Call for papers for a session on customs for the celebration of the end of Harvest
Is anyone interested in joining in a panel proposal for Rural History 2025 on the celebration of the harvest, the way that the forms of celebrations and customs changed over time and especially under the impact of mechanisation and the social and political contexts revealed by changing harvest customs?
As a foundation I am offering a paper on the Harvest Home in southern England, c.1850-1870 showing how the ‘traditional’ forms this took were contested and tamed, with a greater involvement of gentry and clergy and a shift away from harvests homes held on the farm or the public house to disciplined and organized harvest homes run at parochial or estate level.
Proposals of papers on the celebration of the end of harvest elsewhere in the British Isles or Europe, or perhaps North American, at any period, would be welcome. Suggestions to Richard Hoyle, r.w.hoyle@reading.ac.uk by 12 October.
Call for papers for a projected session on farm accounts in British and European agriculture.
At Uppsala in 2022 Federico D’Onofrio and Nathalie Joly ran two sessions on farm and estate accounts. The book arising from those sessions is now in press and should appear in good time for September 2025. One or two papers are invited for a book launch session centered on the book. Details from Federico D’Onofrio (donofrioinnl@gmail.com) and or Nathalie Joly (nathalie.joly@agrosupdijon.fr). Papers should look at the form and purpose of accounts rather than employ accounts to describe individual farms or agricultural practices. Discussions of attempts to persuade farmers to keep accounts, or accounts according to double-entry bookkeepinging rules, are welcome.
There has always been a strong British contingent at the Rural History conferences (and those with longer memories will recall that the BAHS ran the first of this series of conferences at the University of Sussex in 2010). We would very much wish to maintain that presence and hope to see many British colleagues at the meeting.
The conference website can be found at ruralhistory2025.org.
Richard Hoyle
3 October 2024