What did it mean to feel safe or secure for early modern populations? How did people persist and build futures for themselves and their families in challenging conditions? This workshop aims to fill a key gap in our knowledge of how people created conditions to feel safe during times of existential danger or crisis in early modern Europe.
Safety and security can be defined in multiple ways: economic, social, political, physical, psychological, cultural and emotional. In the context of modern history, especially as it pertains to twentieth-century constructions of ‘risk’, there is now an established literature on the development of health and safety in workplaces, insurance and risk, ‘risk society’, including nuclear anxieties and environmental concerns, and in relation to child-rearing and childhood opportunities, where children’s ‘worlds’ are reduced by safety concerns. Within colonial contexts, there is a literature on ‘cultural safety’ and its absence, as a dimension of security for marginalised groups. There is some work on early modern security, particularly in relation to political and national security, physical safety, and individual freedoms, and growing work on economic insecurity and its impacts. Religion is an important part of this story, but people not only lived for the next life but the one on earth. Parents imagined futures for their children; children hoped for themselves; families aspired to long lineages and survival over generations.
This workshop hopes to build on and expand this foundational research to consider how early modern people acquired the social and emotional resources to persist ‘at the end of the world’.
Registration is now open: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc9Z9IU65dL7EmcZlZMRQDQyMkWrbg-CFxzU29Cx1SdMzHZEw/viewform
Registrations close: 31 October 2026.