British Printed Images to 1700: Integrating Visual Sources into Historical Practice
Lead Research Organisation:
Newcastle University
Department Name: Sch of History, Classics and Archaeology
Abstract
This project will conduct research into single-sheet prints produced in Britain before 1700. It will relaunch a digital archive of those prints (www.bpi1700.org.uk) that will close without new funding. The BPI web archive was constructed between 2006 and 2009 using servers and other software that is now 15 years' out of date. This project will redesign and relaunch the archive, which has been an important resource for research of early modern Britain (from undergraduates researching their dissertations to senior academics writing monographs) for a generation. By doing so, the project continues to make the BPI archive freely available to the public and improves its usability through the use of up to date technology and additional research resources.
The project will also promote research into the archive's 11,000 prints. Historians have long been reluctant to use visual sources, believing that they belong to Art Historians, and often lacking the training in how to use or read them. That reluctance has begun to wane in recent years, and early modern and modern historians now make use of satirical prints, posters, and other visual materials as they relate to political history. The same is not true for social and cultural history, however. Much of the material in the BPI's vast archive has not been subject to research, despite it having the potential to tell us vital things about the social and cultural history of Britain between 1500 and 1700. Research conducted by a network of scholars involved in this project will seek to integrate single-sheet prints into social and cultural history. What do depictions of men and women tell us about early modern attitudes to gender? What do representations of peoples from other places or cultures tell us about early modern attitudes to nationality or race? How were mores and morals represented visually, and what role did those representations have in maintaining or challenging conventions? Images have much to tell us about how stereotypes are created and sustained. But they also tell us about more nebulous aspects of early modern culture. How were emotions understood and experienced? How did it conceptualise social order, hierarchy, and rank? This project explores the visual culture of early modern Britain by asking a simple yet fundamental question: what do images tell us about social and cultural history that more traditional historical records do not?
The project will also promote research into the archive's 11,000 prints. Historians have long been reluctant to use visual sources, believing that they belong to Art Historians, and often lacking the training in how to use or read them. That reluctance has begun to wane in recent years, and early modern and modern historians now make use of satirical prints, posters, and other visual materials as they relate to political history. The same is not true for social and cultural history, however. Much of the material in the BPI's vast archive has not been subject to research, despite it having the potential to tell us vital things about the social and cultural history of Britain between 1500 and 1700. Research conducted by a network of scholars involved in this project will seek to integrate single-sheet prints into social and cultural history. What do depictions of men and women tell us about early modern attitudes to gender? What do representations of peoples from other places or cultures tell us about early modern attitudes to nationality or race? How were mores and morals represented visually, and what role did those representations have in maintaining or challenging conventions? Images have much to tell us about how stereotypes are created and sustained. But they also tell us about more nebulous aspects of early modern culture. How were emotions understood and experienced? How did it conceptualise social order, hierarchy, and rank? This project explores the visual culture of early modern Britain by asking a simple yet fundamental question: what do images tell us about social and cultural history that more traditional historical records do not?
Publications
Morton, A
(2024)
Laughing at Hypocrisy: The Turncoats (1711), visual culture, and dissent in early-eighteenth century England
in Studies in Church History
| Description | The project had four objectives: - To redesign and relaunch the British Printed Images to 1700 (BPI1700) website and database and keep it available for public use. - To lead an interdisciplinary network of scholars to collaborate on using the BPI archive to help us understand early modern British history. - To produce research demonstrating how visual sources can be integrated into early modern social and cultural history. - And to conduct research into the survival of single sheet prints in archives and repositories in Britain with a view to expanding the corpus of material in the BPI1700 database. All four of these objects have been, or are on track to being, achieved. The BPI1700 website and database was redesigned in 2023 and early 2024 and relaunched in the summer of 2024. This has ensured that approximately 11,000 prints are available to explore free of charge. The website has new sections to help researchers from undergraduate students to senior academics conduct research into early modern prints. The project also publicised and promoted the archive. Several members of the project's networks took part in an online symposium hosted by the ManyHeadedMonster blog in February/March2025. A conference was also organised to celebrate the relaunch (this was held at Newcastle in 2025). In addition, the PI has spoken at 4 seminars and conferences (3 in the UK, one in Rouen) to publicise the online database, and has a blog posting regular updates on development on the project's research (and the field more broadly). The network of scholars met in a two-day workshop (April 2024) and the conference (including speakers from 5 countries) to discuss how historians might integrate visual sources into their research. A collection of essays on this theme is currently under review. The research in these essays will show how visual sources can add to our understanding of sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth century British history, and fulfils the project's objective of better integrating the use of printed sources into historical practice. The book also promotes the work of early career scholars alongside established experts in the field. The PI