bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Charles I and the Erosion of Trust, 1625–1628
Authors: Young Michael B.
Published: November 2007

In contrast to their predecessors, who emphasized constitutional conflict and opposition in the parliaments of early Stuart England, revisionists emphasized harmony and cooperation. There was a problem with this new, anti-Whig orthodoxy from the outset, however, and that was the problem of trust. Defying the revisionist model of harmonious relations between Crown and Parliament, the M.P.s of early Stuart England perversely refused to trust James I and Charles I. Revisionists adopted two strategies to deal with this problem of trust. Conrad Russell exemplified the one strategy: he acknowledged the existence of distrust but treated it as a deep mystery requiring ingenious explanations. Surveying the reign of James I, Russell discovered “profound distrust, but it is hard to show how this distrust was implanted.” Perplexed by this enigma, Russell observed, “One of the most crucial, and one of the most difficult, questions of the early Stuart period is why this distrust developed.” For Russell, then, it was not natural for M.P.s to distrust the king. It was, instead, an unnatural attitude that had to be “implanted” or “developed.” In time, of course, Russell solved the mystery of distrust by providing a series of explanations: distrust resulted from the pressures of war, friction between the localities and the center, the functional breakdown of an inadequately financed government, court factionalism, and the growth of Arminianism. In Russell's view, the underlying problems that gave rise to distrust had more to do with circumstances and structures than with people, least of all James I and Charles I. A second strategy for dealing with the problem of trust is best exemplified by Kevin Sharpe: he solves the problem neatly by denying its existence. Steadfastly adhering to the revisionist model of harmony and cooperation, Sharpe claims that M.P.s did in fact behave the way that model predicts they should have. “In the early Stuart period,” writes Sharpe, “compromises between king and parliaments…were common because fundamental beliefs were shared and there was an atmosphere of trust.” Sharpe admits that there was an “erosion of trust” in the latter part of Charles's reign. “But,” he insists, “there is little evidence that it unfolds in the parliaments of early Stuart England.”
British Historians and the Treaty of Versailles
Authors: Cline Catherine Ann
Published: November 2007

Students of inter-war foreign relations have long recognized the role played by the British public's disapproval of the Treaty of Versailles in the burgeoning of the appeasement policy of the 1930's. The peace settlement, once generally viewed as “stern but just,” came to be perceived by all political parties and by the public at large as unduly harsh and punitive in its treatment of Germany. Hitler's rearmament of the Fatherland, the remilitarization of the Rhineland, theAnschlusswith Austria, and the occupation of the Sudetenland were all significant attacks on the Versailles system which most groups in Britain had come to consider unworthy of defense.

The influences which brought the Treaty into disrepute were various. For one thing, the deterioration of Anglo-French relations tended to foster an increasingly sympathetic attitude towards Germany. Then, too, the problems of the British economy led to an awareness that the stability of Britain's former trading partner in Central Europe was essential to her own prosperity and to a corresponding desire to soften those features of the peace settlement which might be impeding German recovery. In addition, John Maynard Keynes' brilliant polemic,The Economic Consequences of the Peace(1919), not only made the case that the reparation clauses were unfair and impossible of fulfillment, but, with its withering portraits of the peacemakers, also tended to undermine respect for the Treaty as a whole. Finally, criticisms of various aspects of the peace settlement by elite groups ranging from bankers to bishops of the Church of England contributed heavily to the public's increasingly negative perception of the entire Treaty.
James I, the Russia Company, and the Plan to Establish a Protectorate Over North Russia
Authors: Dunning Chester
Published: November 2007

In the decade preceding the establishment of the Romanov dynasty in 1613, Muscovite Russia went through a catastrophic period known as the Time of Troubles which was characterized by political unrest, famine, regicide, social upheaval, and foreign intervention. In the final, darkest years of the Time of Troubles many people doubted that Muscovy, which for a time lacked a ruler or even a central government, would be able to survive as an independent state. It appeared more likely that Catholic Poland would conquer the country or that Sweden would come to dominate it. The English, who had established diplomatic and commercial relations with Muscovy in the 1550s and who watched events there with considerable interest, were horrified by reports that the Poles had captured Moscow, that the Swedes had seized much Russian territory, and that factions of the Muscovite lords were negotiating with their aggressive neighbors for a foreign tsar. This eventually led the English to contemplate acquiring North Russia and the commercially important port of Arkhangel'sk for themselves. As strange as it seems, for a brief period of time King James I actually dreamed of adding part of Muscovy to his “empire.”
Calvinist Bishops, Church Unity, and the Rise of Arminianism
Authors: Atkins Jonathan M.
Published: November 2007

