IASH would like to warmly welcome Dr Charlotte-Rose Millar who commenced with us on Monday. Charlotte, who was last year awarded a UQ Postdoctoral Fellowship, comes to us from the University of Melbourne where she been tutoring and working as a part-time research assistant in the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions 1100-1800, becoming an Associate Investigator with that Centre. Charlotte is an award-winning scholar and early modern historian. Her 2015 article on sexual activity between witches and devils has been labelled as the definitive piece on the issue.
Charlotte’s current project is titled “Reforming Love, Sex and Desire: Everyday Attitudes to Marriage in the Wake of the English Reformation.” It examines the mentalities of ordinary men and women in early modern England and explores how they constructed and experienced their sexual relationships, how they viewed the role of love, sex and desire in marriage and the extent to which they conformed to changing theological condemnations of illicit sex. Through examining how religious change at a popular, theological and legal level affected popular attitudes towards love, sex, and marriage, the project contributes to religious history, histories of sexuality and histories of emotions—key research areas within the Institute. The objective of the project is to contribute to contemporary debates about the nature of marriage by looking at the period in which current marriage practices were formed.
