• Inactive for Year: 2024/25

• Module Leader(s): Dr Adam Morton
• Lecturer: Professor Rachel Hammersley

• Owning School: History, Classics and Archaeology
• Teaching Location: Newcastle City Campus

Semesters

Your programme is made up of credits, the total differs on programme to programme.

Aims

This module challenges students to consider the political and religious developments which took place during the most important century of British History: the seventeenth century. Students will confront some of the most long-standing and fractious historiographical debates – the causes of the Civil Wars, the effects of the 1688/9 Revolution, the motivations behind the 1707 Union – and be asked to consider what the most significant developments of this period were: in the growth of representational politics, increases in religious freedom, or the expansion of state power?

The first half of the module charts the beginning of the Stuart dynasty in James VI and I, examines the collapse of Church and State during the mid-century Revolution, outlines the intellectual, religious, and social challenges and opportunities offered by the Interregnum. The second half challenges students to think about what was ‘restored’ at the Restoration: was the period from 1660-1690 actually more radical than that of 1640-1660? Or was it a conservative reaction to the ordeal of that earlier period.

The Revolution of 1688/9 is considered as both a beginning and an end, the final resolution of the constitutional challenges in church and state unleashed by the mid-century Revolution or the dawn of a brave new world in which the 1690s launched significant changes in Britain’s culture, state, and place in the world. Closing with 1707, this course asks students to consider whether that union is best understood as the ‘birth of modern Britain’, a pragmatic exercise in politics, or an exercise in English imperialism.

Outline Of Syllabus

The syllabus may include the following topics:

Lectures

1: Politics and Religion in Seventeenth-Century Britain

2: James VI and 1: King of Scotland and England
3: Catholics and Puritans: Two Sides of the Same Coin?
4: Britain and the Thirty Years’ War
5: Charles I, Laudianism, and Personal Rule.
6: The Path to War: The Collapse of Church and State.
7: Civil War or Revolution?
8: Killing the King.
9: Cromwell and Ireland.

10: The World Turned upside Down
11: 1659: A Year of Crisis?

12: Restoration State: Continuity or Change?
13: Restoration Church: Tolerance or Intolerance?
14: “’41 Is Come Again”: The Popish Plot & the Succession Crisis, 1678-83.
15: James VII and II: Absolutist or Idiot?
16: The Jacobites: eighteenth-century Remoaners?
17: A Very English Revolution: 1688/9.
18: Glorious or Inglorious? Revolution in Scotland and Ireland.
19: A New Age? Britain in the 1690s
20: Bloody Accounting: War with France & the Fiscal-Military State
21: Towards Britain – Negotiating the 1707 Union
22: An Equal Marriage? The Union in practice and ideologies of ‘Britishness’.

23: Revision Lecture 1: Politics and Religion in the seventeenth-century
24: Revision Lecture 2:

Seminars

1: The Seventeenth Century: Historiographical Perspectives
2: James VI & I and Divine Right Monarchy
3: Catholics and Puritans
4: The Petition of Right and Charles I’s Personal Rule
5: The Causes of the Civil War
6: Interregnum
***Surgery week for assessed essay – no seminar***
7: Restoration
8: Succession Crisis
9: 1688/9 Revolution
10: 1690s
11: Union

Teaching Methods

Teaching Activities

Teaching Rationale And Relationship

SEMINARS encourage independent study and promote improvements in oral presentation, interpersonal communication, problem-solving skills, research skills and adaptability.

LECTURES enable students to gain a wider sense of historical argument and debate and how such debates operate, which also allows them to develop comparisons between different historiographical debates.

SURGERY TIME: Staff will make themselves available in their offices for one hour over the course of the module to see students individually on issues concerning them, although we expect this will focus on preparation for assessments.

Assessment Methods

The format of resits will be determined by the Board of Examiners

Exams

Other Assessment

Assessment Rationale And Relationship

1. Work submitted during the delivery of the module forms a means of determining the student’s progress.
2. Summative assessment tests knowledge outcomes and develops skills in research and reading.

Formative exercises may also be set for this module. They will be un-assessed, but will be discussed in the seminars and will feed into the assessed work.

All Erasmus students at Newcastle University are expected to do the same assessment as students registered for a degree.
Study-abroad, non-Erasmus exchange and Loyola students spending semester 1 only are required to finish their assessment while in Newcastle. This will take the form of an alternative assessment, as outlined in the formats below:

Modules assessed by Coursework and Exam:
The normal alternative form of assessment for all semester 1 non-EU study abroad students will be one essay in addition to the other coursework assessment (the length of the essay should be adjusted in order to comply with the assessment tariff); to be submitted no later than 12pm Friday of week 12. The essays should be set so as to assure coverage of the course content to date.

Modules assessed by Exam only:
The normal alternative form of assessment for all semester 1 non-EU study abroad students will be two 2,000 word written exercises; to be submitted no later than 12pm Friday of week 12. The essays should be set so as to assure coverage of the course content to date.

Modules assessed by Coursework only:
All semester 1 non-EU study abroad students will be expected to complete the standard assessment for the module; to be submitted no later than 12pm Friday of week 12. The essays should be set so as to assure coverage of the course content to date.

Study-abroad, non-Erasmus exchange and Loyola students spending the whole academic year or semester 2 are required to complete the standard assessment as set out in the MOF under all circumstances.

Reading Lists

• HIS2314's Reading List

Timetable

• Timetable Website: www.ncl.ac.uk/timetable/
• HIS2314's Timetable