The Project
People

Professor Michael Questier - Principal Investigator

Dr Caroline Bowden - Research Fellow and Project Manager

Dr Jan Broadway - Technical Consultant

Dr Katharine Keats-Rohan - Research Fellow

Dr Katrien Daemen-de Gelder - Research Officer Belgium

Pascal Majerus - Research Officer Belgium

Dr James Kelly - Research Assistant

Caroline Watkinson - PhD Student

 

Advisory Panel

Dr Marie-Louise Coolahan, University of Galway

Dr Nicky Hallett, University of Sheffield

Dr Laurence Lux-Sterritt, University of Aix-Marseille

Dr Carmen Mangion, Birkbeck College, University of London

Professor Stephen Taylor, University of Reading

Dr Jean Pierre Vander Motten, University of Ghent

Professor Maurice Whitehead, University of Swansea

 

 

Professor Michael Questier – Principal Investigator

Michael Questier is Professor of Early Modern British and European History at Queen Mary, where he has been based since 2002 following a stint as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at King's College, London.  Having completed his PhD at the University of Sussex in 1991, he has published extensively on Early Modern English Catholicism and its political importance.  He has recently been a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.

Current research interests:
The politics of gender in the early modern period. In conjunction with Professor Peter Lake of Vanderbilt University, he is completing a political biography of Margaret Clitherow of York.
He has also just finished Stuart Dynastic Policy and Religious Politics, 1621-1625 which will be published by the Royal Historical Society in 2009.

Recent publications include:

 “Catholic Loyalism in Early Stuart England”, English Historical Review, cxxiii (2008), pp. 1132-65.
Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England: Politics, Aristocratic Patronage and Religion, c. 1550-1640 (Cambridge U.P., 2006), pp. xxii+559.
“Arminianism, Catholicism and Puritanism in England during the 1630s”, Historical Journal, 49 (2006), pp. 53-78.
Newsletters from the Caroline Court, 1631-1638: Catholicism and the Politics of the Personal Rule (Camden Society, fifth series, 26, 2005), pp.  xvi+358.
“Elizabeth and the Catholics”, in E. Shagan (ed.), Catholics and the `Protestant Nation’: Religious Politics and Identity in Early Modern England (Manchester U.P., 2005), pp. 63-94.
With Peter Lake, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England (Yale U.P., 2002).
With Peter Lake (eds.), Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church c. 1560 (Boydell and Brewer, 2000).

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Dr Caroline Bowden - Research Fellow and Project Manager 

Having received a PhD from the University of London's Institute of Education in 1996, Caroline Bowden previously worked as Research Fellow on the Wellcome-funded project, 'The Health of the Cecils c1550-c1660’ at Royal Holloway, University of London. Before that, she was Associate Research Fellow at the Centre for Religious History, St Mary’s College, Strawberry Hill, where she and Michael Questier became interested in the history of the English convents in exile.  In 2001 she established the research network ‘History of Women Religious of Britain and Ireland’ with Dr Carmen Mangion. HWRBI organises an annual two-day international conference and a moderated list with over 160 members worldwide. In 2006, a corresponding website was launched, hosted by the Bedford Centre for the History of Women at Royal Holloway. http://www.rhul.ac.uk/Bedford-Centre/history-women-religious/

Her current interests focus on books and learning in the English convents in exile.

Recent and forthcoming publications include:

‘Books and Reading at Syon Abbey, Lisbon in the seventeenth century’ in Syon Abbey and its Books: Religious Communities and Communication in Late Medieval and Early Modern England, eds.  E A Jones and Alexandra Walsham, Boydell and Brewer, Summer 2009.
‘The English Convents in Exile and Questions of National Identity, 1600-1688’, in Emigrants and Exiles from the Three Kingdoms in Europe, 1603-1688, ed. David Worthington, Brill, 2009.
‘Women in Educational Spaces’ in The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing, ed. Laura Knoppers, Cambridge University Press, 2009.
 ‘Using computer assisted qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS) in collaborative historical research’, in Virtual History and Archaeology, eds.  Mark Greengrass and Lorna Hughes, Ashgate, 2008.
 ‘Community space and cultural transmission: formation and schooling in English enclosed convents in the seventeenth century,’ History of Education, July 2005, Vol. 34, No. 4, pp 365-386.
‘The Library of Mildred Cooke Cecil’, The Library, The Bibliographical Society, Seventh Series, Vol.6, No. 1, March 2005, pp 3-29.Back to the top

