Dan Beaver

I am an early modern British historian, with interests in popular politics and religion during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. My research has focused on different forms and meanings of community in early modern England and its Atlantic plantations and on the nature of conflict in these communities. I have written on Gloucestershire parishes, on hunting and forest societies in southern England, and on the Cape Ann and Gloucester fishing plantations. My current project, entitled English Forests and Early Modern Literary Geographies, focuses on the interplay among imagined, discursive and narrative forests, and woodlands in England between the 1550s and the 1720s.

Recent Publications:

“Baseball, Modernity, and Science Discourse in British Popular Culture, 1871-1883,” Historical Journal, 65, 5 (2022), 1310-1332.

“Fruits of Unruly Multitudes: Popular Politics and Meanings of Violence in the English Atlantic, 1623-1625,” Journal of British Studies, 59, 2 (2020), 372-395.

“Stories and Verdicts: Maleficium, Judicial Process, and the Politics of Neighborliness on the Atlantic Margins,” Social History, 44, 3 (2019), 296-313.

Giles Geast Charity Account Book, 1558-1891 [an edition of the complete text [> 700 manuscript pages], introduction [> 20,000 words], and notes] (Gloucester: Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, 2017).

Awards and Service:

Fellow, Penn State Institute of Arts and Humanities (2005-2006)
Neale Colloquium: English Revolution and Its Legacies, University of London (2004)
NEH Institute Co-director, Space and Society in the Early Modern Atlantic World (2002)
Fellow, Royal Historical Society (2001)

Recent Courses:

HIST113 Baseball in Comparative History

HIST436 Great Britain Under the Tudors and Stuarts

HIST492 Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe

HIST537 Early Modern Atlantic World