PULLIN Naomi

Assistant Professor in Early Modern British History.

Department of History, University of Warwick.

Research expertise

The early modern British Atlantic, with particular interests in the gender, religious and political history of Britain and its North American colonies; the relationship between sociability and solitude in early modern Britain and how gender determined ideas and experiences of solitude in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Britain; the concept of enmity in the early modern British Atlantic and  the experience of female enmity in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain and North America.

Contributions

Concepts

Enemies and false friends

Friendship held an important place in the long eighteenth century. But one of the major challenges of everyday life was identifying friends from enemies. Few periodicals or treatises explicitly dealt with the subject of enmity, but it was always a central feature of the literature on friendship from this period, which contained abundant warnings about the perils of false friendship. The deepest enmities resulted from the closest friendships. Yet the candour and honesty of enemies had important social utilities. Probing the association between enmity and friendship opens up discussion about the tensions inherent in the sociability described, performed, and enacted during this period.

Solitude

How individuals managed solitude, used their time alone productively, and made the transition between solitude and sociability in their daily lives were topics continuously addressed in writings from the long-eighteenth century. There was no vocabulary for loneliness in this period, but solitude was a state often associated with melancholy and thus frequently employed in a negative sense. A range of eighteenth-century writers warned about the effects of social isolation on spiritual, physical, and mental wellbeing.

Concepts