bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Gilbertine Economy
Authors: Golding Brian
Published: November 2023

Like all religious communities in medieval England, the economy and material prosperity of the Gilbertine priories was determined by the quantity and quality of their landed possessions, both arable and pastoral. They relied for their income on a portfolio of assets which included profits from the sale of agricultural produce (wool in particular) from their demesne land, ideally organized in granges; proceeds from spiritualia, which usually comprised revenues from glebe land and, where appropriation had proved possible, the greater tithes of the parish, as well as offerings at the altar; manorial perquisites such as fines and customary payments; rents from property that had been either permanently alienated or temporarily demised, and which might include payments from urban property; and incidental sources of income, of which the possession of mills and fisheries was probably the most significant. The relative importance of these commodities fluctuated according to prevailing economic conditions in the country at large, but were also determined by a number of other criteria, amongst which the scale of endowments (which was itself governed, as we have seen, by various factors) was the most influential.
George Lansbury
Authors: Shepherd John
Published: November 2023

The most lovable figure in modern politics was how A.J.P Taylor described the Christian pacifist, George Lansbury. At 73 he took over the helm of the Labour Party of only 46 MPs in the Depression years of the 1930s. Throughout a remarkable life, Lansbury remained an extraordinary politician of the people, associated with a multitude of crusades for social justice. He resigned from Parliament to support 'Votes for Women', and for the next ten years edited the fiery Daily Herald. In 1921 Lansbury led the 'Poplar Rates Rebellion' - when thirty Labour councillors went willingly to prison in defiance of the government, the courts and their own party leadership. As Labour leader, Lansbury was known universally as a committed socialist an implacable opponent of capitalism and imperialism. He never sought personal wealth, travelled everywhere by public transport, and made his home in impoverished East London. His final years were spent in a tireless international peace crusade to prevent the drift towards another world war. In this major new biography, John Shepherd draws on an impressive range of research to reconstruct the life of a charismatic Labour pioneer. He reaffirms George Lansbury's standing at the heart of Old Labour and his importance to British politics as a whole.
Socialist Propagandist, 1892–1903
Authors: Shepherd John
Published: November 2023

In the1930s, George Lansbury looked back on a long life, spent mostly in the labour movement, in which he ‘tried to fight the good fight’. In a private note to his family, he set out his simple personal philosophy in near-visionary terms, a universe for ordinary people based on love and service for one another, inspired by an enduring Christian faith. He recognized he would leave ‘very little wealth in the ordinary sense in which men use that word’ but, instead, ‘a wealth of love and high endeavour which in a tiny way I have enjoyed with others’.
Parliamentary Contests, 1900–1910
Authors: Shepherd John
Published: November 2023

In his memoirs George Lansbury recalled that as a child he wrote his name in a church prayer book as ‘George Lansbury MP’ and probably added the name of an East End constituency. Other early memories, besides witnessing the hurly-burly of the political hustings at Greenwich during the 1868 general election, included the popular agitation that engulfed London during the remarkable case of the Tich borne Claimant in the 1870s. The young Lansbury was in the vast and frenzied crowd that tried to gain entry to the court at Westminster where the Tichborne claimant’s case was being heard. Some of the great debates on the Eastern Question between Gladstone and Disraeli in the late 1870s, as already noted, also made an enduring impression on the young labourer from the East End who watched spell bound from the Strangers’ Gallery of the House of Commons.
Introduction
Authors: Davies J D
Published: November 2023

The seventeenth-century Royal Navy has always seemed something of a poor relation beside its sixteenth- and eighteenth-century counterparts. It gained no immortal triumphs on the scale of the Armada fight or Trafalgar; it left no Mary Rose to raise and no Victory to preserve; even Robert Blake did not quite live on in the popular imagination as Drake or Nelson did. However, if the navy of the seventeenth century has been neglected by posterity, its true worth was always recognized by its own contemporaries. As one pamphlet put it, the fleet was ‘the bulwark of our British dominions, the sole fence of our Country’.
Religion, Family, and Sex: the Private Crisis of the 1840s
Authors: Matthew H C G
Published: November 2023

When I compare my convictions in religion, and the mercies that have been poured upon me, with the extraordinary tenacity of the evil in me, the fruit without doubt of indulgence, I cannot but deeply believe that my debt to the justice of God is the very heaviest that can be conceived: for have I not after all suffered that sin which I have described to have its habitation & to find its food in me, and could it have been covered by such flimsy pretexts but for an extreme corruption? The pursuit of knowledge, the desire of estimating different periods & states of the moral and religious life of man, the hope of doing good to the persons living in sin: of all these I had utterly failed to discern the proper bounds, and had sometimes perhaps often lost even these from view when once upon the train of thought on imagery of which they might have first effected the introduction.
The First Government: Ireland, Education, and External Policy
Authors: Matthew H C G
Published: November 2023

