Dr Charmian Mansell

I am an historian of early modern England with interests in the histories of work, gender and society. My research is primarily concerned with recovering everyday experiences and identities of ordinary people from legal records. 

My first book, Female Servants in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 2024) asks: what was it like to be a woman in service in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England? Drawing on evidence recorded in church court testimony, the book excavates experiences of over a thousand female servants between 1532 and 1649. It highlights the importance of female servants' labour to the wider economy and their key role in broader social networks and communities.

I am currently working on a new project titled ‘Everyday Travel and Communities in Early Modern England’, which was supported by a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Cambridge between 2019 and 2024. I am interested in tracing everyday, quotidian journeys made by early modern people – men and women, rich and poor – that took them beyond the boundary of parish. The project stretches the geography of community and its features, expanding our understanding of the spatial horizons of early modern people.

I joined the University of Sheffield in September 2024. Before then, I held a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Cambridge. I was a Research Associate on the AHRC-funded ‘Legacies of the British Slave Trade’ project at University College London and was a Lecturer in Early Modern British History at Queen Mary, University of London. I held a Women in Humanities Writing Fellowship at the University of Oxford in 2018 and was a Research Associate on the Leverhulme-funded ‘Women’s Work in Rural England, 1500-1700’ project the University of Exeter that same year. Upon completion of my PhD at the University of Exeter in 2016, I was awarded a one-year Junior Research Fellowship by the Economic History Society which I held at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London.

I have held US library fellowships at the Huntington Library (Pasadena, California) and the Folger Shakespeare Library (Washington DC). I am a series editor of ‘Women on the Move’, a book series published by Manchester University Press and annual reviewer for periodical literature of the period 1500-1700 for The Economic History Review.