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A Very Pepysian Christmas
by Marlo Avidon (@marloavidon.bsky.social) In seventeenth-century England, Christmas services could be a drawn-out affair. For Restoration diarist Samuel Pepys, the lengthy 1667 Christmas Eve service in the Royal Chapel proved especially tedious; his attempt to combat his boredom led to one of the most shocking passages of his Diary. After arriving at the Royal Chapel and…
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‘Hither page and don my tiara’
Deposuit potentes de sede et exaltavit humiles Tales of Puritan… well… puritanism, are usually a popular topic of conversation this time of year (especially among certain subsets of the population). Christmas in sixteenth and seventeenth century England was a rather sparse affair with fewer and fewer ‘lords of misrule’ and (ostensibly) more and more ‘cleaning-the-feet-of-the-poor-ers’.…
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Holiday Gifting and Social Power in Early Modern England
By Marlo Avidon (@marloavidon.bsky.social) While today, families gather around the tree to open gifts on Christmas morning, in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England Christmas Eve and Day were a comparatively solemn affair. That did not mean, however, that families, friends, and their patrons did not exchange gifts over the holidays! Rather than Christmas morning, New Year’s…
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8. Frankincense in Early Modern Europe
by Tiéphaine Thomason (@teaphaine) This is the first post in a three-part series for the Doing History Advent Calendar on the history of the senses and the gifts of the Magi. When first drafting this post, I had written something short about the role of frankincense and its scent in early modern churches. Just as…
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The Winter of Discontent: Towton, 1461
By Ben Oldham (bo286@cantab.ac.uk) Picture a medieval battlefield. A mudbath littered with writhing corpses is usually what springs to mind – but what if that ground was frozen? A hail of arrows was a common sight against English armies – but what of a blizzard of ice? What exactly did a winter campaign look like?…
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