That Gladstone regarded the premiership which began in December 1868 as his last as well as his first, can hardly be doubted by any reader of his journal. Anticipation of retirement is perhaps the most frequently reiterated theme in moments of recorded private reflection and in hints in private correspondence. The foreknowledge of the dramas of subsequent decades should not warp the reader’s perspective on Gladstone’s attitude of mind as he kissed hands as First Lord of the Treasury, thus becoming Prime Minister of the only world power. Politically, Gladstone’s view was consistent. For the previous two decades he had seen politics and policies from the perspective of the Treasury. As Chancellor of the Exchequer he had been the codifier, legislator, and guardian of the canons of Peelite finance.
The Midlothian Campaign
Authors: Matthew H C G
Published: November 2023

The Midlothian Campaign of 1878-80 was the culmination of a political drama which broadened gradually and sometimes hesitantly from the relatively limited issue of ‘the Bulgarian Horrors’ in 1876 to the wholesale condemnation of innovative Toryism. A former Prime Minister leading a great popular crusade was a new phenomenon in European politics, and before examining the substance of the objections to Beaconsfieldism, some comment on the nature of the campaign is necessary.
Private Life in Retirement
Authors: Matthew H C G
Published: November 2023

Gladstone’s resignation of the premiership in February 1874 ended his £5,000 p.a. salary and left him with a shortage of ready cash. As we have seen in an earlier volume, he only had £1,000 p.a. Tor all general expenditure whatsoever’. This was by no means poverty, but out of it he was maintaining Hawarden Castle and 11 Carlton House Terrace, a big house in the smartest area of London, and, as we shall see, most of his children, now all adults. The announcement in 1875 of formal retirement from politics thus related to a major change in domestic arrangements, a move from the plush fashion of the Carlton House area to a—relatively—cheaper and less grand house in Harley Street.
The Second Gladstone Government, 1880-1885: Retirement, Cabinet, and Party
Authors: Matthew H C G
Published: November 2023

We have seen how in Midlothian did Gladstone ‘hammer with all my little might at the fabric of the present Tory power’. The result of the general election of March and April 1880 was a Liberal majority over the Conservatives of 137, with the Irish Home Rulers winning 65 seats, an even more spectacular victory than the Liberal majority of between 56 and 76 which Gladstone had calculated in November 1878 as likely from the evidence of by-elections† Elected comfortably, as predicted in Midlothian, and, without visiting the constituency, overwhelmingly in Leeds‡ Gladstone went secretly from Edinburgh to Hawarden, rejecting plans for a triumphal entry into London-mindful perhaps of his trenchant condemnation of the Roman triumph of Beaconsfield and Salisbury in 1878§-and soon began an article on the Tory debacle.
Domestic Policy in the 1880s
Authors: Matthew H C G
Published: November 2023

Gladstone supervised the domestic and legislative policy of his second government from four perspectives. As Prime Minister he had an overall responsibility for balance and content. As Chancellor of the Exchequer (until December 1882) he was responsible, at the least, for raising revenue and controlling expenditure. As Leader of the House of Commons, he was in charge of the strategic and tactical conduct of the legislative programme and of the proper working of the Commons, involving daily and usually lengthy attendance there. Lastly, as the chief force behind several of the Government’s major bills, he was responsible for arguing their case at second reading and for seeing them through the Committee stage.
Gladstone and Ireland 1875-1885
Authors: Matthew H C G
Published: November 2023

In 1921 the British government, sustained by a Conservative-dominated coalition, signed a treaty with the Irish Free State, already a de facto republic, thus effectively admitting the end of union between the United Kingdom and most of lreland. Such an outcome would have been regarded by any member of any British Cabinet of the 1880s, and certainly by Gladstone, as an utter failure for British policy.
The Daily Round: Court, Patronage, and the Commons
Authors: Matthew H C G
Published: November 2023

We have thus far looked at the high ground occupied by Gladstone in this period, a ground marked out by the ‘special causes’ which retained him in political life. His own view was that those special causes were external to himself, causes objectively given by the process of politics. Yet in the 1880s that process was so dominated by his own political personality and so shaped by his distinctive style of rhetorical leadership that it is hard and probably unhistorical to try to separate the personality and the process. Gladstone seems to have underrated the extent to which the force of his political personality in itself shaped those causes, and it is in that underestimation that we find the key to what otherwise can seem like a dis-ingenuous series of excuses for not keeping his word about retiring.
Leading the Liberal Party, 1887-1892
Authors: Matthew H C G
Published: November 2023

The dominance of ‘Ireland’ in this period of Gladstone’s life. is obvious enough. The circumstances of 1886 gave Gladstone, as he saw it, a clear role: the duty of leading a Liberal majority to pass a second and successful Government of Ireland Bill. The Home Rulers would show the genuineness of their commitment to a devolved Assembly, their moderation the more remarkable under the provocation of Unionist coercion; the purged Liberal party would win the next general election outright with a significant majority, and would pass a Government of Ireland Bill (with the Home Rulers in support but at a distance) which the Lords would not dare reject; Gladstone would then retire.
Introduction
Authors: Sheehan James J
Published: November 2023

