RHN 138/2024 | Call
Organiser: Richard Hoyle (University of Reading)
9–12 September 2025, Rural History 2025, Coimbra, Portugal
Deadline for abstract submission: 12 October 2025
Rural History 2025 Session Proposal
Customs for the Celebration of the End of Harvest
The deadline for the submission of panel proposals for the Rural History Conference in Coimbra, Portugal, in September 2025 has been extended. Here we offer an invitation to agricultural and rural historians to join a proposed panel.
Is anyone interested in joining in a panel proposal for Rural History 2025 on the celebration of the harvest, the way that the forms of celebrations and customs changed over time and especially under the impact of mechanisation and the social and political contexts revealed by changing harvest customs?
As a foundation I am offering a paper on the Harvest Home on southern England, c.1850-1870 showing how the ‘traditional’ forms this took were contested and tamed, with a greater involvement of gentry and clergy and a shift away from harvest homes held on the farm or the public house to disciplined and organized harvest homes run at parochial or estate level.
Proposals of papers on the celebration of the end of harvest elsewhere in the British Isles or Europe, or perhaps North American, at any period, would be welcome. Suggestions to Richard Hoyle, r.w.hoyle@reading.ac.uk by 12 October.