Group blog
This is a collective effort to find out what it was like to be locked up in the early modern period. We are interested in the economics and government of the prison, the fees, the food, how alcohol was sold, diseases, smells, sex, lice, irons, close confinement, charity, garnish, ancient privileges, violence, how prisoners organized and protested. We want to know what practices of detention tell us about contemporary notions of freedom and unfreedom, and how places of detention figure in the great early modern political debates about rights, tyranny, abuse, freedom and legality.
We are interested in all kinds of prisoners, from debtors to convicts, from prisoners of war to inmates of bridewells and plague houses.
Categories used most frequently by the blogger:
Newgate women Fleet Prison prison staff gaolers King's Bench Prison political prisoners Petitions protest Cambridge Education Students
Some Trump-Induced Thoughts on the History of Detention
27 June 2018
In 1689 the merchant John Farmer complained to the Earl of Nottingham that he and a companion had been imprisoned at Beaumoris without accusation or warrant. Although held only two...
A Failure to Communicate: Authority in Eighteenth-Century Newgate
11 April 2018
We are delighted to publish this guest post by Esther Brot, who is currently pursuing her PhD in History at King’s College London. She is writing her dissertation on the topic...
22 February 2018
Below are three calls for papers and proposals that have come into our inbox recently. None of these are specifically about early modern prisons, but they touch on related subjects...
Radicalism, Respectability, and the Case of the Imprisoned Politician
15 November 2017
We are delighted to publish this guest post by John Owen Havard, Assistant Professor of English at Binghamton University, whose forthcoming work includes a book on the origins of disaffected...