Micro-Internship Programme

For several years now, our project has been periodically supervising student-internships around the broad theme of ‘Early Modern Parliamentary Culture’ as part of the University of Oxford’s Micro-Internship Programme. To us, the team members, it has been one of the most enjoyable, rewarding and thought-provoking sides of this ongoing project. We hope the same applies to the wonderful students we have had the joy of supervising (our project was awarded a Gold Badge as host on several occasions).

 

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Verlesung der Augsburger Konfession vor Kaiser Karl V (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

 

The Micro-Internship Programme consists of 5-day voluntary learning and development opportunities for Oxford University students at all levels. The aim is to develop these students’ employability skills, add to their CV and offer them the opportunity to make new professional contacts. In the process, they contribute to ongoing academic research, in our case on the cultural side of representative assemblies across Europe and beyond in the period between c.1500 and c.1700.

 

Some themes that the interns have explored are:

•       The place of representative assemblies in Jean Bodin’s Six Books of the Commonwealth, comparing the French (1576, 1583, 1591), Latin (1586) and English (1606) editions

•       European discussions of Indigenous assembly cultures in Claude d’Abéville’s Histoire de la mission des Pères capucins en l'isle de Maragnan (1614), as well as the subsequent Svitte de l'histoire des choses plvs memorables aduenuës en Maragan, és annees 1613. & 1614 (1615) by Yves d’Évreux.

•       Transnational references to parliamentary institutions in Robert Beverley’s The History and Present State of Virginia (1705)

•       Historical parallels with the Polish Sejm in Jan Kochanowski’s Odprawa posłów greckich (The Dismissal of the Greek Envoys, 1565-66)

•       Historical references to the Cortes in Núñez de Castro, Libro historico político, solo Madrid es Corte y el Cortesano en Madrid, Madrid (1675)

•       Transnational political thought in William Penn’s An Essay towards the Present and Future Peace of Europe, by the Establishment of an European Dyet, Parliament, or Estates (1693)

 

We are grateful to the students for their enthusiasm, commitment and insightful reflections. The internships have already contributed towards several of our publications (with due credit in the acknowledgements).