New book and professorship

Michaël Green has been appointed professor at the University of Lodz in Poland and has just published his book:

Le Grand Tour 1701-1703. Lettres de Henry Bentinck et de son précepteur Paul Rapin-Thoyras, à Hans Willem Bentinck. Édition critique établie par Michael Green, series: Vie des Huguenots, vol. 89, Paris: Honoré Champion, 2021. 376p. ISBN 9782745355393 

This book contains letters written during the Grand Tour 1701-1703 to Hans Willem Bentinck, the Earl of Portland and a prominent Anglo-Dutch politician, by his son, the nineteen-year-old Henry Bentinck, Viscount Woodstock, as well as Henry’s tutor, Paul Rapin-Thoyras, who would later be known for his L’Histoire d’Angleterre. The Grand Tour, an educational journey aimed at strengthening the family ties of the Bentincks, took place during the first stages of the War of the Spanish Succession. In his introduction, Michael Green focuses on aspects of privacy and private life seen in the correspondence, and reflects both on the customs of the various countries the travelling party visited and on the personal feelings of the travellers. Furthermore, the book features an important discussion on the process by which these letters were copied and preserved, with many letters being omitted from this process. These omissions form in themselves, as the author argues, a question of the protection of privacy. This book is of interest not only to scholars of private life, but also for military historians, historians of political life and the postal service, and of course those who are interested in the history of early modern travel.

As of 1 August 2021, Michael Green has been appointed professor at the University of Lodz in the Institute of History, where he will work on his project dedicated to the history of daily and private life in the early modern Dutch, Danish-Norwegian, and Polish territories. Drawing on egodocuments (documents written by oneself about oneself), he will evaluate similarities and differences between perceptions of private life in these three different territories, which nonetheless maintained cultural and political links. Particular emphasis will be placed on the manner in which individuals from various religious communities wrote about their personal affairs.