2017-18: Women and War: Female Activism During the English Civil War
'Women and War'
Knowledge Exchange Fellow:
Dr Emma Turnbull (no longer at the University of Oxford)
Partner Organisation:
The National Trust
Emma Turnbull is working with the National Trust on a collaborative project on the subject of female activism during the English Civil War. The project aims to reinvigorate the historical content that is on offer to visitors of National Trust properties based on new archival research.
Emma is working with three National Trust properties, providing staff and volunteers with innovative, property-specific interpretations of the Civil-War experiences of women. Lady Mary Bankes of Corfe Castle and Catherine and Elizabeth Murray of Ham House are her principal case studies. Emma hopes that her research will bring to life the active choices and strategies that women pursued during the seventeenth-century conflict.
In the second year of the project, Emma is extending the scope of her partnership to include Knowsley Hall, Lancashire. Emma has been working with the curator to reassess the remarkable story of Charlotte, Countess of Derby, who defended Lathom House from a parliamentarian siege.
As part of her Fellowship, Emma will also organise an interdisciplinary workshop at TORCH in December 2017 on ‘Presenting the Early Modern Period. The conference will bring senior National Trust staff and early modern scholars together to discuss important themes and pressure-points in seventeenth-century research, as well as strategies for presenting and communicating these to the wider public. The event would be a laboratory for further collaborations between early modernists and the heritage sector.