Since its nineteenth-century rediscovery, the _Très Riches Heures_ has been endowed with mythic status, its cultural capital facilitated by serial reproductions. A 2025 exhibition in Chantilly, publicized as a “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunity to see the manuscript in person, contributed further to this proliferation of replications and to the book’s attendant aura. One image looms especially large in this procession of fragmentary simulacra: the opening miniature, representing January, which has become a totem for the entire book.

This paper explores how solitude in early modern Britain was understood in gendered ways, focusing especially on women’s experiences of solitude. There has been much historical work on community and on networks, relationships, and friendships at all levels of early modern society. But in privileging these communal aspects of daily life, there has been a tendency to neglect those quieter and more transient moments that are often silenced and hidden from the historical record. What women did when they were out of company remains an overlooked topic.

Almost four decades ago, theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick identified an epistemological tension between what she characterized as ‘minoritizing’ tendencies where conceptualizations of sexuality are concerned, and ‘universalizing’ ones. For historians of sexuality, this insight has been enabling in several ways, including helping to clarify the stakes in longstanding debates between those who are committed to historicizing the emergence of lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer consciousness, including transgender consciousness, and those who remain suspicious of identitarianism as such.

Join for a panel discussion with H.E. Vikram Doraiswami, High Commissioner of India to the United Kingdom, and Mr. Sunil Kant Munjal, Chairman of Hero Enterprise, on 'Into India and South Asia: Culture, Commerce, and the Future of UK-India Relations'.

The discussion will be followed by a drinks reception.

Please register by 13th October 2025.

Sponsored by Mr. Sean Tiwari and Mr. Meenu Malhotra DL, Honorary Consul General of India and Chairman of Malhotra Group PLC.

This roundtable brings together women's, gender and queer historians from a variety of generations to ask, 'what did you do last summer?' MSt and doctoral students, early career researchers, and postholders, new and familiar, are all welcome.

Convened by Sarah Knott, with contributions from Matt Cook, Mori Reithmayr, Tehila Sasson, Hannah Stovin, Emily West, and Grace Whorrall-Campbell.

We are test-driving the new Schwarzman Centre, and meet initially in History's large Seminar Room on the building's 2nd floor.

A roundtable that brings together activist, political and historical perspectives on 'care', in the later 20th century and today.