Date/Time
Date(s) - 2 Mar 2015
5:15 PM - 5:15 PM
Location
Class of 1978 Pavilion, Special Collections Center
Category(ies) No Categories
Next Monday, 2 March, at 5.15pm in the Class of 1978 Pavilion in the Kislak Center on the 6th Floor of Van Pelt-Dietrich Library
Penn Workshop in the History of Material Texts,
Steve Hindle (The Huntington Library)
“TECHNOLOGIES OF IDENTIFICATION UNDER THE OLD POOR LAW”
Steve writes,
*This presentation re-considers the different ways in which parish and
township authorities in sixteenth and seventeenth century England
identified and labeled paupers and other itinerants. The original paper,
first published in 2006, was not conceived primarily as a study of material
culture, still less one of material texts, but sought to reconstruct the
context and rationale for the various ways in which the poor could be
categorized, and to discuss in detail the physical and documentary methods
which were used. The paper analyzes four main categories of identification:
first, licenses to beg, which were issued to paupers and provided them with
the means to obtain an ‘honorable’ livelihood; second, the vagrant’s
passport, which was a means of allowing a pauper to move, or be moved, from
one part of the country to another; third, the settlement certificate,
which specifically identified the parish which was legally responsible for
the maintenance of a pauper; and fourth, the parish badge, an outward
physical identifier of pauper status.*
*It seemed important at the time to describe the administrative procedures
whereby these four methods were implemented, and to emphasize the
advantages and disadvantages of each method for the pauper and for the
authorities alike. What strikes me most about the analysis almost ten years
later is that it became important in framing the discussion to discuss the
experiential aspect of identification: the reconstruction of the popular
mentalities of subordination—how did it feel to carry a begging license or
to wear the parish badge?—necessitated detailed discussion of the
materiality of the texts and artifacts themselves. I’ll be interested to
hear how an audience so finely attuned to the complexities of material
texts responds to what was effectively an accidental foray into their
territory: I was doing the material thing without realizing it.*
Steve Hindle assumed the Directorship of Research at the Huntington in
2011, after sixteen years in the Department of History at the University of
Warwick. Trained as a social and economic historian, he is the author of
two books, *The State and Social Change in Early Modern England* (2000),
and *On the Parish? The Micro-politics of Poor Relief in Rural England,
1550-1750* (2004); editor of *Remaking English Society: Social Change and
Social Relations in Early Modern England*, the recently-published
festschrift for Keith Wrightson; and has written numerous scholarly
articles on patterns of social relations in English rural communities. He
has just completed an analysis of the representation of harvest labor in
English landscape painting (forthcoming in *Critical Inquiry*), but is
working intensively on *The Social Topography of a Rural Community*, a
study of the Warwickshire parish of Chilvers Coton in the late seventeenth
century.
All are welcome! Please forward this email widely to any who might be
interested. Those who do not hold University of Pennsylvania ID cards
should bring another form of photo identification in order to enter the
library building.