According to Nicholas Tyacke, the doctrine of predestination worked as a “common and ameliorating bond” between conformists and nonconformists in the late Elizabethan and Jacobean Church of England. Anglicans and Puritans both accepted Calvin's teachings on predestination as a “crucial common assumption.” Puritans were stigmatized either because of their refusal to conform to the church's rites and ceremonies or because of their rejection of the church's episcopal government, but their agreement with the episcopacy on predestinarian Calvinism imposed “important limits” on the extent of persecution. The Synod of Dort, a Dutch conference held in 1619 which included several English representatives, repudiated Arminianism and affirmed the Calvinist view of salvation, Tyacke calls “an event which has never received the emphasis it deserves from students of English religious history,” because the Synod “served to emphasize afresh the theology binding conformist and nonconformist together, and the limits which that common bond imposed on persecution.” The rise of Arminianism broke this common bond and contributed to the causes of the Civil War. To the Arminians, Puritans were those who opposed the new religious policies of King Charles I and archbishop William Laud. The Arminians' elimination of Calvinist influence in the church and at court, along with intensified persecution of Puritans, “generated a Puritan militancy” that erupted in 1640. By that date, Tyacke concludes, predestinarian Calvinism had been “transformed with relative ease into a call for ‘root and branch’ remedies”; at the same time, presbyterianism emerged as “the cure of Arminian disease.”
Sally Vaughn's Anselm: An Examination of the Foundations
Authors: Southern Richard W.
Published: November 2007

To attempt to portray Anselm in all his varied activities as monk, prior, abbot, archbishop; as philosopher, theologian, writer of private prayers and meditations; in his letters of spiritual counsel and ecclesiastical policy; as man of God, friend, teacher and guide to the spiritual life; and in his relations with popes, kings, episcopal colleagues, lay men and women, monks and nuns, is one of the most challenging tasks in medieval history. The number of possible combinations in which his life and thought played a part is very large. To add to the difficulties of the subject, much of the evidence is tangential: we interpret for one purpose material that was created for quite different ends. The material is full enough to invite speculation, but rarely full enough to provide clear-cut solutions to the questions asked. To take only two examples at opposite ends of the spectrum: Anselm never wrote any account of the principles which guided his public life as archbishop, which Vaughn is particularly concerned to interpret; and, at the other end of the scale, he wrote much on friendship, but all that he wrote, as we shall see, is capable of widely different interpretations. Even his silences cry aloud for interpretation; and when we come to that, we are in very deep water indeed.
Anselm: Saint and Statesman
Authors: Vaughn Sally N.
Published: November 2007

As the latest in a long line of St. Anselm's biographers, I am privileged here to address the comments of my most distinguished predecessor, Sir Richard Southern. Perhaps the greatest compliment one's work can receive is a rigorous and thorough examination of its premises, evidence, and argument; Southern has graciously rendered that favor to my Anselm of Bec and Robert of Meulan. I am grateful to both Sir Richard and to Albion for this opportunity to reply.

No one could dispute Southern's summation of the difficulty involved in assessing the richness and variety of Anselm's activities and achievements, nor indeed the fullness of the surviving materials and yet their tantalizing silences toward some of our most pressing questions. Indeed, fifteen years would hardly be enough time to work through them, were it not for the labors of many others, including Southern, upon which my arguments often depend. What seems remarkable to me, and apparently to Sir Richard as well, is that he and I can derive such different conclusions from virtually the same evidence. Southern views Anselm as “essentially a monastic contemplative man, with his eyes wholly directed towards God, and with his energies mainly absorbed in the task of calling others to the monastic life,” while I have argued for Anselm's political awareness, his conviction (at some point prior to his archiepiscopal consecration) that God had destined him for Canterbury, and his sense that as God's steward of the mother church of Britain, he must take effective action in the world of high politics to safeguard Canterbury's lands, privileges, and primatial rights. And I have argued that he did so skillfully and successfully. These two views seem almost mutually exclusive.
Celebrating the Glorious Revolution, 1689–1989
Authors: Schwoerer Lois G.
Published: November 2007

1988 and 1989 have been vintage years all over the world for centenary celebrations. People have celebrated the centenary of the Eiffel Tower, the bicentenary of the French Revolution, the bicentenary of Australia, the bicentenary of the American Bill of Rights, the quatercentenary of the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the sexcentenary of the battle of Kosovo (this one may have escaped your notice, but it brought over a million people to a gathering in the city of Pristina in Yugoslavia in June 1989), and, of course, the tercentenary of the English Revolution of 1688–89, with which I am concerned tonight. You will have no trouble believing that I have been “concerned with” and “celebrating” the Glorious Revolution for two years now, but I want to confess to you in the intimacy of this festive occasion that it has really been at least ten years, and that sometimes it feels more like three hundred!

