'On or about'/'In and upon': dating events in the Elizabethan and early Stuart north

History Department Seminar

Keith Wrightson is Professor of History at Yale, specializing in the social, economic and cultural history of early modern England.  He was educated in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, and at the University of Cambridge, where he received his BA (1970), and PhD (1974).  He has taught at the University of St Andrews, at Cambridge (where he was Professor of Social History), and since 1999 at Yale.  He has held Visiting Professorships at the Universities of Toronto, Alberta, Northumbria, and Newcastle upon Tyne, and served as James Ford Special Lecturer at Oxford (1993) and as the British Academy’s Raleigh Lecturer in History (2005). He is a Fellow of the British Academy (1996) and of the Royal Historical Society (1986), an Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge (2008), and an Honorary Professor of the University of Durham (2008).

Wrightson’s innovative survey English Society, 1580-1680 has been in continuous print since 1982.  His work with David Levine on the Essex village of Terling, Poverty and Piety in an English Village (1979) introduced to English social history the ‘microhistorical’ approach which had previously been adopted mostly by historians of Continental Europe.  His collaboration with David Levine produced a further seminal book on the coal-mining parish of Whickham, The Making of an Industrial Society (1991).  His survey of British economic history, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (2000) was awarded the John Ben Snow Prize of the North American Conference on British Studies (2001), and is currently being translated into Chinese.  His most recent book, Ralph Tailor’s Summer (2011) charts the history of a plague outbreak in 1636 from the perspective of a young scrivener appointed to write the wills of plague victims. In 2012 it was short-listed for the Portico Prize in Literature. He is currently editing the Cambridge Social History of England, c. 1500-c.1760.