Jules Michelet began his lectures on British history by reminding his audience that 'l'Angleterre est une ile'. We can begin this book on German history from 1770 to 1866 by stating the equally obvious and no less significant fact that 'Germany' did not exist. In the second half of the eighteenth century, as in the second half of the twentieth, there is no clear and readily acceptable answer to the question of Germany's political,social, and cultural identity. To suppose otherwise is to miss the essential character of the German past and the German present: its diversity and discontinuity, richness and fragmentation, fecundity and fluidity. Our history, therefore, cannot be the single story of a fixed entity, a state or a clearly designated landscape. We must instead try to follow the many different histories that coexisted within German-speaking central Europe, histories that led Germans towards and away from one another, at once encouraging them to act together and making such common action virtually impossible.
Eighteenth-century politics
Authors: Sheehan James J
Published: November 2023

IN the introduction to his History of Osnabrück, first published in 1768, Justus Möser noted that the vocabulary of contemporary politics did not fit the traditional institutions he was trying to describe.
Eighteenth-century Culture
Authors: Sheehan James J
Published: November 2023

Johann Gottfried Herder, a teacher’s son in the Prussian town of Möhringen, swiftly exhausted the meagre intellectual resources available to him at home and in the local school. By the time he was ten or eleven he had begun to wander the streets looking for new books; when he saw one through a window, he would ask to borrow it at once. Towards the end of his life, when he was a venerable figure on the cultural scene, Herder told an audience of schoolboys how joyfully he recalled his earliest encounters with authors old and new: ‘Scarcely anything in later years matched this pleasure, this sweet astonishment.’ Since we live in a culture awash with printed matter, we may find it difficult to share that sense of awe and wonder that books produced in intellectuals of Herder’s generation. For them the written word was sacred. While Herder may have praised folk culture in his theories, the culture to which he belonged was the culture of print.
Culture in the Revolutionary Era
Authors: Sheehan James J
Published: November 2023

New Year’s Day 1792, as the impact of the political revolution was just beginning to be felt east of the Rhine, Franz Dautzenberg, the editor of the Aachener Zuschauer, published an essay on ‘the spirit of our age’, which he defined as ‘the almost universal drive for a new existence’. There is hardly anywhere on earth, he went on, ‘where the disagreeable urge to change civil conditions has not expressed itself, either forcefully or hesitantly.’ Eight years later, a Protestant pastor greeted the new century with the same sentiments: ‘The unmistakable character of our era’, he told his congregation, ‘is the vital, free struggle for something new and better.’ In 1804 Hermann von Boyen, then a junior officer in the Prussian infantry, began his prize-winning essay on tactics by expressing the conviction that ‘the first, holiest law of the human spirit’ is ‘tireless progress’.
Restoration Politics, 1815-1830
Authors: Sheehan James J
Published: November 2023

IN 1815 Heinrich Olivier, just returned from military service with the Free Corps, painted a picture celebrating the Holy Alliance formed by Austria, Russia, and Prussia. In the foreground of the painting stand the Emperors Francis and Alexander and King Frédérick William, their hands joined in an expression of solidarity, which was meant to recall their common victory over Napoleon and to affirm their common stand against further upheavals. The sovereigns are dressed in the cumbersome ceremonial armour of the late Middle Ages, crusaders’ crosses adorn their cloaks, a heavy Gothic altar-piece stands behind them. Here Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant came together in an enterprise whose symbols evoked the Christian heritage they shared. 1 Olivier’s Holy Alliance is not a very good painting, but it does exemplify the medieval idiom through which some people in restoration Europe tried to express their distaste for revolutionary change. Architecture and design, the settings of novels and the background of paintings, the subject-matter of historical monuments and •the focus of scholarly research all reflected this fascination for the Middle Ages. To be sure, medievalism was sometimes merely a temporary refuge, an escape from contemporary cares into the apparently more cohesive and peaceful world of chivalry and cathedrals. The fake castle built by William IX of Hesse-Kassel was supposed to provide an ambience in which such escapism might flourish, as was Franzenburg, constructed by the Emperor Francis outside Vienna. We probably should not make too much of these masquerades. But for some Europeans, the medieval world was more than a refuge; it provided a standard against which current shortcomings might be judged, a set of symbols with which deep-seated longings might be captured, and a model of how society and culture should be organized. The Middle Ages, seen through this historical lens, appeared to be a time when faith was secure and social hierarchies unchallenged, when people believed in God and obeyed their betters.
Revolution and Reaction
Authors: Sheehan James J
Published: November 2023