How did centennial observances start? Why do people go to trouble, take time, and spend money to call to mind an event that happened one, two, or three hundred years ago? What is it about centennial moments that turns serious-minded, scholarly-inclined historians like ourselves into “party people”? What do celebrations tell us about the uses of the past in successive “presents”? The fact is that celebrations, each varying in character, have attended the Glorious Revolution from its beginnings on through each centennial anniversary thereafter — in 1788–89, 1888–89, and 1988–89. The observances at these centennial moments not only celebrated the Revolution itself, but also served, even as they reflected, current political, cultural, and/or economic ideas and goals. In a long perspective, the celebrations are an important part of the political and cultural history of the Revolution of 1688–89 itself. They illustrate how high and low politics may intersect, show how political ideas circulate through society and undergo transformation, and offer an index of changing ideological and cultural assumptions and aspirations over three hundred years.
Issues in the House of Commons 1621–1629: Predictors of Civil War Allegiance
Authors: Russell Conrad
Published: November 2007

My past attacks on the use of hindsight as a tool for explaining the parliamentary politics of the 1620s were not based on any desire to evade the task of explaining the English Civil War. They were based on the belief that it was necessary to understand what did happen in the 1620s before it could become possible to use those events to shed light on the English Civil War. The argument was that the search for the causes of the Civil War had impeded any attempt to see the 1620s as they actually were. That was why I attempted to find out what had happened in the 1620s as a task in its own right, before going on to investigate the coming and the causes of the English Civil War.

It is only because I have already attempted both these questions, and provided answers at least to my own satisfaction, that I now feel free to look back again at the 1620s, and attempt to ask the question what issues, and what attitudes, distinguish a future Royalist from a future Parliamentarian during those years. This is, of course, a very different question from asking what were the key issues of the 1620s. Very often, the issues that transpire to be the best predictors of Civil War allegiance were, at the time, low-priority and poorly reported issues. Attempts to investigate them are not meant to endow them with an importance they did not necessarily possess at the time, nor to suggest any inevitability about the division of England along the lines they suggest. The Civil War was only one of many ways in which the English body politic might have been divided: under a different king, for example, quite different disagreements might have been forced to the surface as the agenda developed. Yet, once it is granted this is not the only way Englishmen might have been divided, it is still worth asking whether the division that actually surfaced corresponds to any visible division in the politics of the 1620s. None of this is an attempt to reopen the debate on “revisionism” in the 1620s. That debate has now acquired a half life of its own, and this article is not intended to take any part in it. It is, though, inevitably informed by thirteen years' work on the politics of the Long Parliament, and so incorporates perceptions of how different the 1620s were from the 1640s, which no other programme of work could have made equally intense.
Representations of Women in Some Early Modern English Tracts on the Colonization of Ireland
Authors: Carroll Clare
Published: November 2007

Since D. B. Quinn's The Elizabethans and the Irish, the history of early modern Ireland has been the subject of a wide range of studies, but only recently has women's role in that history received attention. Similarly, Nicholas Canny's article on “Edmund Spenser and the Development of an Anglo-Irish Identity” initiated a debate about whether sixteenth-century tracts on Ireland express a unified colonialist ideology, but only recently has the construction of sexuality in these texts come under scrutiny. It is not surprising that those who study the history of women in early modern Ireland do not often turn to the English tracts for evidence, except with great caution and reservation. So much related in these documents is indebted to the stereotypes of a colonialist discourse, initiated by Giraldus Cambrensis in the twelfth century, rather than to observation or encounter. Recent work on the history of women in early modern Ireland presents us with a sense of what is not being represented in the English settlers' descriptions. Such aspects of women's lives in Gaelic Ireland as their right to hold and acquire their own land and to keep their own names while married are not referred to in these tracts. These tracts do not yield transparent information about actual Irish women of the period, although there are fascinating references to their activities. Spenser writes that Irish women had “the trust and care of all things both at home and in the fields.” And at least one woman, the foster mother of Murrogh O'Brien, is said to have drunk the blood of her child's head as she grieved when he had been drawn and quartered by the English. The character of these texts as colonialist discourse makes the representation of women as a symbolic category or “gender” the more useful focus rather than some unmediated sense of “women.”
The Expansion of the English Jewish Community in the Reign of King Stephen
Authors: Streit Kevin T.
Published: November 2007

By the time Henry II imposed a large donum on cities, knights, moneyers, and Jews in 1159, the English Jewry dwelt in at least eleven communities throughout the realm. Of these, the London community was certainly the oldest, having been established by the Conqueror. The origins of the other communities are much less certain. Records from the end of Henry I's reign suggest that the Jews of England were still based in or around London, though some indirect evidence suggests the presence of isolated Jews elsewhere in the kingdom. It seems clear, however, that the years falling between Henry I's death and the accession of Henry II—the reign of Stephen, commonly known as the Anarchy—witnessed an expansion of Jews throughout the country, marking this period as very important to the history of English Jews. The meager evidence surviving suggests three important points: first, that it was, in fact, in the reign of Stephen that communities of royal Jews spread from London into other English towns; second, that significant Jewish communities existed only in areas that remained under royal control during Stephen's reign; and third, that these new Jewish communities may have been fostered by Stephen to further his own political and fiscal interests. The paucity of the available evidence makes any case for the English Jewry in this period uncomfortably conjectural; nevertheless, the few scraps that exist suggest these points to be at the least plausible, if not indeed likely.
Richard II and the Invention of the Pocket Handkerchief
Authors: Stow George B.
Published: November 2007

