bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
An Essay on Man and Harte’s An Essay on Reason: Title Pages and Implied Authorship
Authors: McLaverty James
Published: November 2023

Although Pope enjoyed marking his books with their author’s personality, using typography as a form of self-presentation, he also relished anonymous and pseudonymous publication. This was particularly the case with An Essay on Man, culminating in a curious period in the mid-173os when Pope seems to have thought of Walter Harte’s An Essay on Reason as his own poem, or at least as a companion to his Essay and a poem that might as well have been his own. Anonymity had already ensured an unbiased reception for An Essay on Man between February 1733 and January 1734, but in February 1735 Pope was able to use his skills as a publisher to present Harte’s poem so that it might be read as his own and reflect favourably on the piety and orthodoxy of An Essay on Man.
The Grand Old Ballad in Coleridge’s ‘Dejection’
Authors: Stafford Fiona
Published: November 2023

Had Sotheby read no further than the first paragraph, he might well have concluded that Coleridge was supremely confident of his own abilities, not only as a translator, but also as a poet, a critic, and an Englishman. Nor would this have been an unreasonable assumption, given Coleridge's rapidly increas­ing list of publications, and the overt patriotism of some of his recent work.3 And yet, as the letter continues, the self­confidence of the opening gives way first to self-mockery, and then to confessions of depression and failure.
James Clarence Mangan and Percy Bysshe Shelley
Authors: Stafford Fiona
Published: November 2023

The idea of native poetry provided various challenges to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers, depending partly on their own backgrounds, homes, and education. For Burns to command admiration for the 'simple strains' appar­ently flowing from 'the native feelings of his heart', he had to adopt a kind of Scottish dialect which could nevertheless incorporate elements of standard English and literary influences from south of the Border. Coleridge, on the other hand, being less firmly rooted in a particular area, expressed his restless modernity through admiration for traditional bards and ballad­makers, while simultaneously developing a sense of the funda­mental importance of internal rather than external resources. For both poets, as for many of their readers, an awareness of local origins and the peculiarities of certain regions was pro­nounced.
Poetry, Music, and the Sacred
Authors: Fuller David
Published: November 2023

I began university life as a music student, but I abandoned that because I found that writing counterpoint in the style of Palestrina and Bach, or writing harmony in the style of Haydn and Schumann, bore little relation to what I wanted to do-to participate in more intense and more varied ways in the beauty of works which obsessed me, and to find the fullest possible range of other music which might have the same exciting effects. So I gave up Music (as an academic subject) and took up English. The people who taught me (Francis Berry, and later William Empson) were wonderfully odd, and apparently led intellectual lives in which there was a harmonious inter change between the intellect and the other faculties. These people were not, as I naively assumed, the pattern of university life; and when I went to my second university I became conscious again of the gap between the experience of art and the modes of engaging with that experience. But I retained a haunting sense that this need not be so: the gap between aesthetic experience and its institutional study could, I continued to believe, be decreased.
The Metaphysics of Modernism Aesthetic Myth and the Myth of the Aesthetic
Authors: Bell Michael
Published: November 2023

The use of myth in modern writers such as Eliot, Joyce, Lawrence, and Yeats has passed into the academic reception of the period in the now derided form of the 1950s ‘myth kitty’; and Marc Manganaro has acutely shown the line of transmission from Frazer, through Eliot, to Northrop Frye as the continuation of a mistaken ethnographic method. I In the world of Anglo-Saxon academic criticism myth has deserved its bad name, while on the larger stage of European thought it has come to be associated with sinister political movements as the Marxist critique in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlight-enment has won out over the efforts of Thomas Mann and Karl Kerenyi to maintain its progressive and humanistic potential.2 But this familiar story obscures the true significance of modernist myth making, and to that extent of the literature itself, for modernist myth has a liberal and progressive aspect as well as a nostalgic and con servative one. What has been obscured is its philosophical, and through that its critical, import even for the present. I will show this by noting first how some earlier Romantic aspirations towards a philosophical mythopoeia were unwittingly realized in British and American modernism.
The Cosmopolitan and the Rag-Picker in Expatriate Paris
Authors: Parsons Deborah L
Published: November 2023

