The MA in Early Modern History draws on the range of expertise in early modern history at Sussex to offer a carefully constructed programme of compulsory courses from English, British, European and American history. Students take core courses in the autumn term on Historical Methods and Historiography and on Atlantic History: Themes and Perspectives. Training in early modern palaeography at the East Sussex Record Office is also available. Spring term core courses emphasise our research strengths in early modern England, Britain and France with courses on Reading, Writing, Texts and Power and Culture in Early Modern France. A dissertation is prepared and composed in the summer under close supervision. The University Library is well supplied for the early modern period: it subscribes to Early English Books Online, holds the Hartlib papers CDRom and is home to the Travers Collection of rare books of value to scholars of the history of the book and rich in examples of printing and binding from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries. There are also rich archival holdings in the local record offices in Lewes and Chichester. Students also benefit from membership of the Sussex Centre for Early Modern Studies which, building upon a powerful tradition of early modern studies, pursues inter-disciplinary research and postgraduate teaching in all areas of the early modern period. Students are therefore encouraged to participate in the cross-disciplinary postgraduate reading group and to attend the seminar series for visiting speakers.
Programme structure
Full-time students take the following courses in the Autumn term:
Historical Methods and Historiography
Atlantic History: Themes and Perspectives
And two of the following courses in the Spring term:
Reading, Writing, Texts
Power and Culture in Early Modern France
Making and Unmaking Britain, 1600-1800
Literature, Politics and Religion
During the Summer Term students work under individual supervision towards a dissertation.
Part-time students complete the MA over two years, taking Historical Methods and Historiography and one spring term option in their first year, and Atlantic History and one spring term option in their second year, in addition to completing their dissertation in their second year of study.
Teaching
Each course is taught as weekly small-group seminars. Students are also expected to attend the weekly 'Work-in-Progress' seminar organised by the History Department, as well as symposia and seminars organised by the Centre for Early Modern Studies and the Sussex Centre for Intellectual History.
Autumn Term courses
Historical Methods and Historiography
This course is run as a pro-seminar. In collaboration with the cohort a programme is designed through which the group will interrogate the problems and techniques current in early modern history. The goal is to encourage and enable graduate students to orientate their own research to the current debates and to acquire the theoretical and methodological perspectives necessary to contribute to that debate. The course encourages students to develop along two axes. It allows them to develop more facility and expertise in the field and to develop the skills necessary to create their own research projects.
Atlantic History: themes and perspectives [taught through the department of American Studies]
This course examines the historiography of early America, looking at how the new field of Atlantic history emerged and exploring its principal characteristics.
Spring Term courses
Reading, Writing, Texts
Rising levels of literacy and an expanding print culture were among the most important historical changes taking place in early modern period. The course starts by exploring the acquisition of reading and writing skills and their cultural significance, and proceeds to the ways in which manuscripts and books were produced. Specific sessions focus on the impact of religious reformations and Enlightenment ideas. While focusing on England and Scotland, the course offers European comparisons. The last sessions explore different aspects of the popular press and the development of the novel. The final session examines some of the social and political effects of these changes and the survival and continuation of a vernacular culture.
Power and Culture in Early Modern France
Early-Modern French history is one of the most vibrant and intellectually adventurous fields of research in history. The problems of cultural history in the hands of practitioners such as Peter Brown, who began his career at Sussex, Roger Chartier or Natalie Zemon Davis, have revolutionised the way history is understood. The problem of the state in the period has been approached through the question of absolutism and scholars from William Beik to Michel Antoine have opened a fascinating debate on the very nature of that political power and its social basis. The work on France has brought a new sharpness to the manner in which historians generally consider questions of meaning, power and agency. This course places students in the middle of these on-going debates: on the construction of the modern self, on the creation of national identity, on the environmental impact of political change, on the articulation of new values in the French Enlightenment. It allows students to understand the way new methodologies, such as institutional economics, and new themes, like patronage, are challenging received orthodoxies. The course draws on the exceptional strengths of the department in early-modern French history to dramatise these debates . The diversity of approaches and intellectual orientation within the programme offers a unique opportunity for students to participate in the construction of a vital field.