It has long been thought that the deposition and murder of King Richard II was a personal tragedy, and that “Richard's personality—his natural or inherited character considered apart from the important actions of his life—was the chief cause of his downfall.” In more recent years the aesthetic side of his Richard's character has assumed a new importance in explanations of his fall. Richard H. Jones, for example, has noted that “in any case the fundamental obligation of the medieval king was that he should lead his arrays on the field of battle. Yet, Richard was slight of frame and sensitive of disposition. His tastes were aesthetic rather than athletic.” As well, in the view of Bertie Wilkinson,

the reign of King Richard II…ended in utter failure…because he himself was lacking in precisely the qualities he most needed and which his grandfather fortunately had….Instead of the instincts of the warrior he possessed only the more exotic and less popular qualities of the aesthete, loving art, literature, and music, and the pleasures of the mind.
Empire and Social Reform: British Liberals and the “Civilizing Mission” in the Sugar Colonies, 1868–1874
Authors: Smith James Patterson
Published: November 2007

In contrast to the spirit of laissez-faire, the Colonial Office under Gladstone's first government served as a large-scale social engineering agency concerned with the cautious restructuring of volatile societies in the sugar-producing colonies of the West Indies and the Indian Ocean. From the perspective of the Colonial Office civilizing the barbarian made him more governable. There is a revealing paradox in the fact that so much of what Victorian Liberals did in the name of civilizing benighted natives involved active government initiatives in imperial settings. Under the banner of “peace, retrenchment, and reform” nineteenth-century British Liberals advocated cost-cutting and laissez-faire at home and non-expansion abroad. Liberal leaders' public statements in this vein helped set the historiographical stereotype of supposed Gladstonian Liberal “little Englandism” versus a dramatic imperial policy shift toward “forward movement” in the Disraelian Conservative era. Scholarship over the last thirty years has refuted this older view and has stressed the continuity of British imperialism throughout the nineteenth century. However, a careful examination of the details of policy reveals that from 1868–74 the Liberals not only valued the Empire, but were willing to sacrifice their own theories of limited government in order to strengthen the British hold—even on their bankrupt sugar colonies in the Caribbean and Indian oceans. Initiatives in colonial religion, education, health, justice, and labor regulation demonstrate a surprising Liberal bent toward government activism in the non-white Empire. Moreover, the self-conscious and energetic manipulation of such a wide range of policy tools reveals a serious Liberal commitment to empire, which further belies the old notion that from 1868–74, “little Englandism” reached its high point.
“God and the Atom”: British Churchmen and the Challenge of Nuclear Power 1945–1950
Authors: Willis Kirk
Published: November 2007

The nuclear age opened in prayer:

Almighty Father, who wilt hear the prayers of them who love Thee, we pray Thee to be with those who brave the heights of Thy heavens and who carry the battle to our enemies. Guard and protect them, we pray Thee, as they fly their appointed rounds. May they, as well as we, know Thy strength and power, and armed with Thy might may they bring this war to a rapid end. We pray Thee that the end of war may come soon, and that once more we may know peace on earth.

May the men who fly this night be kept safe in Thy care, and may they be returned safely to us. We shall go forward trusting in Thee, knowing we are in Thy care now and forever. Amen.

Thus did United States Army Chaplain William B. Downey bless the anxious crew of the Enola Gay in the quiet, early hours of 6 August 1945. After the aircraft's successful mission and return to the tiny island of Tinian, both President Harry Truman and former Prime Minister Winston Churchill ended their official announcements of the “mastery” of nuclear power and the destruction of Hiroshima with their own benedictions. To Truman, preoccupied with the imminent close of the war, the chief blessings to be offered were strategic: “We thank God that it has come to us, instead of to our enemies; and we pray that He may guide us to use it in His ways and for His purposes.” For Churchill, now uncomprehendingly in political opposition, the appropriate prayers were far more ambiguous:

This revelation of the secrets of nature, long mercifully withheld from men, should arouse the most solemn reflections in the mind and conscience of every human being capable of comprehension. We must indeed pray that these awful agencies will be made to conduce to peace among the nations, and that instead of wreaking measureless havoc upon the entire globe they may become a perennial fountain of world prosperity.
The Conservative Historical Imagination in the Twentieth Century
Authors: Soffer Reba N.
Published: November 2007

