.
CREMS is home to Birmingham Fellows from History and English Literature, including Noah Millstone, an expert on early modern pamphlets and Nick Hardy, whose work focuses particularly on the relationship between renaissance humanism and religious writing. Kate Smith, a specialist in the history of empire in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century and Tom Cutterham - talking about his work here - whose work focuses on eighteenth-century US history, ensure that the CREMS research environment reaches beyond the seventeenth century. Marga Small and Chris Markiewizc, experts on early modern geography and exploration, and the intellectual and political history of the Ottoman empire respectively, situate the early modern world in its global context.
Research in CREMS considers the early modern period at its widest temporal and spatial parameters and offers a research community that produces cutting edge and internationally excellent research across Reformation and early modern studies.