Shariben stock has pioneered the assertion of the significance for women’s modernist literature of the forgotten ‘left bank’, universalized by Ford Madox Ford in his ‘Preface’ to Jean Rhys’s The Left Bank and Other Stories as the marginal area of a city, remaking 1920s and 1930s Paris according to a female literary community. The problem with the ‘anticanonical’ approach is that it can lead to an equally oppositional and reductive analysis.1 Benstock focuses on the sapphitic female modernism of the largely expatriate community centred around the lesbian world of Natalie Barney, and the ‘female modernism’ she reconstructs is thus one of aesthetic and sexual experimentation within a mutually supportive group drawn together in the interior space of the salon. Rarely questioning the dynamics of place, her study thus seems to fix women into asserting urban independence and the rootlessness of exile, but from within the limits of certain social places in a confined part of the city.
Bawdy Virgins and Queer Puns
Authors: Bly Mary
Published: November 2023

I begin with the wish to laugh with the dead. There is something of a tradition in early modern scholarship of books that open with an expression of philosophic if necrophilic desires: to sleep with the dead, to talk with the dead.’ Hearing the laughter of the dead seems a simple concept. Early modern theatrical audiences undoubtedly laughed when Sampson threatened to cut off ‘the heads of the maids, or their maidenheads’. Surely they chortled when Flute as This be professed to have often kissed the hairy stones of Wall, given that ‘stones’ was a common pun on ‘balls’. Their wit, in Dryden’s prim phrase, ‘was not that of gentlemen’. We have little trouble hearing the echo of that laughter. Prince Hal pulls Falstaff’s pistol from its case; the pistol turns out to be a bottle of sack; twentieth century audiences howl with laughter. Cowardice and alcohol are as potent subjects for knockabout farce in 1998 as they were in 1598, when Shakespeare’s The History ofHenry IV appeared in the Stationers’ Register.
Introduction
Authors: Richardson Angelique
Published: November 2023

In 1882 ‘unemployed’ became a noun, Olive Schreiner found a publisher for The Story of an African Farm, the first New Woman novel, and British women were entitled to own their property after marriage.
Charity and Citizenship
Authors: Richardson Angelique
Published: November 2023

Charity had become pivotal in the question of national efficiency. The hereditarian position was clear and inflexible: no amount of charity in the world could undo biology. Malthus had sown the seeds for the eugenic line on charity at the close of the eighteenth century, pinpointing the ‘natural tendency of the labouring classes of society to increase beyond the demand for their labour, or the means of their adequate support’,5 and attacking the poor laws which he saw as creating the poor which they maintained, encouraging them to increase their numbers without increasing food for their support (97).
Poetical Recreations
Authors: King Kathryn R
Published: November 2023

The picture of Barker the poet that emerges from study of the fifty-odd items of verse published in Poetical Recreations (I688) is sharply at odds with the self-doubting, regretful, solitary, even bitter figure taking shape in recent accounts. Certainly some of the verse Barker wrote at St-Germain, the subject of an essay by Toni Bowers, can be read in support of the view that Barker experienced ‘confusion and disappointment’ over her sacrificial devotion to a rather austere poetic vocation.1 But by the time Barker composed this verse she was already developing her mythology of the female poet as Virtuous Outsider, a figure associated in the St-Germain poetry of the I 690s and even more in the late prose fictions with deprivation, neglect, and banishment.
Recasting the Plays: Homage, Adaptation, Parody
Authors: Lanier Douglas
Published: November 2023