Why DO people rebel? Our instinctive answer is, because they find their lives intolerable. But this is obviously no answer at all: not only is it circular, it ignores the unhappy truth that, while intolerable conditions are common, rebellions are rare. Suffering alone is not enough; it is a necessary but not a sufficient cause for revolution. Before they rebel, those who suffer must believe, if only for a short time, that their rebellion will lead to a better life for themselves or their communities. Only in this belief can people find the courage to act, the strength to break the bonds of habit and run the risks rebellion inevitably involves. By itself, suffering will not provide this strength and courage; indeed, suffering is more likely to weaken and demoralize than to incite and inspire. Revolutions are rare because they require an unusual conjunction of suffering and hope, a sense of outrage and an act of faith.
Culture in the Age of the Burgertum
Authors: Sheehan James J
Published: November 2023

IN OUR day’, wrote Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl in 1851, ‘the Bürgertum unquestionably possesses overwhelming moral and material power. Our entire era has a bürgerlich character.’ Riehl believed that the Burgertum was the epitome of modern society; other groups were no more than ruined residues of a bygone age. And he knew that, as usual, this social fact was reflected in the way people talked about their world. ‘Now we speak of bürgerlich honour, bürgerlich death, where once we had spoken more generally of social honour, social or political death. Instead of speaking of members of the state, current usage takes the most significant part for the whole and refers to Staatsbürger.’ Riehl himself acknowledged the Bürgertum’s universal significance when he entitled his study of contemporary society Die bürgerliche Gesellschaft.
Political Opportunities and Al ternatives
Authors: Sheehan James J
Published: November 2023

The discussion of the question, who should rule ... belongs in the realm of philosophical speculation; the practical question only has to do with the simple fact that it is power alone which can rule.’ These lines from the opening pages of Ludwig August von Rochau’s Grundsätze der Realpolitik are often taken as a kind of epigraph for the post-revolutionary era, just as Rochau’s personal evolution from student rebel to political exile to enthusiastic advocate of the Bismarckian Reich apparently illustrates a generational shift from opposition to reconciliation. Like so many contemporary philosophers, scientists, and writers, Rochau based his view of the world on a new appreciation of the importance of facts: It is certain that the spoken and written word can accomplish nothing in the face of physical facts and that facts can only give way to other facts, and it is equally certain that the fragmented German powers will not be united by a principle, an idea, or a treaty, but only by an overwhelming power that will subdue the rest.When it appeared in 1853, Rochau’s book enjoyed considerable success. The young Heinrich van Treitschke, for example, believed that it contained ‘more that was useful for scholarship than a thick textbook on politics’.2 But, despite its supposedly exemplary character, Rochau’s Grundsätze der Realpolitik is an ambiguous and problematic document. As a description of political behaviour, the concept of Realpolitik involves difficulties similar to those we encountered when we tried to apply ‘realism’ to literary works.
The Teaching of Natural Philosophy in Early Seventeenth-Century Paris: The Case ofJean Cécile Frey*
Authors: Blair Ann
Published: November 2023

Long dismissed as bastions of backwardness, particularly in scientific fields, late Renaissance universities have increasingly received careful study. It is now widely recognized that ‘traditional natural philosophy’ in the Renaissance was ‘far from being a homogeneous body of knowledge uniformly accepted and taught in the universities’. Historians have taken many complementary approaches to this new field of investigation, tracing for example the evolution of the official curriculum, the range of professorial commentary on assigned texts or on controversial themes, as well as the socio-intellectual networks of various academic milieux. The case that I present here provides evidence of a somewhat different sort to add to the picture that is already emerging of a dynamic and adaptable yet in many ways still traditional philosophy being taught at the universities in early seventeenth century Europe. I have focused on one professor at the university of Paris, following not only his teaching and publications, but also his academic career, personal life and social networks. This is the case of Jean Cecile Frey, who taught natural philosophy and medicine in Paris colleges between 1607 and 1631; now obscure, he was well respected in his day by a wide range of students and friends, although he was probably not the most eminent among his colleagues.
Foreign Scholars at Paris in the Early Fourteenth Century: the Crisis of 1313
Authors: Courtenay William J
Published: November 2023

On 1 May 1313 the masters of the university of Paris, under the leadership of its rector, Nicholas of Vienne, authorized a general collection from university members to meet a current financial need. ‘ The amount to be collected from each student and master was a full burse, that is, an assessment equal to the official sworn amount each scholar spent, on the average, on food and other expenditures per week, exclusive of lodging, payments to servants, or expenses connected with instruction or promotion. The practice of such collections went back to the early thirteenth century.3 They were authorized to meet non-instructional costs of the community as a whole, usually legal expenses connected with defending their rights and privileges. The amount authorized for collection was determined by the size of the incurred or anticipated debt and usually varied between a quarter-burse and a half-burse. Because of the uneven results of a system dependent upon the willingness of everyone to pay, and administered only by the rec tor and representatives of the nations and higher faculties, Martin IV in 1284, at the request of the university, had put the matter of collection in the hands of the abbot and chancellor of Ste-Genevieve, giving them the power to suspend from the university and impose ecclesiastical sanctions on any student or master who did not pay his share promptly. Although Pope Martin did not specify what ‘promptly ‘ meant, by 1313 the length of the period of payment before sanctions would be applied was understood by the abbot of Ste-Genevieve and university leaders to be one week.
Teachers and Learners in Scholastic Medicine: Some Images and Metaphors*
Authors: Crisciani Chiara
Published: November 2023