 

 

 

Dr Jan Broadway - Technical Consultant

After completing a B.A. in Medieval and Modern History at the University of Birmingham in 1983, Dr Jan Broadway worked for a decade as a software engineer in the field of real-time programming. She returned to Birmingham to research her Ph.D. in 'Antiquarianism in the Midlands and the Development of County History 1586-1656' (1997). Since then her career has been divided between a variety of academic work and software development for the private sector. In 2002, Jan joined the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters at Queen Mary.
She is currently working on a biography of the seventeenth-century herald and scholar Sir William Dugdale.

Recent publications include:
2008
Jan Broadway. ‘Aberrant Accounts: William Dugdale's Handling of Two Tudor Murders in The Antiquities of Warwickshire’, Midland History, 2008, Volume 33, Issue 1, p.2-20 (2008).
2006
Jan Broadway, Richard Cust, Stephen Roberts. ‘Additional State Papers Domestic for Charles I from the Docquets of Lord Keeper Coventry (1625-1640) in the Birmingham City Archives’, Archives, October 2006, Volume XXXI, Issue 115, p.148-167 (2006).
Jan Broadway. 'No historie so meete': Gentry Culture and the Development of Local History in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Manchester, 2006).

Jan Broadway. ‘Political Appropriation: Reading Sir Walter Ralegh's 'Dialogue between a Counsellor of State and a Justice of the Peace'’ (2006). Back to top

 

 

 

Dr Katharine Keats-Rohan – Research Fellow

Having been awarded a PhD from Royal Holloway, Katharine Keats-Rohan has published extensively on prosopography and is founder  director of the unit for Prosopographical Research at Linacre College, Oxford.  She was also co-founder and General Editor of the Prosopographica et Genealogica imprint, which has published 12 volumes since 1997 as Occasional Publications of the same unit.
Since 1997 she has also been a Fellow of the European Humanities Research Centre at Oxford, having previously held a Leverhulme Trust grant for a database project researching 'The Continental Origins of English Landholders 1066-1166 [COEL]'. Her main research interests currently are the medieval abbey of Mont-Saint-Michel and monastic necrologies.

Recent publications include:

2007

Prosopography Approaches and Applications. A Handbook, ed. K.S.B. Keats-Rohan (Occasional Publication of the Unit for Prosopographical Research Vol. 13, Oxford, 2007), including her essay ‘Biography, Names and identity.: Understanding the pursuit of the individual in prosopgraphy’, available from http://prosopography.modhist.ox.ac.uk/course_syllabuses.htm, where there is also an online Tutorial in prosopography she has written.

‘What’s in a name? Some reflections on naming and identity in prosopography’, in Carreiras Ecclesiásticas no Ocidente Cristão (séc. xii-xiv)/Ecclesiastical Careers in Western Christianity (12th-14th c.), Centro de Estudos de História Religiosa, Universidade Católica Portuguesa (2007), 333-47.

2006

The Cartulary of the Abbey of Mont-Saint-Michel (Avranches, Bibliothèque Municipale, ms 210) (Donington, 2006).

2004

'Testimonies of the Living Dead: The Martyrology-Necrology and Necrology in the Chapter Book of Mont-Saint-Michel (Avranches, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 214', in The Durham Liber Vitae and its Context, ed. D. Rollason, A. J. Pipe, Margaret Harvey, Lynda Rollason (Woodbridge, 2004).

2002

Resourcing Sources, ed. K.S.B. Keats-Rohan (Historians and Computerized Methodologies, Occasional Publication of the Unit for Prosopographical Research Vol. 7, Oxford, 2002).

Continental Origins of English Landholders 1066-1166 Database (COEL)) (2002).

