Preliminary Programme

This paper seeks to do two things. One, it seeks to enlarge our conventional definitions of social elite to include those members of the sixteenth and seventeenth-century English rule society who were below the level of the gentry, but nonetheless operated as their communities’ leading members. Two, it demonstrates how family reconstitution, a methodological preserve of historic demographers, in conjunction with parish reconstitution, can not only identify members of this small and typically hidden group of rural villagers, but can also place them into their family and political networks in such a manner as to allow for the partial reconstruction of their social life and world. (Show less)

This paper stems from an on-going 3-year research project into the gender identity of elite males in England, c. 1700-c.1900. It is based on the family papers of 15 landed estate-owning families, and offers insights into social, cultural, normative and behavioural practices that shaped the identity of gentry males over three centuries. In the course of this research we have identified a number of interpretative and methodological problems, which we believe are relevant to the themes of this strand.
The paper considers these two types of problems:
1) Interpretative Problems:
• Problems of distribution – surviving correspondence is not distributed evenly between family members, or across generations. This reflects accidents of survival, but also structural weaknesses in collections, favouring relationships that drew letters into a familial archive over those that dispersed them.
• Problems of distribution in the life-cycle –some points in the life-cycle generated more (surviving) letters than others: later school years, university, courtship, and correspondence with children as young adults, often immediately after marriage or entering business/professions. There is much less evidence about those remaining within the domestic family, during early childhood, after marriages of eldest sons, and between husbands and wives.
• Problems of self-selection – often only the more diligent children wrote home. Open or prolonged disputes were relatively rare, and aberrant family members tended not to correspond.
• Problems of self-censorship – correspondence is skewed towards some subjects (social events, money, children, health, politics, religion, travel, and family gossip), and away from others (sex, detailed emotional revelations, extended considerations of abstract concepts – such as ‘manliness’ – or detail about the distribution of power/authority in the household/family).
These create two deeper problems of omission and evasion. Diligent children often ‘echoed’ the values prescribed by their parents, often merely telling their parents what they thought they wanted to hear. Similarly, correspondents whose perspectives or values were well known often wrote letters in which such norms remain tantalizingly implicit, and unarticulated.
2) Methodological Problems:
These omissions, evasions, and implicit meanings force us to uncover sub-texts, implied cultural norms beneath the ‘official transcript’ of familial values. In reconstructing expressions of gender identity, we become prisoners of the subjectivities of our correspondents but, can use these subjectivities to understand the values and practices implied in this process of self-presentation, self-censorship or ‘self-writing’.
Consequently, we have supplemented our basic source critiques with a second level of analysis:
• Reconstructing the ‘field’ of gender-subjects, and the family ‘grammar’ that underpinned their discussion – to identify embedded assumptions upon which these discussions were founded.
• Comparative analysis relating these observed norms to those expressed in other sample families, and over time, with comparable situations at other periods in the same family or others in the sample.
• The central interpretative endeavour, to relate these ‘surface-level’ values to mid-level ‘conjunctural’ gender norms about fashion, civility, gentility, courtesy or taste, and then to deeper-level fundamentals of identity, notably ‘manly’ perennials such as honour, virtue, wisdom and courage. (Show less)

What acquired and inherited resources do individuals, who manage to be admitted to the most sought after areas of the educational system or who establish themselves at the most prominent positions within professional fields, possess? And how do these possessions change over time? In the paper, we try to answer this question by examining, on the one hand, the social recruitment the most dominant school of fine arts in Sweden, the Royal University College of Fine Arts in Stockholm, and, on the other hand, the social recruitment the most dominant positions in the field of artists in Stockholm. Our time period stretches from 1938 to 2007. This paper outlines our research model—arguing for a strong relation between the study of elite schools and the study of the dominant positions in the fields—and especially our construction and use of prosopography (collective biographies). In focus are 1 137 students in one elite school and 851 artists in leading positions in the field of art. (Show less)

The names of the clubs, associations, and coteries are legion in the modern world. The historiographical passage from social history, through the linguistic turn and beyond has been fraught. This paper considers such associations as the Royal Society, The Synthethic Society, and Bloomsbury to should how a social history of modern elites can be written whichy combines the study of classificatory categories with the study of discourses. It should how far one can go in the study of such groups without separating incident from sentiment. (Show less)

The paper reports on conclusion of a fundamental research devoted to the formation of the intelligence (learned profession - Bildungsbürgertum) in Moravia and Silesia in the 2nd half of the 19th and the beginning of the 20.th century. Extensive research was methodologically carried out from Population and Housing Census 1857, 1880, 1890 and 1910, family reconstruction, parish reconstruction and others methods of the social history. The research was carried out in the selected locations: Moravian Ostrava (new administration centre of the industrial region), Opava (regional capital city of the Austrian Silesia), Olomouc (administrative city, centre of church administration, garrison city), Místek (stagnating town with textile industry) and Vítkovice (dynamically developing municipality). According to the evidence obtained was made conclusions not only to quantitative development of the monitored social group, but in particular to describe the national structure, religious denomination, professional specialization, territorial mobility as well as the standard of living. Based on the others sources we will deal with in brief with typical professional careers of representatives of individual profession. The paper will also deal with engagement of representatives of intelligence in the municipal politics and associations at the time of nationalization of the society. Attention will also be paid to the high proportion of males of Jewish confession working as doctors and attorneys. Also everyday life of the monitored social group will be described. I would like to discuss about this methodological questions and issues. (Show less)