I would like to describe in this paper how physicians themselves represented their role as teachers, what values they attributed to the different phases of medical education, and how they represented the relations of master and pupil at various levels of instruction. I should like first to clarify one point. I will use the word ‘representation ‘ a number of times. In fact I believe that what we call the institutional context must be understood in a broad sense. This context should encompass not only the statutory norms and regulations that governed university teaching, but also a much larger body of didactic orientation, educational ideals, ways of writing and reading texts, and images of knowledge that teaching physcians themselves considered as goals and instruments in medical education. I The Sermones medicinales of Niccolo Falcucci is a medical encyclopedia that was famous and widely diffused at the beginning of the fifteenth century. In its introductory chapter, the author provides very precise indications both of the structure of medicine as a scholastic discipline and of the qualities of a good physician. In order to emphasize that the good physician could now only be a professional who was doctoratus-that is, a learned practitioner educated at a university-Falcucci, even before he prescribed proper professional behaviour for a physician, first outlined the phase of medical education, that is, the route through which the physician became at once doctus and expertus.
The Portrait of the Prince as a Rhetorical Genre
Authors: Johannesson Kurt
Published: November 2023

What is politics? It deals with the state and the citizens, their interests, rights, and mutual obligations. The state may seem remote, vague, or abstract to the citizens. Still, it can always be transformed into something close, familiar, and almost palpable by means of symbols.
Rex et sacerdos: The Holiness of the King in European Civilization
Authors: Sergio Bertelli
Published: November 2023

It was 4 January 1804. A group of men preceded by a band and escorted by a large armed guard stopped at the Place de la Sorbonne in front of the deconsecrated Cluny church. Napoleon and the empress, as well as officials and courtiers, were there to pay homage to Louis David and to admire the Sacre de I‘Empereur et le couronnement de I’Tmperatrice(a title specified on the contract); the painting measuring six metres by nine, was at the atelier which had been decorated for the occasion.
Ceremonial Space
Authors: Chrościcki Juliusz
Published: November 2023

Ceremonial space was influenced by three factors: a model of the state which existed in a given country, the laws and ceremonies of the court, and local tradition accumulated over the centuries. Changes in governmental systems were often conceived by means of the destruction of’ sacred’ ceremonial space used by the anci én regime. The typical social behaviour, which followed was characterized by phenomena such as outbursts of hatred and violent disturbances, together with the destruction of monuments erected to the glory of previous rulers and heroes. Statues, temples, mausoleums, and ancient burial places are usually levelled, which entails the conscious evaluation of an earlier ceremonial space. The new state created on the ‘rubble’ of the former constructs its own ceremonial space, either in the same place or in a completely different one.
Satire
Authors: Sullivan ]. P
Published: November 2023

Satire is to be found wherever vice, corruption, and social misery are confronted by talented writers, who may seek reform, but sometimes settle for savage reprobation or urbane reproof. Its deepest roots may lie in magic, myth, and ritual, which are not to our purpose here. Geoffrey Grigson has argued that whatever the moral or punitive intentions of the satirist, the writing of the satire never caused the author pain, and Lord Byron even claimed that satiric rhyme first sprang from selfish spleen. If so, the impulse managed to disguise itself as something more altruistic and rational, and it is surprising how many risks satirists have been prepared to run and how much rage they have aroused in powerful adversaries. In Rome, Lucilius’ powerful friends, Horace’s protests of innocence for fear of libel, Persius’ posthumous publication, and Juvenal’s avoidance of contemporary allusion minimized their dangers; in England, on the other hand, the Archbishops of Canterbury and London in 1599 entered an edict in the Stationers’ Hall Register that certain satires be burned and that no satires or epigrams be printed thereafter.
Architecture
Authors: Watkin David
Published: November 2023

Roman architecture is known to us most directly through two sources: the surviving ruins, and Vitruvius’ De architectura, which is the only treatise on architecture to survive from the ancient world. As we shall sec, both the ruins and the writing have been interpreted down the ages in an astonishingly wide variety of ways. None the less, the legacy of Roman architecture is today often interpreted as having reached its climax during the Renaissance, after which it was superseded by the Greek Revival, the Gothic Revival, and finally by the Modern Movement. This chapter should demonstrate the falsity of this view by showing how the achievement of ancient Rome in planning, building, and decoration underpins most of the main developments of Western architecture. What makes the process of exploring this legacy exciting is that it becomes clear that each age has to rediscover for itself the message of ancient Rome.
Law
Authors: Feenstra Robert
Published: November 2023

