British Printed Images to 1700: Integrating Visual Sources into Historical Practice

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 The BPI web archive was constructed between 2006 and 2009 using servers and other software that is now 15 years' out of date.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?