The Bodies, Emotions and Material Culture Collective blog 

New Exhibition!The Germanisches Nationalmuseum—the largest museum of cultural history in the German-speaking region—has launched the new special exhibition Global Nuremberg, 1300–1600. What is the Exhibition About?This special exhibition explores the global networks...

Camden Reeves is Professor of Music at the University of Manchester. In this post, he explains how a visit to The Whitworth's 2023-2024 exhibition, Albrecht Dürer's Material World, inspired him to write the new musical composition 'Melancholia & the Angel'. The...

Julia Nurse is a Collections Research Lead at Wellcome Collection with a long career within the museum field. She has a particular interest in Early Modern European print cultures, particularly in relation to science, health, and medicine. In this post, Julia reflects...

Dr Holly Fletcher has been awarded the 2025 St Andrews Article Prize by the European Society for Environmental History (ESEH) for her article ‘Making Beds in Early Modern England: Sleep Matter and Environmental Change’, published in Historical Research in 2024. The...

In this post, Professor Sasha Handley interviews Dr Beatriz Marín-Aguilera and Professor Stefan Hanß about their award-winning volume In-Between Textiles, 1400-1800: Weaving Subjectivities and Encounters (Amsterdam University Press, 2023).Sasha Handley: Dear Beatriz...

Congratulations to our own Dr Joshua Rushton, who has secured a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship for the project "Catholic Renewal and Environmental Change in the Early Modern World”. He will take up his award in 2026 at the University of Manchester. Josh’s project...

In this series for The Bodies, Emotions and Material Culture Collective blog, Dr Holly Fletcher interviews leading scholars on the subject of the history of the body. For this post she spoke to Professor Karen Harvey about her previous and current research, as well as...

In this post, Sasha Handley interviews Professor Hannah Barker about the publication of her recent book Faith in the Town: Lay Religion in Northern England, 1740-1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025).Warmest congratulations to you and your co-authors on the...

Holly Fletcher, who is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate on the ‘Sleeping Well’ Project at the University of Manchester, has been awarded a prestigious Wellcome Trust Early Career Award for her project ‘The Fats of Life in the Early Modern World, 1500-1750:...

‘The Emotional Dimension of Shrine Formation in Early Modern Catholicism’, by Dr Joshua Rushton has been published in the latest issue of Cultural and Social History.  Shrines were always important for early modern Catholics as sites of healing, salvation, miracles,...