Domesday Descendants: A Prosopography of Persons Occurring in English Documents 1066- 1166 Volume II Pipe Rolls to Cartae Baronum (Woodbridge, 2002) [vol. I published 1999]. Back to top

 

 

 

Dr Katrien Daemen-de Gelder - Research Officer Belgium

As well as working as a Research Officer on the Who were the Nuns? project, Dr. Katrien de Gelder is post-doctoral research officer for The Northern and Southern Netherlands as a Literary and Cultural ‘Entrepôt’ for Seventeenth-Century British Letters, 1603-1688 project based in the Department of English at Ghent University, where she is a part-time assistant professor. Having gained a PhD in English literature from the VU University Amsterdam in 2001, she has worked on several other research projects, including Englishmen Adrift. The English Presence in the Southern Netherlands, 1603-1660. She has published extensively in her specialist fields of British-Flemish relations and Scottish literature. Together with Prof. J.P. Vander Motten, she is currently researching the continental and British networks of Richard Flecknoe, seventeenth-century English dramatist and poet.

Her recent publications include:

Katrien Daemen-de Gelder and J.P. Vander Motten.  ‘Thomas Ross's Second Punick War (London 1661 and 1672): Royalist Panegyric and Artistic Collaboration in the Southern Netherlands.’ Quaerendo 38 (2008) 1: 32-48.
Katrien Daemen-de Gelder and J.P. Vander Motten.  ‘ “The Times are Dangerous”: An Unnoticed Allusion to William Cavendish’s The Variety.’  ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews 21 (2008)3: 35-40.
Katrien Daemen-de Gelder. ‘WILLIAM BLAKE, een Biografische Schets van een Lang Miskend Genie.’  Kunsttijdschrift Vlaanderen 56 (2007) 314: 3-7.
Katrien Daemen-de Gelder.  ‘Recitations of Nationhood. Sir Robert Ayton (1570-1638) and the Canon of Early Modern Scottish Literature.’  English Studies 87 (2006): 426-441.
J.P. Vander Motten and Katrien Daemen-de Gelder.  ‘Sir Samuel Tuke (c. 1615-1674) and the ‘Little Court’ of Mary Stuart (1631-1660).’  Notes and Queries. New Series  53 (2006) 2: 168-170. Back to top

 

 

 

Pascal Majerus - Research Officer

Having graduated from the Catholic University of Louvain, Pascal Majerus subsequently received Masters degrees from University College Dublin and the University of Newcastle.  Specializing in social and religious historical research projects, he has created exhibitions at several museums, including the Musées Royaux d'Art et d'Histoire in Brussels, and from 1993 to 2004 was lead researcher in the monastic history of the Low Countries at the Archives Générales du Royaume, also in Brussels.  Fluent in several languages, he is currently in the process of editing the annals of the English Convent of Bruges for the Catholic Record Society.

Recent Publications include:
2007
L’abrégé de vertus chez les religieuses anglaises des Pays-Bas (17ième-18ième siècles): panégyrique ou règlement de compte ? [Obituary notices from the English Nuns in Flanders in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries] dans Actes du VIIième Congrès de la Fédération des Cercles francophones d’Histoire et d’Archéologie de Belgique, 2007, p. 592-602.
2005
Le diable, c’est l’autre. Processus de diabolisation  de la différence, dans Catalogue d’exposition « le diable en personne », Fondation Marinus, Bruxelles, 2005, p. 137-152.
Norfolk's rising Hill in Brussels. Le couvent des dominicaines anglaises à Bruxelles (17ième et 18ième siècles), dans Les Cahiers Bruxellois, 2005, XXXVIII, p. 45-93.
2001

Ordres mendiants anglo-irlandais en Belgique. Monasticon, Brussels, 2001. Back to top

 

 

 

Dr James Kelly – Research Assistant

After completing his BA at the University of York, James Kelly was awarded a Masters with distinction in the History of Christianity from King's College, London in 2004.  Following a year working in publishing, he has just completed his doctoral studies at the same institution, with a thesis entitled 'Learning to Survive: the Petre family and the formation of Catholic communities from Elizabeth I to the English Civil War'.

Publications:

'Kinship and Religious Politics among Catholic Families in England, 1570–1640', History, 94 (2009), pp. 328-343. Back to top

 

 

 

Caroline Watkinson - PhD Student

Having completed an MA in History at the University of St Andrews, Caroline Watkinson studied for an MA in History at UCL. Her MA dissertation looked at anniversary sermons referring to the execution of Charles I in the long eighteenth century. Her PhD research will consider patronage networks and political activities at the English convents in the eighteenth century. Back to the top