The influence of Roman Law is undoubtedly one of the most important but at the same time one of the most puzzling aspects of the ‘legacy of Rome’. Numerous are the metaphors that have been used to characterize this influence. Leaving aside the idea of a ‘ghost story’, treating of a ‘second life ... after the demise of the body in which it first saw the light’ (Vinogradoff) and the comparison with a diving duck which hides itself from time to time but never wholly disappears and always comes to the fore again (Goethe), I may quote the much used statement of a nineteenth-century German scholar, Rudolf Jhering: ‘Three times Rome has dictated laws to the world, three times has it brought the peoples to unity; the first time, when the Roman people was still in its full strength, to unity of state, the second time, when this people had already perished, to a unity of church, the third time, as a result of the reception of the Roman law, in the Middle Ages to a unity of law.’
The City of Rome
Authors: Purcell Nicholas
Published: November 2023

Augustus and his successors chose to make Rome visibly the capital of their enormous power. Their task was therefore to make this city beyond question the outstanding marvel of a world of cities. It was not enough that the place Rome should by chance be the home of the power that ruled the Mediterranean world; despite the facts of history, that was too precarious an honour. In a culturally complex world, with a high degree of mobility, wide horizons, and good communications the pre-eminence of the historic cradle of empire could not be guaranteed. There was a widespread anxiety that ambitious dynasts might make another city the centre of their rule, and there were numerous candidates, Rome’s equal in antiquity and fame, and its superior in beauty and natural advantages. Indeed such fears were fulfilled when, in the third century of our era, competing emperors came to rely on provincial capitals, and, above all, when Constantine founded the New Rome on the Bosporus.
Introduction
Authors: Wright Jonathan
Published: November 2023

In 1930, a year after Stresemann”s death, the British historian John Wheeler- Bennett wrote: With the possible exception of M. Aristide Briand, no figure since the war has so dominated European affairs as did Herr Stresemann; and no statesman has shown so unwavering a devotion to what he conceived to be the right course for his country. By a fortunate coincidence it was also the right course for the world. Herr Stresemann may be said to have been the first of the Europeans.
“A hunger for power” Business and Politics, 1901-1914
Authors: Wright Jonathan
Published: November 2023

Between 1901 and 1914 Stresemann established his reputation in two areas: as the organizer of manufacturing industry in Saxony, in which his success created a model for other parts of the Reich and, secondly, as a young politician of unusual gifts in the National Liberal Party. The two areas were closely connected, for Stresemann saw in manufacturing industry a natural partner for the left wing of the National Liberal Party with which he became associated. When he started his professional life as a syndic or promoter of the interests of manufacturing industry in Saxony, Stresemann found a situation in which his clients were both poorly organized and disadvantaged. Compared to the interests of agriculture organized predominantly in the Agrarian League and the interests of heavy industry, particularly the coal and steel giants of the Ruhr, which dominated the Central Association of German Industrialists (Central Verband deutscher Industrieller), the corresponding manufacturers” interest group, the Association of Industrialists (Bund der Industriellen), founded in 1895, was weakly organized and uninfluential.
“We are and remain independent towards the right and the left”
Authors: Wright Jonathan
Published: November 2023

The central challenge to a biographer of Stresemann is to interpret his development from wartime annexationist to the European statesman of 1925-9. The years between the end of the war and his appointment as Reich chancellor in 1923 provide the link. Historians have been divided between those who argue that his aims and outlook changed fundamentally and those who see an essential continuity of aim behind a skilful change of tactics. The period between defeat and the elections of June 1920 which saw Stresemann’s new party become once again a significant political force marked the first phase of a painful process of adjustment.
“All but political suicide”
Authors: Wright Jonathan
Published: November 2023

The long-threatened occupation of the Ruhr by French and Belgian troops began on 11 January 1923 after last-minute attempts by the German and British governments to find a compromise had failed. Britain and the United States opposed the occupation but adopted a policy of non-intervention. Cuno condemned the action as a violation of the Versailles treaty and announced a policy of passive resistance in the Ruhr. Stresemann saw his task as helping to rally opinion at home against the French, as he had during the war, but also increasingly-and unlike his wartime stance-to assist in finding a negotiated solution. He loyally supported the Cuno government and checked his speeches in advance with the Foreign Minister. The government used him as an unofficial channel for airing ideas which it wished to make public without being committed to them. The crisis confirmed Stresemann in his view that Germany could only recover-and indeed only survive-by agreement of the moderate parties of the parliamentary centre and, if possible, a great coalition including the SPD.
Locarno and the League, 1925-1926
Authors: Wright Jonathan
Published: November 2023

