The Madman and the Churchrobber: Law and Conflict in Early Modern England

This microhistory reconstructs and analyses a protracted legal dispute over a small parcel of land called Warrens Court in Nibley, Gloucestershire, which was contested between successive generations of two families from the mid-sixteenth century to the early eighteenth century. Employing a rich cache of archival material, it traces legal contestation over time, and through a range of different courts, as well as in Parliament and the public domain, and it contends that a microhistorical approach makes it possible to shed valuable light upon the legal and political culture of early modern England, not least by comprehending how certain disputes became protracted and increasingly bitter, and why they might fascinate contemporaries. This involves recognising the dynamic of litigation, in terms of how disputes changed over time, and how those involved in myriad lawsuits found legal reasons for prolonging contestation. It also involves exploring litigants’ strategies and practices, as well as competing claims about the way in which adversaries behaved, and incompatible expectations of the legal system. Finally, it involves teasing out the structural issues in play, in terms of the social, cultural and ideological identities of successive generations. Ultimately, this dispute is employed to address important historiographical debates surrounding the nature of civil litigation in early modern England, and to provide new ways of appreciating the nature, severity, and visibility of political and religious conflict in the decades before and after the English Revolution

Transcriptomic diversity in human medullary thymic epithelial cells

The induction of central T cell tolerance in the thymus depends on the presentation of peripheral self-epitopes by medullary thymic epithelial cells (mTECs). This promiscuous gene expression (pGE) drives mTEC transcriptomic diversity, with non-canonical transcript initiation, alternative splicing, and expression of endogenous retroelements (EREs) representing important but incompletely understood contributors. Here we map the expression of genome-wide transcripts in immature and mature human mTECs using high-throughput 5' cap and RNA sequencing. Both mTEC populations show high splicing entropy, potentially driven by the expression of peripheral splicing factors. During mTEC maturation, rates of global transcript mis-initiation increase and EREs enriched in long terminal repeat retrotransposons are up-regulated, the latter often found in proximity to differentially expressed genes. As a resource, we provide an interactive public interface for exploring mTEC transcriptomic diversity. Our findings therefore help construct a map of transcriptomic diversity in the healthy human thymus and may ultimately facilitate the identification of those epitopes which contribute to autoimmunity and immune recognition of tumor antigens

‘A Knowing but a Discrete Man’: Scribal News and Information Management in Restoration England

This article builds upon recent interest in scribal news by analysing official uses of manuscript newsletters during the Restoration, in domestic contexts as well as in relation to Anglo-Dutch affairs. It uses official correspondence and diplomatic archives to trace official attitudes to scribal news, as well as the processes devised for utilising newsletters. In part, this is a study of ‘information management’, and it explores the methods used for acquiring and analysing intelligence, as well as the personnel involved. But it also emphasises that officials were conscious of the shifting landscape of news across the 17th century, and of popular demand for both printed and scribal news. As such, intelligence strategies involved more than just spies and intercepts, in terms of the need to both ‘consume’ and produce scribal news, to develop relationships with intelligencers and journalists, and to exchange information. Mapping this complex news ecosystem enhances our appreciation of the ongoing relevance of scribal newsletters, but it also highlights some intractable challenges faced by the government, in terms of the tensions between disseminating information to friendly correspondents and imperilling some of its most valued intelligencers

Collecting Revolution: George Thomason and the ‘Thomason Tracts’

The approximately 24,000 pamphlets, manuscripts and newspapers collected by the London bookseller George Thomason are an invaluable source for the study of the political events of 1640 to 1663. This introduction surveys the articles, based on a conference held at the British Library, which are brought together in eBLJ 2023

Scattered about the Streets: George Thomason’s Annotations and Ephemeral Print during the English Revolution

Thomason is rightly famous for his tendency to annotate individual pamphlets, and his notes have long been exploited by scholars in order to trace his connections with various authors, to contextualise individual items, and to enhance our appreciation of writers and the debates in which they participated. This chapter subjects such annotations to closer scrutiny, in order to highlight Thomason’s determination to interrogate the print revolution, difficult though this clearly proved to be. What emerges is a deeper understanding of something that clearly became evident to Thomason: that the English Revolution witnessed not just a major transformation in the commercial basis of the book trade, and the dramatic rise of ‘cheap’ print, but also a range of more or less innovative uses of print that involved non-commercial practices, from organisational tickets and forms to handbills and flyers, and material that could be posted in public or even scattered about the streets. Attending to such phenomena, and to the ways in which Thomason made them visible, enhances our appreciation of how everyday politics was transformed during the mid-seventeenth century, not least in terms of the possibilities that emerged for novel kinds of mobilisation and popular participation