In 1935, R. G. Collingwood defined the historical imagination as an innate or a priori part of thinking that allows students of history to reconstruct the past. Whether stored in the furniture of the mind, learned through practice, or inherited as genetic inclinations, imagination is indispensable to the historian's craft. The historian's imagination may be richer, more diverse, more inventive than that, say, of an orthopedist, because the historian's present is the surviving but elusive past. Historians have to imagine more because they can never know what actually happened. Like orthopedists and everyone else, historians enter their professions hauling baggage packed haphazardly with images drawn from cultural, personal, religious, moral and practical experience. An orthopedist checks his psychological and social luggage when treating anesthetized muscle and bone in the controlled atmosphere of an operating room. For the orthopedist, the only images relevant for diagnosis and remedy are those produced precisely by x-rays or magnetic resonance. A historian neither diagnoses nor remedies. Instead, relying upon recalcitrant evidence, she tries to explain events that occurred in a dynamic, unpredictable, uncontrollable world already finished.

When historians conduct research and then interpret what they find, they are unwilling and unable to lay aside their every day images of human nature and society. Such concepts, even when wrong, are logically necessary to explanation. Historical imagination organizes the categories that provide a historian with a match between her expectations and the subjects of her inquiry. The historian's juxtaposition, unlike the orthopedist's realistic image, is impressionistic. It becomes satisfying only when it fulfills a cultivated sense of propriety. Although honest historians are persuaded by the information they discover, there are few experiences more pleasing than that frisson of recognition when initial impressions are validated by the historical records. That pleasure is far more agreeable than disappointment. If the records repudiate anticipations then the historian must search for a more adequate explanatory scheme that approximates the truth more closely.
Anarchy in the U.K.? Ideas of the City and the Fin de Siècle in Contemporary English Film and Literature
Authors: Brooke Stephen , Cameron Louise
Published: November 2007

“…before I die I must know my beloved London again: for me it is the centre of civilization—tolerant, intelligent and completely out of control now, I hear”—Hanif Kureishi, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1988)

“D'you want me to go on? The end of the world is nigh, Bri. The game is up!”—Mike Leigh, Naked (1993)

In an essay published in 1969, Alastair Macintyre reflected upon the contradictory place of faith in the modern world, caught between absence and presence, absent because it is apparently no longer central to life, present because its structures still lie all around us. Macintyre suggests that it is at the moment when faith is lost that it becomes more easily, if trivially, incorporated into modern life: “[o]nly since the crisis of belief in the last century, however, has theism so emptied itself of any content that might affront us culturally that it has proved wholly assimilable.”

From the contemporary perspective, one might make the same observation of the secular creed of “Englishness.” It has been suggested that the post-1945 crisis of confidence in the pillars of that mythic “Englishness”—imperial greatness, economic strength, a uniform national and racial identity—can be set against the relatively easy and successful assimilation of past notions into perceptions of the present, perceived, for instance, in the “heritage” industry, whether in tourism or in film. If, as Macintyre remarks of faith in the modern world, we are saddled with “an identity that we can now neither fully recover nor yet quite disown,” it might be argued that England enjoys or endures the same predicament with regard to its national identity.
The Lancashire “Rising” of 1826
Authors: Walsh David
Published: November 2007

In early April 1826, William Huskisson, President of the Board of Trade, wrote to the Home Secretary, Robert Peel, a gloomy picture of the state of essential foodstuffs in the domestic market: “there is a very serious deficiency in every article of produce even in Great Britain. Unfortunately, that deficiency is most alarming in those crops which are the food of the lowest classes—potatoes and oats. It is further unfortunate that the falling off is likely to be greatest in the parts where the lowest classes most abound…my opinion, founded on these and other considerations, is that some immediate measures ought to be taken.” In the industrial north west this dearth of essential foodstuffs coincided with one of the sharpest downturns in the trade cycle seen thus far in the nineteenth century. What Huskisson sought was some lessening in the application of the Corn Laws “immediately,” and that the question be given priority in Cabinet discussions. But his warning was ignored, the government failed to act, and the result was one of the most serious industrial disturbances of the early nineteenth century.

This article recounts the details of the disturbances themselves, but it also attempts to locate the context of the disputes in a wider historical framework than a traditional one offered by historians, namely, the imposition of new machinery. Although scholars have noted the deteriorating conditions facing industrial workers at this time their narratives have focused on the destruction of machinery. John Stevenson, for example, concedes that the disturbances were not the “blind violence they have been painted,” however, it is implicit in his approach that he views the machines as the weavers' sole target, for he ends by saying that the riots were “ineffective” as the manufacturers quickly brought in new looms. It is important to show that this episode was not mere mindless violence; it was linked to a wider set of circumstances that affected the lives of working people. Although the power looms were the physical representation of the plight of the weavers, and thus rife for attack, their targets were not only the employers and governors of their locality.
Thatcher and Her Ministers
Authors: Lloyd Trevor
Published: November 2007

