Early modern history personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

What pulled me towards the early modern period was a set of transcribed parish registers I found while looking for something else entirely. I had been searching for material for a coursework project on local industry and instead read the burial entries for a Warwickshire village in the 1590s, where the number of deaths rose sharply across two winters. The names meant nothing to me, but the pattern did, and I wanted to know what caused it: harvest failure, disease, or simply better record-keeping by a new curate. That question turned out to be exactly the kind of problem early modern historians argue about, and I found I enjoyed the arguing more than the tidy answer. Since then I have been drawn to the period because it sits at the point where ordinary people begin to leave written traces of themselves. Wills, inventories, churchwardens' accounts and depositions were not written for historians, which makes them awkward and valuable at once. I am interested in how belief, law and household economy pressed on each other between roughly 1500 and 1700, particularly in England but also in the wider European context of confessional division and expanding trade. Reading Keith Thomas on popular belief showed me how carefully evidence of thought and custom has to be handled when the people involved left no explanation of themselves. I want three years to work at that properly, with languages, palaeography and the historiography that frames the questions, rather than skimming the period as one module among many.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

My A levels are History, English Literature and Religious Studies, which have turned out to support each other more than I expected. In History I have studied Tudor England and the Russian revolutions, and the contrast has been useful: the Tudor topic depends on fragmentary and often partisan sources, while the twentieth-century material buries you in evidence and forces you to select. My coursework compared interpretations of Elizabethan religious settlement, and reading Eamon Duffy alongside older accounts taught me that a historiographical shift can rest on taking a previously ignored body of evidence seriously. English Literature has made me slower and more attentive as a reader. Working on Jacobean drama, I became interested in how contemporaries talked about credit, reputation and household authority, which is not the same as knowing what they did, but is evidence in itself. Religious Studies has given me vocabulary for doctrinal disputes that are easy to flatten into labels; understanding what was actually at stake in arguments about the sacraments makes the persecutions of the sixteenth century less baffling. Outside the syllabus I have been teaching myself to read secretary hand using a free online tutorial, starting with sixteenth-century wills. It is slow and I still lose whole words, but I can now get through a short probate inventory, and seeing what people owned at death has changed how I imagine the period.

What else have you done to prepare outside of education, and why are these experiences useful?

On weekday evenings I help look after my younger brother, who has autism and needs a predictable routine. That has shaped how I work: I revise in defined blocks between five and seven, and I plan coursework weeks ahead because I cannot rely on a free evening appearing. It has also made me better at explaining things, since I often have to break a task into steps and try a second and third approach when the first does not land. I use the same habit when I am stuck on a difficult article, rewriting the argument in my own words before deciding whether I agree with it. I work Saturdays on the tills and plant benches at a garden centre, which involves a lot of patient conversation with customers who want advice rather than a product. Once a month I help at a heritage open day at our parish church, mostly setting out chairs, directing visitors and answering basic questions about the building. The church has a Tudor tower and some defaced medieval stonework, and explaining the damage to visitors made me look properly into iconoclasm and how uneven its enforcement was. I have also joined a local history society, where I am much the youngest member and have learned a great deal from people who have spent years with the county record office. A talk there on seventeenth-century poor relief prompted me to read about parish settlement disputes, which is now the area I would most like to study further.

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