One of the more curious Shakes popphenomena of recent years has been the appearance of Shakespeare fan fiction. Fan fiction involves fans producing their own ‘unauthorized’ adaptations of favourite TV shows, movies, cartoons, and comic books and publishing them in alternative venues like websites and fanzines. Writers of fan fiction take the characters, settings, plot lines, and motifs from established genres and imagine otherwise forbidden relationships between characters, encounters between different series or fictional worlds (so called ‘crossover fan fiction’), or plot possibilities never explored in the originals..
A Theoretical Overview
Authors: Taylor Georgina
Published: November 2023

The study of literature has usually tended to focus on the individual author. As Raymond Williams writes: ‘We may know that authors work within determinate social and cultural conditions, but we still emphasise the fact of individual production.’
Postscript
Authors: Taylor Georgina
Published: November 2023

Following the end of the war, the public sphere of modernist women writers was never again to regroup as a dynamic network. Though several individual writers produced interesting texts, the sense of a collective and co-operative endeavour was lost. In place of a public exchange of ideas, interactions between writers now took place within a much smaller arena oriented towards support and encouragement and rooted in private friendships rather than a more public interaction of contemporaries.
The Anatomy of Bigotry: Carlyle, Ruskin, Slavery, and a New Language of Race
Authors: Wood Marcus
Published: November 2023

Carlyle and Ruskin wrote repeatedly about slavery from a variety of perspectives. Within their slavery writings the competitive and acquisitive approach to the sufferings of the Atlantic slave took a number of new turns. For both Ruskin and Carlyle the plight of the labouring masses in Britain provided the central platform for comparative discussions of slavery. It is the desire to remove the slave and substitute the white industrial labourer that drives the thought of both men. Yet the expression of this desire could hardly have taken more divergent forms.
Coleridge’s ‘Hymn before Sun-rise’ and the Voice Not Heard
Authors: Esterhammer Angela
Published: November 2023

Coleridge’s interest in a wide range of natural and social sciences, and his conviction that ‘nothing can be more absurd than [the] belief of the necessary opposition of poetry to science’ (TT, ii. 455 ), are amply illustrated by the chapters in this volume.
Coleridge’s Secret Ministry: Historical Reading and Editorial Theory
Authors: Everest Kelvin
Published: November 2023

‘The historical context of Coleridge’s poetry has been neglected.’ That was the opening sentence of the introduction to Coleridge’s Secret Ministry.1 The sentence was written in September 1976, and I can still remember exactly where and when I wrote it. It was a hot morning, just before the start of the academic year, and I was in my office in the English department of St David’s University College, Lampeter, in rural west Wales. I was 2 5, married, and with a 4-year-old daughter.
Prologue
Authors: Swindells Julia
Published: November 2023

In 1832, the playwright, George Colman the Younger, also Examiner of Plays to the Lord Chamberlain at that time, was asked a telling question by a member of a parliamentary committee by whom he was being interviewed: Question: In the exercise of your censorship at the present moment, if the word reform should occur, you would strike it out?In reply, Colman declared: No; I should say, ‘I think you had better omit it; I advise you to do so for your own sakes, or you will have a hubbub.
Distressed Tenants And Rural Landscapes
Authors: Swindells Julia
Published: November 2023

It has already become apparent, from studying some aspects of the factory movement and its drama, that there is more at work in the representation of the plight of industrial workers than an exclusive concern with the factory itself Part of what Richard Oastler and others who campaigned against the factory system and against enforced emigration were defending, as well as the rights of labourers and their children, was the English rural landscape and its charms.
St George for Ireland
Authors: McCabe Richard A
Published: November 2023

About a month after Lord Grey’s arrival in Ireland, Sir William Pelham, then President of Munster, issued a proclamation requiring ‘every horsmane’ in the service of the crown ‘both Englishe and lrishe’ to display ‘two rede crosses, either of Silke or Cloth, the one to be fastened on the breste, the other on the backe’. On his first visit to the province in which he would finally take up residence, Spenser could have seen bands of ‘Redcross knights’ pricking across the plains of Desmond in pursuit of what the Lord Deputy regarded as the papal dragon.
Noble Britons, Savage Scyths
Authors: McCabe Richard A
Published: November 2023

