Materiality and Extinction at the History Reading Party

History students and tutors returned to Herefordshire for their annual reading party amid the sunshine and hailstorms of an English spring. The weather was more predictable for the one participant who joined online from California. The books under discussion reflected recent trends in historical writing. The role of eighteenth-century material cultures in the exchange of knowledge and the construction of masculinity came under scrutiny, as did the boundaries between forgery, restoration and recreation in the Western market for Islamic ceramics. The history of the body inspired studies of gesture in the English Reformation, in emotive preaching, bowing to the altar or the vexed question of which parts of the service demanded that men should or should not wear hats, and of funerals and coronations among medieval Scottish kings. Gender came to the fore in books on women’s role in global religious movements from Reformation and Counter-Reformation to Methodism and on gender and radical theology in mid-seventeenth century England. The varieties of political history ranged from popular protest in later medieval Scotland to the management of twentieth-century Sudanese debt and the unexpected affinities between neoliberalism and the modern populist right. Global perspectives came into play with a study of the distinctive role of Europe in world history and of the fluctuating and politically-charged usage of the idea of extinctions of species and peoples in the past two centuries.