has already published one article from research conducted during the project (Studies in Church History) and has another under review. Two more articles are in preparation and will be submitted by Easter 2026 to ensure all academic outputs mentioned in the proposal are met. Because the research proved fruitful, the PI will publish more articles in the late-2020s and early 2030s. Those articles will underline the importance of the project's research and also promote the BPI1700 archive, showcasing the material it holds to academic audiences (from undergraduate to senior research). The PI also completed scoping research of UK-based archives (including the Pepys Library, Cambridge, the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford) to assess the extent of surviving single-sheet prints. The next stage of the project (after the period of funding has closed) will be to consider how viable future digitisation projects are to extend the BPI1700 corpus. The priority is to focus on expanding the number of book illustrations available and the PI is preparing a funding-bid to that effect. |
| Exploitation Route | One of the principal outputs - the online website and database - is publicly available online. Users from a range of backgrounds (public, undergraduate, post-graduate, academic, heritage sector) can access this free of charge. The website contains guides to help researchers at all stages use printed sources in their research. The ambition is that it will help visual sources become integrated into historical practice. |
| Sectors | Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software) Education Culture Heritage Museums and Collections |
| Description | At the time of the end of the funding period (January 2025), the BPI1700 website has only been live for five months. It is therefore too early to trace many forms of impact, particularly non-academic ones. At this stage, what can be said is that the project has made a database of 11,000 prints publicly available and that that database (and the project's block) are receiving internet traffic from around the world. The PI will continue to update this section in the years after the period of grant funding to track the impact that the research has. The project has already had academic impact. Feedback on the new website and database has been positive, both at the project's workshops and conference, and via correspondence. For example, the PI has received reports of undergraduate students using it to research their dissertations. The workshop in April 2024 certainly had academic impact. The PI invited leading early modern historians - many of whom do not routinely use visual sources in their research - to discuss how visual sources can enhance our understanding of the past. These conversations have inspired research in the volume of essays that has emerged from the workshop and the conference. Feedback has been positive, and members of the network have been promoting use of the BPI1700 website in their universities. The online symposium hosted by the ManyHeadedMonster blog (February/March 2025) is also evidence of academic impact: the project's research has been showcased on a leading platform for early modern history in the UK (and one which has an international audience online). In the years after the period of funding, the PI will continue to promote the project (including submitting articles to history magazines aimed at a broader audience). The project will have an impact on undergraduate and post-graduate teaching almost immediately. For example, in the academic year 2025-26 the website will play a leading role in a new MA module in the School of History, Classics, and Archaeology at Newcastle University. |
| First Year Of Impact | 2024 |
| Sector | Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software),Education |
| Impact Types | Cultural |
| Title | British Printed Images to 1700 |
| Description | The project has redesigned and relaunched (June 2024) an online database: British Printed Images to 1700. This web-database contains almost 11,000 digital records of single-sheet prints produced in Britain before 1700. The images were digitised as part of an AHRC-funded project led by Prof Michael Hunter (Birkbeck) in 2006-09 and hosted by the Digital Lab at King's College, London. The resource was due to be archived/removed from the web. The current project secured funding to save and revive it, making the resource available to researchers, undergraduates and the public. The database was moved to Newcastle University, who are hosting it. It has been redesigned by the PI in collaboration with Research Software Engineering at Newcastle University. As a result of this redesign, the database will be more user-friendly. Prints can now be searched via keywords, for example. By the end of the funding period, additional resources (bibliographies, guides to use, support for undergraduates using visual sources in their dissertations) have been made available on the website. The aim of the new website is to help to make visual sources (the majority of which have not been used by researchers before) a much more routine part of historical practice. A new blog has been added to the website to help promote new research, the use of images in the classroom, and explore key research questions associated with the project. A workshop on using the BPI archive and database was April 2024 at Newcastle University. 15 leading early modern British historians will be introduced to the site in the hope that they - and their PhD students, departments, and undergraduates - will use it more readily. |
| Type Of Material | Improvements to research infrastructure |
| Year Produced | 2024 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | Feedback from colleagues at other universities has been positive. They have reported that both they - and their students - have found the resource useful to their research. |
| URL | https://bpi1700.org.uk/ |
| Description | British Museum |
| Organisation | British Museum |
| Department | Department of Prints and Drawings |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Public |
| PI Contribution | The partnership has been a discussion. The majority of the material held in the BPI1700 database is part of the British Museum's collections. The Department of Prints and Drawings was very helpful in helping me to prepare the grant application. Although they could not officially partner with the project (as they no longer have a British Print specialist) they have provided expertise and guidance throughout. |