For the purposes of the nation state, genealogy is largely the art of self invention. Ancestry underwrites ascendancy and the claim to an heroic past validates the quest for an imperial future. In the second book of The Faerie Queene Spenser provides his countrymen with a myth of origin, in the third he provides them with a myth of destiny and the two are inextricably linked. There is nothing unique in this. The perceived telos of history frequently promotes the adoption, or fabrication, of myths of ethnic origin which exercise authority precisely (and paradoxically) because they are ‘myths’ in Roland Barthes’s sense of the term, pseudo-historical fictions that facilitate contemporary policies and are stubbornly defended as historical truths for that very reason.
Colin Clout’s Other Island
Authors: McCabe Richard A
Published: November 2023

Within less than a year of the appearance of The Faerie Queene the reading public was confronted by Spenser’s Complaints. Containing sundrie small Poemes of the Worlds Vanitie (1591). The epic poet now revealed himself as a satirist, or perhaps it might be more accurate to say that the satiric subtext of his heroic verse received explicit articulation.1 The Ruines of Time refers to a paradisal garden more beautiful than that ‘which Merlin by his Magickeflights | Made for the gentle squire, to entertaine | His fayre Belphcebe (523-5).
Savage Courtesy
Authors: McCabe Richard A
Published: November 2023

At the very outset of book six courtesy is identified as the virtue proper to the ‘court’ (6. r. 1), yet it is Artegall’s untimely ‘recall’ to ‘faerie court’ that frustrates the ‘reforme’ of lrena’s kingdom (5. 12. 27). It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the pattern of violence begun in book five continues into book six. ‘Courtesy’, as commonly conceived, was generally regarded as inappropriate to the colonial enterprise. According to Thomas Churchyard, for example, ‘severe and straight handely [sic] of rebellious people, Reformes them sooner to obedience, then any courteous dealyng’.
Seádn Rordáin: Between Corkery and Joycery
Authors: Sewell Frank
Published: November 2023

While each of these wrote in an individual vein, their work taken together realized the desire for an authentic modern voice in poetry. Their use of the language in response to experience established the validiry of modern poetry in Irish.
Cathal Ó Searcaigh: Zig-zagging All Over Creation
Authors: Sewell Frank
Published: November 2023

Jacques Derrida, in his essay ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’, argues that an ‘event’ or ‘rupture’ has taken place in the history of the concept of structure.
A Brief History of Paranoia
Authors: Trotter David
Published: November 2023

If any text can claim biblical status in the collective self-understanding of a profession, it is the current (fourth) edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (1994). According to this text, the ‘essential feature’ of ‘Delusional Disorder’, or paranoia, is the presence of one or more ‘non-bizarre’ delusions which persist for at least a month. These delusions are ‘non-bizarre’ in that they are comprehensible, and arise from circumstances which could conceivably occur in real life (being stalked, or betrayed, or conspired against, or loved at a distance). ‘Apart from the direct impact of the delusions,’ the Manual continues, ‘psychosocial functioning is not markedly impaired, and behaviour is neither obviously odd nor bizarre.’ Despite important revisions of terminology and emphasis, the basic understanding of what constitutes ‘Delusional Disorder’ has not changed all that much over the last 200 years or so. Paranoia has been with us for a long time, and in more or less the same shape: a shape made palpable in textbooks, case-histories, newspaper articles, and, I shall suggest, literary fiction.
Ford’s Impressionism
Authors: Trotter David
Published: November 2023

