Rachel Hammersley

The Experiencing Political Texts project has sparked new ideas. Together with Katie East, I am developing a project that looks at the history of political education in the late eighteenth century, considering its aims and methods - and potential parallels and connections with citizenship education and the development of political literacy today. As part of this, I have been examining: the works that Thomas Hollis sent to various institutions in Europe and North America and the amazing bindings he added to those works - along with his memoirs and diary; the archives, print publications, and newspaper articles produced by the Society for Constitutional Information; and the publications and activities of Thomas Spence. I hope to link some of this work on the dissemination of knowledge to Katie's interests in debate - both how people in the eighteenth century made sense of parliamentary debate and their opportunities to engage in political debate themselves.

The Experiencing Political Texts project grew out of the research I did for James Harrington: An Intellectual Biography. That book includes a chapter entitled ‘Innovation in Style’, which argues that Harrington’s political works contained an important literary dimension. Concerned that his audience would find it difficult to understand the written constitutional model he presented in that work, Harrington experimented with fiction, dialogue, and visualization to spark his readers’ imaginations so that they could ‘experience’, and therefore come to understand and appreciate, his political model.

Experiencing Political Texts rests on the belief that this concern with literary form was not just a feature of Harrington’s work, but of early-modern political writing more generally. In order to be effective political texts must not simply inform their readers and convince them of the validity of the arguments being presented, but must prompt their engagement with those arguments and even incite them to action. The authors of early-modern political texts seem to have been particularly conscious of this requirement and the works they produced were often designed to be ‘experienced’ rather than just read. To achieve this end they wrote in a wide range of genres; made use of an array of literary strategies - including playfully blending fact and fiction; exploited the physical form of the works they produced; and paid attention to the interaction between the written word, images and artefacts, and how to how these objects circulated at political gatherings. Exploring these methods and considering how effective they were in achieving their ends has implications for the reading of those texts today, for the ways in which they are presented to modern audiences, and even for the articulation of political arguments in the twenty-first century.

Since January 2019 I have also been working on the AHRC-funded project ‘Wastes and Strays: The Past, Present and Future of English Urban Commons’ (AH/s001824/1). I am working alongside the PI Chris Rodgers from the Newcastle Law School; Alessandro Zambelli, from Portsmouth School of Architecture; Emma Cheatle from the Architecture Department at Sheffield University; John Clarke from the English Department at Exeter University and our three fantastic Research Assistants Sarah Collins and Livi Dee (Newcastle) and Siobhan O’Neill (Portsmouth). The project centres on four case studies: the Town Moor, Newcastle upon Tyne; Valley Gardens, Brighton; Mousehold Heath, Norwich; and Clifton Down, Bristol. As Co-I with responsibility for the ‘Past ‘ element of the project I have been working together with Sarah Collins to examine the historical and archaeological records relating to these case studies. For more detail see the project website and the blogs I and other members of the team have produced about the project. One of these - on the Victorian idea of People’s Parks - is reproduced here.

Between 2015 and 2019 my research project focused on the seventeenth-century political thinker James Harrington, a highly influential figure whose innovative constitutional proposals exercised a profound influence on political debate during the English Revolution and for at least two centuries thereafter. His insights concerning the nature of democracy and representative government remain relevant today. 

While Harrington's reputation rests on his role as a republican author who penned The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656), offering an influential blueprint for a more durable form of republican government than those that ruled England in the 1650s, his reputation during the 1640s was as a royal servant. In 1647-8 Harrington was gentleman of the bedchamber to the captive Charles I. Though employed by Parliament, he is said to have got on well with the King and acted on behalf of him and other members of the Stuart family. Making sense of the apparent tension between Harrington's republican and royalist activities lies at the heart of my current research project.

This project was funded by a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship in 2017-18 and resulted in James Harrington: An Intellectual Biography, which was published by Oxford University Press in 2019. The book explores Harrington’s career not only as a republican author, but also as an innovative political thinker, religious controversialist and philosopher. It sheds important new light on the nature of seventeenth-century English republicanism; the development of radical political and religious ideas in the 1650s; literary experimentation; the interrelationship between political, religious, scientific and philosophical ideas during the early-modern period; and the transition from the veneration of the ancients to the celebration of the moderns. As part of the project I also produced four video podcasts presenting some of my research findings, which are embedded below. 

In May 2018 I held a workshop at Newcastle's Literary and Philosophical Society exploring the relevance of early-modern political thought in the twenty-first century. Four expert speakers examined four themes: popular mobilisation; toleration; environmentalism and exile. I have written a blogpost on the event.

In July 2017 I led a workshop on the writing of early-modern intellectual biographies  at Newcastle University. For more detail on that event you can read my blogpost on the subject.

I have also been part of a reading group at Newcastle University exploring the concept of civil religion. For more information about that project click here.