Making and Unbreaking Britain, 1600-1800
The "New British History" offers a new set of questions that help us to understand the histories of the historic peoples of the British Isles from the point of view of their interactions. This approach has been particularly fruitful in early-modern history where the reinterpretation of Elizabethan Humanism, especially Spencer, has been renovated by paying attention to the Irish context of much of its writing. Similarly the history of the civil war of the mid-seventeenth century has been transformed by viewing it through the optic of "the war of the four kingdoms". This course interrogates the work that has been done in the New British History and asks what work is there left to do? In political history we will discuss the ideologies of nationhood created in and against the project of Britain, and the change from a seventeenth-century framework of multiple monarchy to the eighteenth-century reality of British Empire. In social and cultural history we will investigate the communities, such as merchants, sailors and intellectuals, whose existence was patterned between the multiple regions of the islands. We will pay particular attention to the debate on Britishness; its icons, images, heroes and villains, and to the alternative versions of British identity generated by Jacobites, Catholics, Covenanters and other heterodox groups. We will also hope to identify the relationship between the New British History, Imperial History and Atlantic History.
Literature, Politics and Religion
The purpose of this course is to give students a thematic introduction to the literature of politics and religion and their interrelationships in early modern Europe. With toleration and liberty as guiding themes, the course explores how the development of religious and political thought were intertwined, and how a variety of literary genres, with their own conventions, rhetorics, and vocabularies was employed in the articulation of religious and political ideas. The course focuses on three important 'moments' in the development of theological debate, political thought and literary genres: Christian Humanism and the rise of Scepticism, the English debate on toleration between the Civil War and the Glorious Revolution and the discussion of religion in the work of three key figures of the European and Atlantic Enlightenment, Hume, Rousseau and Paine.
Summer term
During the summer term students work under supervision on a dissertation of up to 20,000 words on a topic of their choice, subject to the agreement of their supervisor. Part-time students are expected to begin background reading for the dissertation in their first summer term.
Assessment
Historical Methods and historiography is assessed by a portfolio consisting of an essay and a research proposal. Each other course is assessed by a 5000-word term paper for each of the four courses, each paper to be written in the vacation following the end of the course in question. All students submit a 20,000-word dissertation, which is submitted towards the end of the summer vacation.
Admission requirements
Students should have at least an upper second honours degree in a related discipline.
Core faculty and their research interests
The following faculty are particularly associated with the programme:
Peter Campbell (Senior Lecturer in History) (Research expertise: seventeenth and eighteenth-century French political, intellectual and cultural history, with a current interest in the relationship between patriot ideology or rhetoric and the politics of the end of the old regime)
Rafe Hallet (Tutorial fellow) (Research expertise: sixteenth and seventeenth century European culture, particularly Puritanism and print in the 16th century, the epistemology of Francis Bacon and the Royal Society, and the philosophy of religious toleration in early modern and enlightenment Europe.)
Knud Haakonssen (Professor of Intellectual History, director of the Sussex Centre for Intellectual History (Research expertise: the history of early modern philosophy with special emphasis on moral, political, and legal thought)
Robert Iliffe (Professor of Intellectual History and History of Science) (Research expertise: early modern history and the history of science, in particular The Newton Project)
Jim Livesey (Reader in History) (Research expertise: the cultural history of France and the British Isles, especially Ireland, from 1640 to 1900, with a particular interest in the growth of democratic values in society, the economy and politics)
Naomi Tadmor (Lecturer in History) (Research expertise: British social and cultural history c.1500-1800, currently working on the language of social and interpersonal relations in early modern biblical translations)
Richard Whatmore (Reader in Intellectual History) (Research expertise: eighteenth and nineteenth century British, French and Swiss intellectual history)
For links to individual faculty member's profiles, see the University's staff directory.
Further information
For further information on the MA programme, please contact the Programme Convenor, Dr Claire Langhamer, email C.L.Langhamer@sussex.ac.uk, tel. +44 (0)1273 606755 ext. 2163. See also the web page on the MPhil or DPhil programmes