A British politician starts a successful ministerial career by taking the Privy Council oath of secrecy and ends it by signing a publisher's contract for a volume of memoirs. The works of self-justification after 1914 started the flow, which rose a little higher because Labour ex-ministers needed the money much more than earlier politicians had done, and now has swept everybody away. The mass of diaries and memoirs produced by cabinet ministers—Barnett, Benn, Brown, Callaghan, Castle, Crossman, Griffiths, Healey, Jay, Jenkins, Marsh, Owen, Stewart, Wigg, Wilson—from the Labour governments of the 1960s and 1970s was larger than ever before but the Conservatives from Thatcher's eleven-year premiership have already caught up. The ministerial memoirs now available have come out unusually quickly, appearing in print on average within three years of retirement, but there are plenty more to come. Howe's memoirs appeared too late for this review; other Thatcher ex-ministers like Joseph and Younger are probably composing their memoirs at this moment, and survivors from her time who are still in the cabinet, like Clarke, Heseltine, Howard, Hurd, and Major, or who are politically active outside the cabinet like Brittan and Chris Patten, will want to publish when they are free to do so. Perhaps a dozen more books will emerge from the Thatcher cabinet.
“Such Masculine Strokes”: Aphra Behn as Translator ofA Discovery of New Worlds
Authors: Goodfellow Sarah
Published: November 2007

Aphra Behn (1640–89) stands simultaneously at the center and on the edge of Restoration literature. As one of its most prolific writers, her success as a playwright was rivaled only by Dryden; however, as a woman, she defied and challenged contemporary ideas about sex, gender, and authorship. Behn was remarkably aware of the ambiguity of her position; a widow, a writer, and a professional, she inhabited and personified the grey areas of seventeenth-century gender roles. For these reasons, her work provides an interesting window through which to view the relationship between gender and literature in the late seventeenth century.

The subject of several book-length studies and many more articles, Behn has experienced a renaissance in the academic community during the last ten to fifteen years and has been installed in the seventeenth-century literary canon. Two related aspects of her career however have been overlooked. The first is her interest in natural philosophy, including her criticism of philosophers for not sharing their knowledge. The second aspect is her work as a translator, especially as a translator of scientific texts. Perhaps the enduring perception of translation as an essentially derivative activity has led scholars to dismiss Behn's translations as uninteresting or unoriginal. In so far as natural philosophy was a “masculine” discipline, however, Behn's translations demonstrated her ability to participate in and translate between elite natural philosophy, often written in Latin (the most “masculine” language), and a general or female audience.
“Prosecutions…are Always Risky Business”: Labor, Liberals, and the 1912 “Don't Shoot” Prosecutions
Authors: Fletcher Ian Christopher
Published: November 2007

In the spring of 1912, the British syndicalist leader Tom Mann was prosecuted under the Incitement to Mutiny Act 1797 for his opposition to the use of troops during the great coal strike. He was convicted and sentenced to six months' imprisonment, but an outcry from socialists, trade unionists, and progressives forced the Liberal government to reduce his sentence and release him early from prison. This much is familiar to historians of early twentieth-century Britain and Ireland. It is often forgotten, however, that Mann was only one of eight syndicalists and socialists who were prosecuted for their involvement in the “don't shoot” agitation. It is likewise forgotten that Mann went on trial just days before the suffragette leaders Emmeline Pankhurst and Frederick and Emmeline Pethick Lawrence shared a similar fate, amid demands that Sir Edward Carson, the leading opponent of Irish home rule, join them in the dock. Indeed, the Nation, a progressive Liberal weekly, complained that “the country is…getting somewhat tired of political trials.” Perhaps because we assume the relative transparency of the law, historians have failed to scrutinize in detail the origins and outcome of the “don't shoot” prosecutions. George Dangerfield devoted one sentence to them, Elie Halévy a few more; although the “don't shoot” episode has been invoked to symbolize the increasingly fragile relations between Liberalism and the working classes, it continues to receive only brief mention in accounts of Edwardian labor and politics. Even Tom Mann's biographers have shed little new light on his case.
Conflict and Sacred Space in Reformation-Era Scotland
Authors: Graham Michael F.
Published: November 2007

On Whitsunday in June 1593 William Sinclair of Galwaldmuir and two of his sons attended a kirk near Stirling to hear the Sabbath day's sermon. Perhaps they and some of their fellow parishioners were inspired by hearing the word of God, but not everyone in the neighborhood was in a forgiving mood. Just after they left the kirk, “immediatlie aftir sermond,” the Sinclairs were attacked by Sir Archibald Stirling of Keir and several of his followers. When the melee was over, the three Sinclairs lay dead. This was no random act of violence. Rather, it was part of an ongoing feud; Sinclair of Galwaldmuir had earlier been involved in the killing of Stirling of Keir's brother James. The discord originated with a disputed title to the lands of Auchinbie in the parish of Dunblane. The Sinclairs claimed that they held it in feu from the king, while the Stirlings countered that they held it on similar terms from their kinsman William Chisholm, bishop of Dunblane, and they had backed this with a royal confirmation of the feu charter the previous December. The attack was also a significant incursion of profane activity into sacred space—an act situated in such a way as to maximize its dramatic impact.

