Eleanor Hubbard
Assistant Professor of History
G28 Dickenson Hall
Email: ehubbard@princeton.edu
Eleanor Hubbard is a historian of sixteenth and seventeenth century Britain. She is especially interested in the history of ordinary people in periods of intense change. Her first book, City Women: Money, Sex, and the Social Order in Early Modern London (Oxford University Press, 2012), traced the experiences of poor and middling women in London as the city grew rapidly due to immigration. These women usually could not write and did not leave diaries or letters, so Hubbard used their court depositions (which were written down by clerks) to recapture how they dealt with life’s challenges.
Now Hubbard is working on a book about English sailors during the first period of English maritime expansion, when English ships sailed for the first time to the Mediterranean, the East Indies, America, and Russia. She is interested in how sailors coped with the many dangers of the sea – bad weather, pirates, and enemy ships of all kinds – as well as how they engaged with the unfamiliar peoples they encountered on their voyages.
While Hubbard’s subjects are mostly humble individuals who never or rarely show up in textbooks, she enjoys tracing them through archival sources, combining fragmentary glimpses to reconstruct their lives, and trying to tell early modern English history from their point of view. One of the great appeals of history is that it is both one of the humanities and a social science, and Hubbard uses whatever scholarly tools come to hand – from statistical analysis to close readings of poems and songs – to explore early modern people’s struggles and dreams.
In 2013-2014, Eleanor Hubbard will not teach in the fall. In the spring, she will teach a freshman seminar about pirates and a survey of early modern British history from the end of the Wars of the Roses to the Glorious Revolution. The course will cover Henry VIII and the Reformation, Elizabeth I, the English civil wars of the 1640s, and many other fascinating topics.
Assistant Professor of History
G28 Dickenson Hall
Email: ehubbard@princeton.edu
Eleanor Hubbard is a historian of sixteenth and seventeenth century Britain. She is especially interested in the history of ordinary people in periods of intense change. Her first book, City Women: Money, Sex, and the Social Order in Early Modern London (Oxford University Press, 2012), traced the experiences of poor and middling women in London as the city grew rapidly due to immigration. These women usually could not write and did not leave diaries or letters, so Hubbard used their court depositions (which were written down by clerks) to recapture how they dealt with life’s challenges.
Now Hubbard is working on a book about English sailors during the first period of English maritime expansion, when English ships sailed for the first time to the Mediterranean, the East Indies, America, and Russia. She is interested in how sailors coped with the many dangers of the sea – bad weather, pirates, and enemy ships of all kinds – as well as how they engaged with the unfamiliar peoples they encountered on their voyages.
While Hubbard’s subjects are mostly humble individuals who never or rarely show up in textbooks, she enjoys tracing them through archival sources, combining fragmentary glimpses to reconstruct their lives, and trying to tell early modern English history from their point of view. One of the great appeals of history is that it is both one of the humanities and a social science, and Hubbard uses whatever scholarly tools come to hand – from statistical analysis to close readings of poems and songs – to explore early modern people’s struggles and dreams.
In 2013-2014, Eleanor Hubbard will not teach in the fall. In the spring, she will teach a freshman seminar about pirates and a survey of early modern British history from the end of the Wars of the Roses to the Glorious Revolution. The course will cover Henry VIII and the Reformation, Elizabeth I, the English civil wars of the 1640s, and many other fascinating topics.