| Collaborator Contribution | My main contributions will be publishing research on the BM's holdings. Four articles will be published to increase our knowledge of these sources (early modern prints). This will undoubtedly increase interest in their holdings. The essays in the edited volume emerging from the project's networks also contains discussion of a good deal of the BM's holdings, which will have the same effect. |
| Impact | As mentioned above, the partnership has really been one of discussion and advice. |
| Start Year | 2023 |
| Description | British Museum |
| Organisation | British Museum |
| Department | Department of Prints and Drawings |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Public |
| PI Contribution | The partnership has been a discussion. The majority of the material held in the BPI1700 database is part of the British Museum's collections. The Department of Prints and Drawings was very helpful in helping me to prepare the grant application. Although they could not officially partner with the project (as they no longer have a British Print specialist) they have provided expertise and guidance throughout. |
| Collaborator Contribution | My main contributions will be publishing research on the BM's holdings. Four articles will be published to increase our knowledge of these sources (early modern prints). This will undoubtedly increase interest in their holdings. The essays in the edited volume emerging from the project's networks also contains discussion of a good deal of the BM's holdings, which will have the same effect. |
| Impact | As mentioned above, the partnership has really been one of discussion and advice. |
| Start Year | 2023 |
| Description | John Michael Wright and the Art of Invention |
| Organisation | University of Edinburgh |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | This project investigates the career and work of the artist John Michael Wright. It is run by Catriona Murray at the University of Edinburgh. My role in this project is small. I will be giving a paper at a conference in the autumn of 2023 on the anti-Catholic context of Catholic culture in early modern England. The intention is for this to be published in a volume of essays emerging from the John Michael Wright project. |
| Collaborator Contribution | See above. |
| Impact | No outputs to date. A conference paper will be delivered in late 2023, with a publication in 2024. |
| Start Year | 2022 |
| Description | MEMOREV |
| Organisation | University of Rouen |
| Country | France |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | I was invited to take part in a research project - MEMOREV - based in France. The project considers memory of the British Revolutions (the Civil Wars and 1688 Revolution) from the 17th to the 19th century and involves scholars from Rouen, Lille, the Sorbonne, Paris Nanterne, Keele, Princeton, and Birmingham. The collaboration emerged from connections I had made during the AHRC network grant (the PI, Claire Gheeartes-Graffeuille, is part of my network). I will be hosting one of the MEMOREV workshops in Newcastle (September 2024). A funding application is in preparation (we are thinking about the ERC). |
| Collaborator Contribution | See above. |
| Impact | The collaboration is multidisciplinary (history, literature, politics, and art history). Outputs do far have been conference and workshops papers (it is still early in the project). We have discussed journal articles and so on. |
| Start Year | 2023 |
| Description | University of Rouen |
| Organisation | University of Rouen |
| Country | France |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | I am working closely with Geraldine Vaughan and Claire Gheearts-Grafeuille at the university of Rouen. We will be developing a workshop in 2021, and talks have begun to formalise a research collaboration (perhaps in a funding grant). |
| Collaborator Contribution | Participants in the network (Alan Ford and Carys Brown) are publishing papers in a volume edited by Vaughan (Palgrave), which I reviewed. |
| Impact | Publications are not yet out. I will update them in subsequent years when they are. |
| Start Year | 2019 |
| Description | University of Rouen |
| Organisation | University of Rouen |
| Country | France |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | I am working closely with Geraldine Vaughan and Claire Gheearts-Grafeuille at the university of Rouen. We will be developing a workshop in 2021, and talks have begun to formalise a research collaboration (perhaps in a funding grant). |
| Collaborator Contribution | Participants in the network (Alan Ford and Carys Brown) are publishing papers in a volume edited by Vaughan (Palgrave), which I reviewed. |
| Impact | Publications are not yet out. I will update them in subsequent years when they are. |
| Start Year | 2019 |
| Description | Blog Series Discussing the Project |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Engagement focused website, blog or social media channel |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | Members of the network of scholars involved in the project wrote a series of blog posts about their research and the updated British Printed Images to 1700 website on the ManyHeadedMonster blog. This blog supports and promotes research into early modern history. It has a wide a diverse audience, combining academics from a range of disciplines with students, heritage professionals, and the wider public. The blogs were posted over a 4 week period in February and March 2025. They promoted the new BPI1700 website and opened up debate about the intellectual issues involved in historians using images in their research. Most importantly, they promoted our research to a broader audience. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2025 |
| URL | https://manyheadedmonster.com/2025/02/24/a-new-life-for-british-printed-images-to-1700/ |
| Description | Guides to Research available to the public |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Engagement focused website, blog or social media channel |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Undergraduate students |
| Results and Impact | The website (and database) attached to this project includes sections designed to help further research into printed images. These have been written to assist specialists and beginners alike. For example, one section includes a guide on how to use printed images in undergraduate history dissertations. These sections fulfil a core aim of the project: to integrate the use of visual sources into the practice of early modern historians. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024,2025 |
| URL | https://bpi1700.org.uk/research |