By following the course of the Sinclair-Stirling feud to its conclusion and also drawing on other examples in which officials of Scotland's Reformed Kirk became involved in conflicts, either as peacemakers or antagonists, this article will examine two related issues.
Open Elites: Recruitment to the FrenchNoblesseand the English Aristocracy in the Eighteenth Century
Authors: McCahill Michael W.
Published: November 2007

Over the past fifteen years historians of Britain have debated the degree to which the nation's aristocracy was open to newcomers. First, W. D. Rubinstein suggested that the new rich of the nineteenth century broke with the pattern of centuries and refrained from large-scale land purchases, in part because the established aristocracy had assumed a more “caste-like” mentality that held outsiders at bay. Then in 1984 two important works extended the challenge to earlier centuries. John Cannon demonstrated that throughout the eighteenth century recruits to the peerage were chosen from among the upper reaches of the landed aristocracy, a fact that suggested to him that the British nobility was a closed group, more closed than its continental counterparts. More significantly, Lawrence and Jeanne Stone completed an immense study of the elite of three counties over a 340-year period; they concluded that the proportion of newcomers was small and that new recruits were drawn mainly from groups already affiliated with the aristocracy. It was not businessmen but small gentry, office holders, and members of the professions who dominated the ranks of newcomers to their county elites.

Other leading students of the British aristocracy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have taken exception to the claims of these iconoclasts. Sir John Habakkuk concluded in his Ford Lectures that “there was no weakening among new men in the eighteenth century of the desire to acquire landed estates. Almost all the wealthiest (or their descendants in the next generation) joined the landed elite….” In greater detail F. M. L. Thompson called into question Rubinstein's findings by challenging the usefulness of his probate data and by showing that millionaire Victorian businessmen or their direct heirs made substantial land purchases.
“Martyrs in Flames”: Sir John Temple and the Conception of the Irish in English Martyrologies
Authors: Noonan Kathleen M.
Published: November 2007

In the violence over Protestant marches in Northern Ireland in the late 1990s much of the debate centered on two towns, Portadown and Drumcree. Students of seventeenth-century Irish history will note that those towns were sites of some of the most infamous stories of rebel atrocities in the 1641 uprising. The continuity of such images reinforces the notion that ethnic and religious conflicts are immutable and perhaps inevitable. A certain fatalism surrounds the acrimony of Arab and Jew, Muslim and Christian, English and Irish arising from the conviction that such conflicts have raged, as if unchanging, over centuries. However, when viewed over time, the struggles between such groups are dynamic rather than static and have helped construct how each group sees the other and how it identifies itself. In the dynamism surrounding Anglo-Irish relations a number of important turning points can be identified. One of the most important is of course the seventeenth century, particularly the 1641 uprising. More than thirty years ago W. D. Love noted how for three centuries Irish historiography and Anglo-Irish intercourse had been molded by the events of the mid-seventeenth century and had compelled historians to support or deny the charges made by each side about the events of the 1640s. In trying to understand the searing nature of those events, and how they came to frame political as well as historical debates from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, a number of historians have noted the importance of Sir John Temple and his propagan distic piece, The Irish Rebellion. Temple's work offered not just an interpretation of the 1641 uprising but a portrait of the two peoples, English and Irish, as basically and permanently incompatible—a thesis that has had remarkable staying power. Published in 1646, Temple's work was a departure from the Tudor and early Stuart canon on Ireland. While Temple borrowed much from earlier commentators such as Edmund Spenser and Sir John Davies, his analysis differed from them and set out in a new direction by defining the Irish as ethnically distinct. Spenser and Davies suggested that the problem of Ireland arose not from the land, or even its people (although Spenser devoted considerable discussion to the ways Irish customs undermined English success), but from foolhardy or poorly executed English policy. Even though the late Tudor and early Stuart commentators saw the Irish as barbaric, the Irish were thought to be amenable to the benefits of English culture and rule, although their reformation might require draconian measures. Even the divisive issue of religion was not thought insurmountable. Davies and Spenser argued that a religious reformation begun after peace and stability had been secured in Ireland would succeed. In contrast, Temple viewed the 1641 revolt as conclusive evidence that the Irish were irredeemable and posed a deadly threat to England and its people.
Sex in the Cinema: War, Moral Panic, and the British Film Industry, 1906–1918
Authors: Rapp Dean
Published: November 2007

The film era in Britain commenced in early 1896, but its moral impact on viewers was not considered very much during its first decade. This was primarily because film was dispersed in a variety of venues like music halls and fairgrounds where other entertainment was provided, or in unused shops and other premises that were temporarily rented. Film thus had no permanent, separate identity as a leisure activity that took place in one particular type of public space, hence it was difficult for moralists to recognize, much less discern and evaluate its moral influence. Moreover, many of the middle class (from whom most moralists came) dismissed the early film industry as a passing, vulgar fad of the working class that need not be taken seriously.