One day in 1914, Ford Madox Ford, then 40 years old and feeling it, found himself for a while in the custody of the youthful Percy Wyndham Lewis, a writer whose work had appeared in Ford’s magazine, the English Re11ielll, and who was about to launch a magazine of his own, the rather more intemperate Blast. Gripping Ford by the elbow, Lewis, who was as usual in incendiary mood, poured scorn on him and his associates. ‘You and Mr Conrad and Mr James and all those old fellows are done’, he was to be heard insisting. ‘Exploded! ⃛ Fich11s! .⃛Vieux jeu! .⃛No good! ⃛ Finished!’ Lewis’s beef was with literary ‘impressionism’: with novels which sought intricately to render the movements, at once furtive and immense, of a consciousness enmeshed in and inseparable from worlds not of its own making. ‘
Wyndham Lewis’s Professions
Authors: Trotter David
Published: November 2023

For uetter or for worse this book has by now developed a certain momentum, and it is tempting to press on at once to the obvious conclusion: that Wyndham Lewis’s work of the 1920s is the outcome and fulfilment of the habits of mind analysed in previous chapters, in short, of ‘paranoid Modernism’. It would, indeed, be rather odd if a book about paranoia, of all things, were wilfully to reverse or dissipate its own delusion of reference, its burgeoning belief that the evidence has a single story to tell. So I shall press on.
Terrorism and Modern Literature, from Joseph Conrad to Ciaran Carson
Authors: Houen Alex
Published: November 2023

Is terrorism's violence essentially symbolic? Does it impact on culture primarily through the media? What kinds of performative effect do the various discourses surrounding terrorism have? Such questions have not only become increasingly important in terrorism studies, they have also been concerns for many literary writers. This book is the first extensive study of modern literature's engagement with terrorism. Ranging from the 1880s to the 1980s, the terrorism examined is as diverse as the literary writings on it: chapters include discussions of Joseph Conrad's novels on Anarchism and Russian Nihilism; Wyndham Lewis's avant-garde responses to Syndicalism and the militant Suffragettes; Ezra Pound's poetic entanglement with Segregationist violence; Walter Abish's fictions about West German urban guerrillas; and Seamus Heaney's and Ciaran Carson's poems on the 'Troubles' in Northern Ireland. In each instance, Alex Houen explores how the literary writer figures clashes or collusions between terrorist violence and discursive performativity. What is revealed is that writing on terrorism has frequently involved refiguring the force of literature itself. In terrorism studies the cultural impact of terrorism has often been accounted for with rigid, structural theories of its discursive roots. But what about the performative effects of violence on discourse? Addressing the issue of this mutual contagion, Terrorism and Modern Literature shows that the mediation and effects of terrorism have been historically variable. Referring to a variety of sources in addition to the literature--newspaper and journal articles, legislation, letters, manifestoes--the book shows how terrorism and the literature on it have been embroiled in wider cultural fields. The result is not just a timely intervention in debates about terrorism's performativity. Drawing on literary/critical theory and philosophy, it is also a major contribution to debates about the historical and political dimensions of modernist and postmodernist literary practices.
Wyndham Lewis: Literary ‘Strikes’ and Allegorical Assaults
Authors: Houen Alex
Published: November 2023

If Conrad’s 17ze  Secret  Agent gestures towards a politically engaged style of literature, it is the avant-garde movements and periodicals which flourished throughout Europe in the early twentieth century that at tempt to tum such gestures into a punch. As Renato Poggioli ,vrites in The  Theory  (r/the  Avant-Garde (1968), these movements were closely affiliated ·with military vanguards from the outset. Only after the Paris Commune in 1871, he argues, did the term ‘begin to designate separately the cultural artistic avant-garde while still designating, in a wider and more distinct context, the socio-political avant-garde’. In contrast to the nineteenth-century periodical, which functioned largely as a liberal ‘organ of opinion’, the avant-garde periodical, Poggioli argues, was ‘an independent and isolated military unit, com politely and sharply detached from the public, quick to act, not only to explore but also to battle, conquer and adventure on its own’.
Benefits and Benefactors
Authors: Golding Brian
Published: November 2023

