Module Directory

This module will examine the interactions political, religious, cultural and social between the populations of the three kingdoms.

The module will teach you how the institutions and societies of the British Isles today were formed and the origins of the divisions that persist in them down to the present day.

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.

By the end of this module, students will be expected to be able to:

1. Have an awareness of the key debates in early modern history and the particular religious and national biases that have shaped these debates.


2. Be able to read secondary sources critically.


3. Have a more sophisticated awareness of how perceptions of the past are shaped.


4. Have an understanding of the objectives in life that early modern people had and to understand how these differ from such objectives today.


5. Understand how people in the early modern period conceived of themselves and this was different from how we identify ourselves in the present.


6. Understand how different cultures and societies interact.

The early modern British Isles were home to three kingdoms (England, Scotland and Ireland), five languages, and peoples with vastly differing cultures. The Reformation also created deep religious divisions in all three kingdoms with Catholics and various Protestant denominations persecuting each other. These separate kingdoms all came to be ruled by one monarch, yet the social, cultural and linguistic differences in the kingdoms persisted for centuries.

The progress of the module will be like the lowering of a microscope, yielding greater detail as the module progresses. We begin with the political history of England, Scotland and Ireland in the late thirteenth-century when it looked like all three kingdoms would be brought under the rule of the English king, Edward I. We will follow this political history through until the Act of Union in 1707 which formally united the kingdoms of England and Scotland. After that we will look at the progress of the Reformation in each of the three kingdoms and the religious divisions this created.

Then, in the second portion of the module, we begin by looking at the different cultures and languages of the early modern British Isles. From there we examine the social communities in which people lived, looking at issues of status, rank, honour and reputation. (This will also include violent methods of maintaining honour such as duels and feuds). And finally we will analyse the most basic social unit, the family, examining the different forms of patriarchy, kinship, marriage and parenting in the different societies of the early modern British Isles.

General Reading List

• 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.