Page 16 - The Keble Review 2016

Dr Lucy Kaufman
Career Development Fellow
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The Keble Review 2016
Lucy Kaufman is the Centre for Medieval
and Renaissance Studies Career Development Fellow in Renaissance History
when Elizabeth I died in March 1603, she left behind a changed England. Nowhere were these alterations more obvious
than in the Church of which she had been Supreme Governor for nearly forty-five years. The chaos unleashed when her father, Henry VIII, split from Rome had only grown under the rule of her siblings. Ten years before her coronation, icons were being smashed under the rule of her brother, Edward VI. Three years before, the former Archbishop of Canterbury was burned to death at the stake on Broad Street in Oxford on the orders of her sister Mary. These were unstable foundations upon which to build a national church,
but build it Elizabeth did. By setting an unwavering expectation of religious conformity, increasing state surveillance, and leveraging power structures in
the parishes, her reign saw the Church in England transform into the Church of England. It is this process that I study: the regeneration that follows moments of great disruption, and how everyday lives helped to shape this new world.
My Career Development Fellowship allows me the enormous privilege to explore these ideas – and realize new ones – over four years. I had happily anticipated the support for research and writing,
but I was surprised to find that having my sources
so close to hand would transform the way that I work. As an American who studies British history, I have always had to raid the archives, collecting as much information as I could during my transatlantic research trips. Now I often find myself researching in the morning and writing in the afternoon, returning to the archives the next day to unravel intriguing leads. I have chased Elizabethan Londoners across the pages
of parish records and traced the fate of defendants hauled before ecclesiastical courts; I have transcribed centuries-old depositions and tallied reimbursement receipts for dinners eaten by churchwardens long before my home state of Pennsylvania was a glimmer in England’s mind’s eye.
My work has grown richer, deeper, and broader as a result. In the past nine months, I have drafted two articles and my book manuscript proposal, consulted with the National Trust on Tudor chapels, and been invited to give five papers across Europe. But Keble remains at the heart of these explorations. I share
my research and debate my findings with students in tutorials and classes, while collegial conversations with archaeologists over lunch, geographers over dinner, and writers over coffee open new perspectives and spark new ideas.
Such discussions have fed my increasing interest
in the interwoven currents of the early modern
world – a place where complicated ties connected events thousands of miles away, where activities in Crimea shaped lives in London, where a plant grown
in Indonesia changed the fate of the Netherlands, and where political developments in Libya were debated by imperial officials in the Americas. It was also a world of immigrants. It is to them I will turn for the duration of my fellowship, as I explore the early modern interplay between immigration and British identity at a time when thousands of refugees fled religious conflict
on the continent. It is a story that seems particularly relevant for our times, and I could not imagine a more vibrant intellectual place to explore it than at Keble.