In a career that has taken her from Glasgow to Edinburgh, via two decades in Oxford, Jenny Wormald has been one of the most prolific and influential historians of late medieval and early modern Scotland and Britain. This conference in Jenny's honour has been organised by her Edinburgh colleagues Steve Boardman and Julian Goodare. It brings together a number of her friends and fellow-scholars to debate and advance some of the themes that Jenny has brought to the fore in her own work.
In Jenny’s celebrated early paper ‘Taming the Magnates?’, and in other works, she revolutionised the study of fifteenth-century Scotland. She later went on to bring fresh insights to the sixteenth century as well, providing a framework for the study of ‘lordship’ that has been followed by all others since. The title of the conference echoes that of her influential monograph, Lords and Men in Scotland: Bonds of Manrent, 1442-1603 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1985). Jenny’s work also extends beyond Scotland, and we are pleased that some English scholars have accepted the invitation to look at some Anglo-Scottish themes.
The breadth of Jenny's Scottish interests appears in her recently-edited textbook Scotland: a History (Oxford: OUP, 2005). Her British interests are exemplified in her most recent edited book, The Seventeenth Century (Oxford: OUP, 2008), in the series The Short Oxford History of the British Isles. She is about to publish The Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish History (Oxford: OUP, 2012), co-edited with T. M. Devine.
One overarching theme for the conference is the nature of the transition from the late medieval to the early modern periods. Few scholars work both on the fifteenth century and on the sixteenth century, and even fewer are equally at home in either - but Jenny is one of those who bridges this divide. By bringing together a group of late medieval and early modern scholars, we hope to be able to take stock of the continuities and contrasts between these two adjacent periods, and learn from one another about where we should go from here.
[Download the conference poster as a PDF] |
