Dr Danae Tankard

Reader in Social History

About

I am a social and cultural historian of 17th-century Sussex. My publication outputs are characterised by micro-analyses which investigate the social, material and spatial worlds of non-elite men and women. I have recently completed a monograph on seventeenth-century clothing entitled Clothing in 17th-century Provincial England (Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2020) which explores the production and consumption of clothing in 17th century Sussex. I am now working on a study of late 17th century Chichester provisionally entitled ‘Factionalism and Dissent in Late Seventeenth-Century Chichester’ and also on a scholarly edition of the 1649-50 parliamentary survey of Cathedral owned properties in the city. I am General Editor of the Sussex Record Society and an editorial board member of Sussex Archaeological Collections.

I currently teach:

A Social History of Early Modern England (L5)
Commerce and Consumption in Early Modern England (L6)
The Cultural History of Death (L6)
British Cultural History (L7, team taught)
I am the programme coordinator for the MA Cultural History.

General Editor and council member, Sussex Record Society
Editorial board member, Sussex Archaeological Collections
Committee member, British Academy Hearth Tax Project
Editorial advisory group, Chichester Papers
Member, West Sussex Record Office User Forum
Member, Sussex Archaeological Society
Member, Vernacular Architecture Group

Key Publications

Books

Clothing in17th-century Provincial England (Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2020).

Houses of the Weald and Downland: people and houses of south-east England, c.1300-1900 (Lancaster, 2012).

With A Miles and W White), Burial at the site of the parish church of St Benet Sherehog before and after the Great Fire: Excavations at 1 Poultry, City of London (London, 2008).

Research articles and essays

‘The House’ in A Flather (ed), A Cultural History of the Home in the Renaissance (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), 59-81.

‘“A garden to every cottage”: cottage gardens and the nineteenth-century agricultural labourer’, The Agricultural History Review 67:2 (2019), 227-248.

‘Housing and social status in early seventeenth-century Chichester: a case study of the parish of All Saints in the Pallant’, Sussex Archaeological Collections 157 (2019), 213-228.

‘“Flowered silk is little worn but gold and silver striped is much worn”: metropolitan clothing consumption in late seventeenth-century Sussex’ in T Dean, G Parry & E Vallance (eds), Faith, Place and People in Early Modern England: Essays in Honour of Margaret Spufford (Woodbridge, 2018), 153-174.

‘“Buttons no bigger than nutmegs”: the clothing of country gentlemen, c1660-1715’, Cultural & Social History 14:1 (2017), 1-16.

‘Late sixteenth-century domestic wall painting: an example from Fittleworth, West Sussex’, Sussex Archaeological Collections 154 (2016), 195-208.

‘“They tell me they were in fashion last year”: Samuel & Elizabeth Jeake & clothing fashions in late 17th century London & Rye’, Costume 50:1 (2016), 20-41

‘Giles Moore’s clothes: the clothing of a Sussex rector, 1656-1679’, Costume 49:1(2015), 32-54.

‘“I think myself honestly decked”: attitudes to the clothing of the rural poor in seventeenth-century England’, Rural History 26: 1 (2015), 1-17.

‘Form and function in the late medieval rural house’ in K Giles & M Svart Kristiansen (eds), Houses – shaping dwellings, identities and homes. European housing culture from the Viking age to the Renaissance (Jutland Archaeological Society, 2014), 163-173.

‘“A pair of grass-green woollen stockings”: the clothing of the rural poor in seventeenth-century Sussex’, Textile History 43: 1 (2012), 5-22.

‘The regulation of cottage building in seventeenth-century Sussex’, The Agricultural History Review 59: 1 (2011), 18-35.

‘The Weald & Downland Open Air Museum 1970 to 2010’, The Local Historian 40: 4 (2010), 281-291.

‘Graffham and Woolavington potters, tilemakers and brickmakers, c.1590-1740’, Sussex Archaeological Collections 146 (2008), 175-188.

‘Reformation in the parishes: St Mary le Bow and its associated parishes’ in M Byrne and G R Bush (eds), St Mary le Bow: A History (Barnsley, 2007), 119-152.

‘The Johnson family and the Reformation, 1542-52’, Historical Research 80 (2007), 469-490.

‘Defining death in early Tudor England’, Cultural & Social History 3:1 (2006), 1-20.

‘Protestantism, the Johnson family and the 1551 Sweat in London’, The London Journal 29: 2 (2004), 1-16.

‘The reformation of the deathbed in mid sixteenth-century England’, Mortality 8:3 (2003), 251-267.

Research

I am a social and cultural historian of 17th century. For the last few years I have been working on 17th century clothing, focusing on the production and consumption of clothing in Sussex (now published as Clothing in 17th-century Provincial England, Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2020). I am now working on a study of late 17th century Chichester provisionally entitled ‘Factionalism and Dissent in Late Seventeenth-Century Chichester’ and on a scholarly edition of the 1649-50 parliamentary survey of Cathedral owned properties in the city.

I am General Editor of the Sussex Record Society and an editorial board member of Sussex Archaeological Collections. I am one of three editors and introducers of the East Sussex Hearth Tax volume which forms part of the British Academy Hearth Tax Project (in preparation, British Academy/ Sussex Record Society, 2022).

Between 2005 and 2016 I worked at the Weald & Downland Living Museum, initially as a research associate on a Knowledge Transfer Partnership with the University of Reading (2005-2008) and subsequently part time as the museum’s social historian. In these roles I worked on aspects of rural social history from circa 1300 to 1900, including housing, households, material culture and social structure. Some of this research was published in my monograph, Houses of the Weald and Downland: people and houses of south-east England, c.1300-1900 (Lancaster, 2012).