As the 2023 coronation of King Charles III highlighted, oaths remain a feature of modern British public life. Indeed, though largely taken for granted, oaths and declarations continue to play a much wider role within many state agencies (e.g., cabinet government, parliaments, the judiciary, the magistracy, the armed forces, and the police force). Oaths also feature in other parts of life in the UK: professions including doctors, senior lawyers, and CoE ministers are still required to take oaths. Oaths are also a requirement of some civil society groups (e.g., the Scouts) and are required for membership of some mass-membership associations (e.g., Freemasonry and Orangeism). And since 2004, oaths have been performed at UK citizenship ceremonies up and down the country. Crucially, all these oaths are not just subscribed to in writing, but also performed in person, often in a public, ceremonial context.

 

In recent decades, early modern historians have advanced our understandings of oaths and oath-taking. As a result, we now have a much better understanding of the role of oaths in changing conceptions of the political community, evolving crown-subject/state-citizen relations, and in relation to generating trust during the upheavals of the seventeenth century and their aftermath. However, understanding the evolution and role of oaths over the longue durée (especially beyond the early eighteenth century) requires more attention, and without assuming they inevitably declined after their early modern heyday. While in the British context, the practice of national oath-taking led by the state declined after the early eighteenth century, oaths remained in common use for a wide variety of purposes. For example, oaths were ubiquitous in civil society, taken on a peer-to-peer basis on admission to friendly societies, trade unions, and various forms of voluntary association. Similarly, although the use of oaths as religious tests to disbar non-Anglicans from public office was largely dismantled in the nineteenth century, this does not explain the varied and continued use of written and oral oaths right up to the present day. Rather than charting a decline from an early modern peak and seeing oaths as an archaic practice that retains a residual presence today, we instead want to explore the different roles that oaths perform and have performed and why this has mattered in different temporal, geographic, social, and political contexts. 

 

Possible topics could include, but are not confined to

Language and rituals of oaths

Subversive oaths

Oaths and secrecy

Religious oaths and tests

Loyalty, the constitution, and the state

Assertory and promissory oaths

Perjury and oaths as legal instruments

Oaths and modernity

Oaths, business, and capitalism

Oaths, performance, practice, and behaviour

Oaths as speech acts

Oaths, vows, swearing, and promises

Oaths and dispute resolution

Oath and material culture

Literacy and oath taking

Oaths and the history of emotions

Resisting oaths

Conscience and notions of honour

Oaths and marriage 

Oaths and professionalism

Mundane / profane oaths

Comparative perspectives on oaths and oath-taking

 

We welcome proposals of c. 250 words (for 15-minute in-person presentations) concerning these or other topics, to be submitted, along with a short CV, by the end of Friday, 6 January 2025. The submissions should be sent to henry.miller@northumbria.ac.uk. Proposers will be informed of the outcome in early January 2025. Thanks to the generosity of the Social History Society and the Past & Present Society, we have some limited funding available to support travel and, if appropriate, accommodation, expenses costs of speakers: this will be reserved for those who are early career researchers, independent scholars, or in fixed term posts. If you wish to be considered for this financial support, please indicate your likely costs of attending the workshop; and we would also ask that you first draw on any internal sources to which you have access