“The development of a politician to a statesman takes place in a life, in which one learns not only to express what one personally sees as desirable, but in which one learns to overcome oneself when it is a question of fitting the individual self into the greater whole and into belief in the futuren The conference which opened at Locarno on 5 October 1925 set the scene for the European detente which followed and which lasted, despite increasingly severe strains, until Stresemann’s death in October 1929. The conference set the scene in three ways: in what it agreed, in the differences that remained, and in the will to reach agreement despite the differences.
Intellectual and religious life
Authors: Mcdowell R B
Published: November 2023

During the eighteenth century Ireland could be taken as forming part of the British cultural, intellectual and social world. At the same time the Irish catholics had many links with continental catholicism and the bulk of the country people in the south and. west still spoke Irish and cherished remnants of Gaelic culture. Contacts between Great Britain and Ireland were numerous and multifarious. A number of landowners had estates in both islands. Lord lieutenants and chief secretaries formed long-lasting Irish friendships. Great Britain was Ireland’s principal market, by the close of the eighteenth century taking about 80 per cent of Ireland’s exports. Great Britain was also the source of about 70 per cent of Ireland’s imports, supplying Ireland with British manufactures, coal and the products of the East. By the eighteenth century the flow of emigration from Ireland to Great Britain had begun. Irish labourers went over to assist with the English harvest and, according to Castlereagh, it was the money earned on these annual expeditions which enabled the emigrants to pay their rent. Towards the close of the century Irish harvesters were to be found as far as Lincolnshire, where the presence of the ‘poor Irish’ stirred up organized hostility amongst local labour.
A restive parliament
Authors: Mcdowell R B
Published: November 2023

In Ireland the early Hanoverian age was an era of political placidity. The very long intervals between parliamentary sessions, a judicious distribution of power and patronage, the absence of major issues, an unquestioning and generally satisfied acceptance of the constitutional pattern, the presence of a large and potentially dangerous catholic community, and sobering memories of civil war and abrupt reversals of political fortune, all contributed to the maintenance of political tranquillity. But by the middle of the century there were signs that this calm was breaking up. The great borough interests, whose support was essential for the smooth working of the parliamentary system, were becoming noticeably assertive, and alert independent M.P.s were calling for inquiries into the working of the government machine and raising constitutional issues—the increasing cost of pensions, the duration of parliament, and the power exercised by the Irish privy council under Poynings’ law, of altering and rejecting bills.
An Anglo-Irish settlement
Authors: Mcdowell R B
Published: November 2023

By the summer of 1780 Buckinghamshire had been well over two years in Ireland and his nerves were sorely strained. ‘The most painful part of my situation’, he wrote, ‘is the necessity at times when my mind is particularly agitated to listen with apparent temper to capricious reasonings’, and he had, he said, become dependent ‘on the cheerful circulation of claret’ for two or three hours after dinner. He resented being written to by the secretary of state ‘in the style which Dr Busby with a birch under his arm would have used to a king’s scholar’ and his own letters show signs of despondency and weariness. He had warned his colleagues in England well in advance that the Irish situation was becoming critical and he had then, in his own opinion, coped successfully with the difficulties of a very stormy parliamentary session.
Pitt and Ireland
Authors: Mcdowell R B
Published: November 2023

Pitt when he became prime minister was deeply conscious that Britain’s ‘power and pre-eminence’ was in eclipse, and was calmly confident that it was his responsibility—it might be said his hereditary responsibility—‘to unite and correct what yet remains of our reduced and shattered empire’. Though a realist, he was not content to be simply a pragmatist. Unlike many contemporary politicians he did not restrict himself to keeping the administrative machine functioning and meeting problems as they presented themselves. He was not ‘one of those who thought that if a session passed without anything material being done, it was a circumstance of pleasure and self-congratulationc’. Rather, he was prepared to survey the whole field, isolate major issues, and attempt to cope with them by well-planned, comprehensive measures. By the close of 1784, he was immersed in the preparation of a grand design which, he believed, would dispose of a number of issues likely to breed contention between Great Britain and Ireland, promote the prosperity of both nations and strengthen the empire.
The maintenance of law and order
Authors: Mcdowell R B
Published: November 2023

From the summer of 1795 the Irish administration and the Irish ruling world were challenged by militant political and social discontent, backed by the threat of a French invasion. There were two distinct ways of meeting this challenge. Sweeping concessions might be made which would satisfy the less vehement enemies of the existing regime, and then a broad alliance of those who wanted stability could be formed in defence of the remodelled constitution. The alternative was a defiant and unyielding maintenance of the existing order, inspired by a belief in its virtues and the conviction that a strategic retreat attempted in the face of intransigent foes would quickly degenerate into a rout. The latter, non possumus policy, was adopted by the Irish administration, supported by most men of property and by instinctive conservatives in all classes. Camden, on arrival in Ireland, was anxious to improve the quality of Irish life—he welcomed the appointment of assistant barristers, he suggested that justices of the peace should be empowered to fix wages, taking into account the price of provisions, and he wanted to encourage clerical residence (a resident clergy would provide the government with a source of reliable information in every parish).
Aftermath
Authors: Mcdowell R B
Published: November 2023

