Module Directory

This module will examine how these different peoples and cultures interacted with each other throughout the early modern period and what the results of this interaction were.

The module will not focus on the great events of early modern Britain and Ireland--The Reformations, the Nine Years War, the Civil War the Restoration and the Glorious Revolution - but will investigate how the people in the three kingdoms interacted with people of different status and wealth, with people of different languages and cultures and how they interacted with the members of their families.

The aims of this module are:

• To familiarize students with the political and social history of the British Isles in the early modern era.


• To enable students to understand how the relations between England, Scotland and Ireland provided the basis for the modern experience of the UK and Ireland.


• To instruct students in the how cultural identities were created in the early modern British Isles.


• To instruct students in the formation of national identity.


• To instruct students in the different ways in which ties of kinship and the institutions of family life developed in the early modern British Isles and the reasons for these variations.


• To enable the students to assess and examine critically different types of historical sources.


• To develop research and writing skills.

The three kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland, were, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, home to four, even five, independent regions, seven languages and a number of peoples with vastly different cultures.

The approach of this module is a little like looking through a microscope at a slide. We begin with the largest social and cultural levels, with fundamental cultural divisions between societies that were based on an oral heritage and societies reliant on written records and we look at the different methods of governance and the different legal systems of these societies. Then the module examines the different languages in the three kingdoms in 1500 (English, Cornish, Welsh, Manx, Gaelic, Norn and French) and looks at when and why some these languages became extinct, while English prospered

Lowering the microscope a little, we then examine, the hierarchical divisions with each society, examining from where authority was derived and the maintenance of order. We will also examine varying concepts of individual social behaviours covering varying conceptions of status, honour, criminality, dishonour and shame. The last half of the module lowers the microscope to the most fundamental level, analysing the variant forms of the most basic social unit across the three kingdoms: the family. We will be discussing both the idea and practice of patriarchy within Britain and Ireland. We will be comparing different ideas of courtship, marriage and divorce in the three kingdoms and how they evolved over time. We also discuss ideas of kinship, including fictional kinship. Finally this module will look at concepts of age, parenting and infancy.

Introductory reading

• Jane Dawson, Scotland Re-formed 1488-1587 (Edinburgh, 2007).


• Steven G. Ellis, The Making of the British Isles: The State of Britain and Ireland, 1450-1660 (Harlow, 2007).


• Keith Wrightson, English Society, 1580-1680 (London and New York, 2003).

This module will be delivered via:

• One 1-hour lecture per week.
• One 1-hour seminar per week.