Over the first half of this year, the Many-Headed Monster – an early modern history blog – published twenty-five short pieces by early career scholars. These addressed topics that ranged widely from witchcraft and ghosts to apothecaries and barbecues, as you can see on the main table of contents.
However, one type of source turned up remarkably often in these posts: petitions. It has been wonderful to see these early career researchers using petitions to understand early modern society, so we decided to highlight these five posts here:
- Scott Eaton, ‘A Poor Hand-Maid’s Tale: Love, Petitioning and Print in Seventeenth-Century England’
- Ellen Paterson, ‘A ‘slanderous & scandalous’ petition: the Dyers’ Company and a burdensome petitioning campaign in early Jacobean England’
- Robert Daniel, ‘Religious Persecution and Child Loss in Early Modern England’
- Anna Cusack, ‘‘Being a great nuisance to the inhabitants’: Petitions to relocate executions and gibbets in eighteenth-century London’
- Aaron Columbus, ‘‘Being all dead of the Plague’: Plague and petitions in Westminster c.1620-1645’
There has also been some work on petitioning that has appeared elsewhere over the last few months:
- Emily Rhodes, Female Petitioning to Monarchs and the Criminal Process in England, 1660-1702, Women’s History Network (21 June 2021)
- Mabel Winter, ‘The Elizabethan Civil Service, or If at First You Don’t Succeed, Get Up and Petition Again’, Middling Culture (5 July 2021)
Happy reading!