The ’98 insurrection demonstrated vividly and dangerously the intensity and strength of discontent with the existing social and political order in Ireland, and confronted the government with two major problems. The removal of the causes of discontent called for bold and long-term measures. More immediately, there was the question of how were the discontented, who had resorted to direct action, to be handled? By coercion or conciliation or by a blend of both? The Irish administration, which had to cope with these problems, was headed by Cornwallis and Castlereagh, who took office as lord lieutenant and chief secretary during the insurrection. Cornwallis had been driven to devote himself to the service of king and country, by what he himself termed, ‘the irresistible impulse … to follow the thorny path I have travelled’.
The Union
Authors: Mcdowell R B
Published: November 2023

A policy of pains, penalties, pardons and policing might temporarily restore order in Ireland. But it left the causes of Irish discontent still festering and to some in authority in 1798 it seemed clear that the Irish crisis called for a dynamic approach which would transform Ireland from being a defence liability into a prosperous and contented member of the empire. History suggested an answer to the Irish problem. The attempt which had been made at the beginning of the century to solve the Scottish question by a union had proved a most successful political experiment. After the union Scotland had advanced rapidly economically, Glasgow had become a great port and industrial centre, Edinburgh, at the end of the century was completing a magnificent piece of urban planning and a long list of names, Mansfield, Loughborough, Dundas, Erskine, Abercromby, Heathfield, Hume, Adam Smith, Boswell, were a reminder of the great contribution that Scotland was making to British life and the opportunities afforded to Scotsmen by the union.
An Academic Counter-Revolution: Newman and Tractarian Oxford’s Idea of a University
Authors: Nockles P B
Published: November 2023

University reform in the age of liberal revolution took a variety of forms. Historians have tended to focus on only one model of university reform in Britain, that propagated by liberal and radical reformers. However this model, which in the context of the undisputed Anglican hegemony of the two English universities in the early nineteenth century had distinctly secularizing, if not anticlerical overtones, was by no means the only one. This paper concentrates upon a very different, counter-revolutionary scheme put forward by a party in the Church of England no less dissatisfied with the status quo in the University of Oxford than their liberal counterparts. The leaders of this active party expounded, in a rich vein of pamphlet and periodical literature, an alternative educational ideal to that put forward by liberals. It was an ideal shaped by and related to the Oxford context in which it was born, but which at the same time was to provide the ultimate inspiration for one of the classic treatises on the purposes of universities in the English-speaking world, John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University
Universities and Elites in Modern Britain
Authors: Anderson R D
Published: November 2023

This paper discusses the relation of British universities to elites and elite formation in the light of some recent general theories about university development, notably those in the collective volume on The Transformation of Higher Learning, 1860-1930 (1983) edited by Konrad Jarausch, and in Harold Perkin’s The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880 (1989). From these books, and from other contributors to the debate like Fritz Ringer and Harmut Kaelble, four main points seem to emerge. One is that the years from the 1860s to the 1930s form a distinctive period, the middle phase of a transition, in Jarausch’s words, ‘from traditional elite higher learning to modern mass higher education’. Jarausch sees a ‘seismic shift’ within this period, as ‘a small, homogeneous, elite and pre-professional university turned into a large, diversified, middleclass and professional system of higher learning’. There was a substantial rise in enrolments, but (and this is the second point) the key to expansion remained middle-class demands. Working-class students were few, and some authors have claimed that in this period those poorer students whom tradition had formerly admitted were squeezed out as competition for middle-class positions intensified. Thus Kaelble sees this as the era of ‘competitive opportunities’, coming between those of ‘charitable’ and ‘welfare’ opportunities, with the last phase not starting before 1914. Jarausch too considers that ‘only after World War One did conscious attempts to create equality of educational opportunity begin to have an impact on enrollments’. For England, Perkin would put the process a little earlier, seeing the period 1900-1920 as the ‘critical turning point’ both for the entry of talent from below, and for the process by which ‘the university became the normal route to high status and income’.
From Cosmogony to Exorcism in a Javanese Genesis
Authors: Headley Stephen C
Published: November 2023

In 1925 the influential Dutch anthropologist W. H. Rassers posed the question of the relationship of myth to ritual, taking as his case study the Javanese myth of the birth of the man-eating demon, Kala. The light shed by this myth, and its re-enactment, on the social morphology of Java was immediately the subject of debate among students of Javanese culture. Stephen C. Headley translates and studies ritual and myth in their variant forms. He expands illuminatingly upon Rasser's general proposition, that the movement from cosmogony to exorcism founds fundamental social forms within which values circulate in Javanese society. Richly detailed descriptions confirm the permanence of these networks of circulating values in modern-day Java, and their persistence in the face of contemporary individualism.