But moralists did begin to notice the impact of the industry when film acquired a conspicuous new identity of its own in the years after 1906 when thousands of purpose-built cinemas were constructed. The tremendous growth of both the cinemas and their mostly working-class, youthful audiences led some middle-class moralists to focus their attention on film for the first time. They soon concluded that the cinemas undermined the morality of their young audiences and launched a crusade against the film industry. The general outlines of the campaign are well known. Moralists charged that the darkened cinemas provided cover for couples to court and for some men to abuse children. They also asserted that many films were sensational ones about sexual indecency, crime, and violence. Such fare, they contended, encouraged immorality and incited juvenile delinquency among youth who imitated the crimes they saw enacted on screen. The moralists therefore demanded censorship of the films, brighter lighting in the cinemas to discourage sexual misbehavior, and police action against indecency. Moreover, Sabbatarians opposed the opening of the cinemas on Sundays as a further desecration of that holy day of rest.
Influence of Flickering Light on the Retinal Vessels in Diabetic Patients
Authors: Mandecka Aleksandra , Dawczynski Jens , Blum Marcus , Müller Nicolle , Kloos Christoph , Wolf Gunter , Vilser Walthard , Hoyer Heike , Müller Ulrich Alfons
Published: November 2007

OBJECTIVE—Stimulation of the retina with flickering light increases retinal vessel diameters in humans. Nitric oxide is a mediator of the retinal vasodilation to flicker. The reduction of vasodilation is considered an endothelial dysfunction. We investigated the response of retinal vessels to flickering light in diabetic patients in different stages of diabetic retinopathy.

RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS—We studied 53 healthy volunteers, 68 type 1 diabetic patients, and 172 type 2 diabetic patients. The diameter of retinal vessels was measured continuously online with the Dynamic Vessel Analyzer (DVA). Diabetic retinopathy was classified using Early Treatment Diabetic Retinopathy Study criteria. Changes in vasodilation are expressed as percent change over baseline values.

RESULTS—After adjustments for age, sex, and antihypertensive treatment, the response of retinal arterioles to diffuse luminance flicker was significantly diminished in patients with type 1 diabetes compared with healthy volunteers. The vasodilation of retinal arterioles and venules decreased continuously with increasing stages of diabetic retinopathy. The retinal arterial diameter change was 3.6 ± 2.1% in the control group, 2.6 ± 2.5% in the no diabetic retinopathy group, 2.0 ± 2.7% in the mild nonproliferative diabetic retinopathy (NPDR) group, 1.6 ± 2.2% in the moderate NPDR group, 1.8 ± 1.9% in severe NPDR group, and 0.8 ± 1.6% in proliferative diabetic retinopathy group.

CONCLUSIONS—Flicker responses of retinal vessels are abnormally reduced in diabetic patients. This decreased response deteriorated with increasing stages of retinopathy. The response was already reduced before clinical appearance of retinopathy. The noninvasive testing of retinal autoregulation with DVA might prove to be of value in early detection of diabetic vessel pathological changes.
Endometriosis in the Uterosacral Ligament Giving Orthopedic Symptoms Through Compression of the Sciatic Nerve and Surgically Treated Via an Extraperitoneal Approach Keeping the Pelvic Organs Intact
Authors: Bergqvist Agneta , Bergqvist David , Lindholm Karin , Linell Folke
Published: November 2007

Sciatic pain in a young woman was not relieved by orthopedic treatment. The gynecologist found a large hard tumor‐like mass in the uterosacral ligament extending to the pelvic wall. Cytologic examination of fine needle aspirate indicated an endometriotic lesion. The large tumor‐like mass was extirpated by an extraperitoneal technique and the pain disappeared.
Patients With Vaginal Discharge In General Practice
Authors: Bro Flemming
Published: November 2007

In a multi‐practice study, 80 general practitioners registered 327 patients with spontaneous complaints of vaginal discharge. Forty‐eight percent of the patients were between 20 and 29 years of age, compared with 20% in the general female population (p < 0.001). An increase in discharge was reported by 89% of the women, itching by 53%, and malodour by 38%. More than one symptom was reported by 61%. The symptoms present were mutually independent and no correlation was found with age. Seventy‐six percent of women 25 years or older had had earlier instances of vaginal discharge. In patients aged 15–19, 60% had experienced earlier episodes. Male consort symptoms were reported by 14% of patients less than 25 years old and by 7% of the patients 25 years or older (p<0.05). Symptoms had persisted for one week or less in 36% of the women, for between 1 and 2 weeks in 27%, and for more than one year in 5%.