Penelope J. Corfield

History and the challenge of gender history

Abstract This essay provides a critical assessment of debates within and about gender history. The fruitfulness of the field is absolutely and unquestionably great. Womens history, now mutating into gender history, is notably broadening and enriching historical studies. That is incontestable. But success has also posed challenges. Despite the initial ‘hype’, womens history has not subverted the discipline by producing a new general interpretation or, more ambitiously, a new epistemology. Instead, historians of gender share the same range of theoretical problems faced by other historians. The chronology and the very nature of long‐term changes and/or continuities remain unclear. In addition, gender historians have their own debates about the historical construction of gender identities. Although a timeless and a historical ‘Woman’ has been abandoned, it is far from clear how and how far social roles are learnt, transmitted and changed. Certainly, it is much too simplistic to assume that a prescriptive co...

From Poison Peddlers to Civic Worthies: The Reputation of the Apothecaries in Georgian England

Trust is not automatically granted to providers of professional services. The doctors of Georgian England were, by later standards, deficient in medical knowhow, particularly before the mid-nineteenth-century scientific understanding of antiseptics, and much satirised. Nonetheless, the emergence of a coherent medical profession indicates that the picture was far more intricate and positive than the satirists implied. Patients sought care as well as cure; and medical practitioners had no problems in finding custom. This essay reassesses the apothecaries’ role in the slow transition whereby reputable practitioners differentiated themselves from ‘quacks’. The change was propelled by three linked processes: firstly, the intersection of expanding medical supply with insistent consumer demand, noting that demand plays a key role alongside supply; secondly, the intersection of local power-broking within Britains growing towns with an ethos of community service, whereby apothecaries joined the ranks of ‘civic worthies’ and trusted care-givers; and, lastly, the intersection of shared medical knowledge among practitioners at all levels with the creation of a distinctive professional identity. As public trust grew, so Parliament was emboldened in 1815 to license the Apothecaries Society as the regulatory body for the medical rank-and-file, so launching the distinctive Anglo-American system of arms-length state regulation.

Record Linkage Theory and Practice: an Experiment in the Application of Multiple Pass Linkage Algorithms

By implementing multiple-pass record linkage algorithms between two compatible datasets, the number of records linked may be dramatically increased above the level achieved by any single algorithm. This increase is made without commensurate diminution in confidence in the linked dataset.

Business leaders and town gentry in early industrial Britain: specialist occupations and shared urbanism

Three major conclusions are derived from close study of Britains pioneering directories in the 1770s and 1780s. First, they show that over 30,000 leading townsmen and women were enmeshed into the burgeoning knowledge grid through the public listings of their addresses, status and occupations. Secondly, a close examination of that information reveals a notable extent of occupational specialization – among both men and women, and among individuals and the nascent firms – thus confirming one of Adam Smiths key observations about the nature of Britains increasingly commercialized, if still largely pre-mechanized, economy. Thirdly, aggregative analysis highlights systematic differences in the socio-economic characteristics of different towns: from manufacturing, commercial and professional centres to the great capital cities to the specialist leisure towns and resorts – all interlocking in an inter-dependent urban network. Hence this evidence suggests that a generic re-interpretation of all large towns as ‘residential leisure towns’ on the strength of their flourishing cultural life (as recently proposed by Stobart and Schwarz) is misleading, as it obscures significant systemic differences between different types of towns. At the same time, however, the interlinked urban network was generating a confidently shared urbanism, bridging between aristocratic and middle-class society. That link was exemplified by the listing of numerous titled and gentlemanly ‘town gentry’ alongside the business leaders – as the directories in effect flourished their collective calling cards.

POST-Medievalism/Modernity/Postmodernity?

Studying human history means studying the recoverable stock of past human experiences and the retrospective assessments of those experiences. But recent arguments about how and whether historians can study earlier times have not yet sufficiently highlighted the questions of periodisation. This essay urges that such a debate is long overdue. In practice, historians are eclectic and many invoke their own preferred timespans. Yet the collective ‘default’ system of the profession as currently institutionalised sticks with out-dated assumptions about the onset of the ancient world, medievalism, modernity and (perhaps) postmodernity. However, did history really change so schematically? The suggested binary ‘breaks’ between Modernity and Postmodernity at some stage in the later twentieth century are shown, upon close examination, to be subjective and inconsistent, as well as lacking in specific chronology. It also remains unclear whether this binary shift is/was applicable solely to western societies or to the entire world. Moreover, the uncertainty surrounding this supposed great transformation is as nothing in comparison with lack of clarity associated with the concept of Modernity and (not the same) Modernism. These confusions have been generated by historians and cultural critics who do believe that the past can be studied (here differing from theorists of Postmodernity); but who do not compare and contrast their own operating models. ‘Modernity’ is such a familiar term that its use seems unproblematic. The result is much repetition, but conceptual confusion. In fact, all the apparently ‘established’ chronologies have problems, including the Marxist variants of Feudalism, Capitalism and Communism. So it is time for historians, who do believe that the past can be studied, to allow for multiple dimensions – continuity, gradual change, and revolutionary upheaval – within one period. In that way, the analysis can move beyond Post-post to study multi-layered experiences in the past as in the present.

The State of History

Miles Fairburn, Social History: Problems, Strategies and Methods, Basingstoke and London, Macmillan, 1999; pp. viii + 325; ISBN 0-33361587/5 (hbk); 0-333-61586-7 (pbk) Brian Fay, Philip Pomper and Richard T. Vann (eds), History and Theory: Contemporary Readings, Blackwell, Oxford, 1998; pp. x + 406; ISBN 0-63120952-2 (hbk); 0-631-20953-0 (pbk) Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn (eds), Reconstructing History: The Emergence of a New Historical Society, New York and London, Routledge, 1999; pp. xxii + 377; ISBN 0-415-92278-X (hbk); 0-415-92279-8 (pbk) Anna Green and Kathleen Troup (eds), The Houses of History: A Critical Reader in Twentieth-Century History and Theory, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1999; pp. x + 338; ISBN 0-7190-5254-8 (hbk); 0-7190-52556 (pbk) Ludmilla Jordanova, History in Practice, London and New York, Arnold, 2000; pp. xvi + 224; ISBN 0-340-66331-6 (hbk); 0-340-66332-4 (pbk) John McLeod, Beginning Postcolonialism, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2000; pp. xii + 274; ISBN 0-7190-5208-4 (hbk); ISBN 0-7190-5209-2 (pbk) S.H. Rigby, Marxism and History: A Critical Introduction (2nd edn), Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1998; pp. xviii + 314; ISBN 0-71905612-8 (pbk)

‘A woman's life in other ages’, by Arnold J. Toynbee, with an editorial introduction

The historian Arnold Toynbees characteristic breadth is shown in his 1969 essay on women in history – here published in English for the first time. Setting himself the question: when was the best time for women to live? Toynbee did not plump for modern times. Legal right was not the only criterion. After reviewing many cultures, Toynbee concluded that the ‘black day for women’ occurred long ago, when agricultural technology shifted from the female-wielded hoe to the male-directed plough. The editorial introduction puts Toynbees essay in the context of his own work and the continuing debates about women in history.