Local Attachments

Alexandra Harris on 19/07/2020

Fiona Stafford - Local Attachments

Fiona StaffordFiona Stafford - Local Attachments (Oxford, 2010)

Recommended by Alexandra Harris

One of the many remarkable things that happened towards the end of the eighteenth century was that local feeling and the life of particular places became great literary subjects. You wouldn’t expect to find a Jacobean poet writing about the River Duddon (unless perhaps it was a symbol of national prosperity), but of Wordsworth you would expect nothing less. Paying close attention to the changing cultural status of local particularity, Stafford asks how and why this came about, and how Romantic writers, poem by poem, made places matter.

Read the introduction on the OUP website

The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village

Alexandra Harris on 19/07/2020

The Voices of Morebath: Reformation & Rebellion in an English Village by Eamon Duffy

Eamon Duffy (New Haven, 2001)

The Voices of Morebath: Reformation & Rebellion in an English Village by Eamon DuffyRecommended by Alexandra Harris

A revelatory example of what happens when the great movements of national and international history are explored from a particular on-the-ground vantage point. Morebath is a small village on the edge of Exmoor; the priest there in the mid seventeenth century kept detailed parish records, and these form a core around which Duffy builds up a portrait of rural Catholic life and how people responded to the changes they faced. It’s a good starting point for exploring the varied field of historical writing in which skilled and painstaking archival work is made to yield precious clues about the experience of rural and working people whose lives have been otherwise forgotten.

 

The History of Myddle

Alexandra Harris on 19/07/2020

Cover of the History of Myddle

Richard Gough, ed. David Hey (London, 1981)

The History of Myddle by Richard GoughRecommended by Alexandra Harris

A pioneering work of local history. Richard Gough was a Shropshire yeoman who wanted to write about his parish community: its past and its present. In 1701 he published a study of the antiquities in Myddle, following more or less the newly established conventions for antiquarian place studies. But he wanted to write about more than the pedigrees of manorial lords and the relics of monastic houses, so he invented a form to suit him and embarked on his ‘Observations concerning the Seats in Myddle and the families to which they belong’. By ‘seats’ he meant pews in the church. He drew a plan of St Peter’s, labelled the pews, and wrote a portrait of each member of the congregation, seat by seat. Though he was imagining them all in church, he was writing lives that strayed far from the orderly Sunday formation, into fields and towns, into bedrooms, backrooms, affairs, and quarrels. It was a simple and evocative method of group biography; no-one seems to have used it before, or since.