No religious order, however world-forsaking, could afford to cut itself off entirely from secular society and influence. Every house needed a protector and defender of its interests. Just as a vassal expected support, as well as a fee, from his lord in return for military service, so the eleemosynary tenant would expect protection from the benefactor. But when discussing the nature of this reciprocal relationship a problem of definition is immediately encountered. Strictly speaking, the term ‘patron’ should be applied only to the founder and his/her family and successors, and perhaps in some cases to the founder’s own lord, whose consent was necessary to the alienation of his tenant’s estates.’ However, the term can also be used in a non-technical sense to indicate those particular benefactors who enjoyed a special relationship with a community, as evidenced, for example, by the grant of confraternity, burial rights, or corrodies. So, W., prior of Malton, appointed a perpetual chaplain in the priory to celebrate for the soul of John Mansel, once provost of Beverley, ‘our special patron and helper’, in recognition of all the good work done by John for the community.2 Such supporters were normally, and hardly surprisingly, among the more generous benefactors to the priory. In order to avoid ambiguity in the discussion that follows, the use of the term ‘patron’ will be confined to the founder and his kin.
Second Labour Government, 1929–1931
Authors: Shepherd John
Published: November 2023

On Monday, 10 June 1929, the Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, was filmed on the terrace of 10 Downing Street presenting the nineteen members of his new Labour administration to the nation before the first Cabinet meeting. To make this first ‘talkie’ at Whitehall, there was an extraordinary collection of cameras among the rhododendrons bordering the lawn, as well as two film-production vans parked outside in Downing Street. Ironically, only an American agency using German equipment responded to the Government’s invitation to record this notable occasion. No one else spoke as MacDonald announced his Cabinet colleagues in turn. He introduced his First Commissioner of Works-’our old friend, George Lans bury’-and declared that the Member for Bow and Bromley, besides looking after historic buildings and royal parks, also had an important role in the government’s plans for tackling unemployment in Britain.
The Elements Of Naval Life
Authors: Davies J D
Published: November 2023

THE officers] dressed as if for a gala at Versailles, ate off plate, drank the richest wines, and kept harems on board, while hunger and scurvy raged among the crews, and while corpscs were daily flung out of the portholes.
The Revolution Of 1688
Authors: Davies J D
Published: November 2023

The navy was one part of James Il’s kingdom which might have been expected to greet his accession with unbridled enthusiasm. James himself perceived a special relationship, and told his sea-officers of his pride in having been their admiral before he was their king.
Prologue
Authors: Matthew H C G
Published: November 2023

‘Men make their own history, but not of their own free will; not under circumstances they themselves have chosen but under the given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly confronted.’ Of few can Marx’s truism be truer than of William Ewart Gladstone. His epic public career first in office in 1834, last in 1894-confronted the prime of Britain as the first industrial nation. The agenda of free trade and imperialism was dictated by forces far beyond the control of individuals acting as such. Yet the interpretation and execution of the agenda was achieved by the decisions and actions of individuals and explained through their speeches and writings. In this interpretation, execution, and explanation, Gladstone’s career holds a central place. In the process through which the British governing class came to terms with its new commercial and industrial destiny, Gladstone was a vital agent.
Chancellor of the Exchequer: Free Trade, Budgets, and Franchise Reform
Authors: Matthew H C G
Published: November 2023

Thus Gladstone, twenty-six days after kissing hands in 1868 as first lord of the Treasury for the first time, celebrated his arrival at ‘the top of the greasy pole’. It had not for him been a difficult climb, though there had been the odd slip and loss of grip. Nor had the conditions been especially arduous in the decade since the Crimean War. The crises of ‘the hungry forties’ gave way to the spectacular prosperity of the 1850s and 1860s. Britain moved towards democracy by the rule book, recalcitrant theorists proving a worse problem for the government than the demonstrations of loyal artisans, eager to ally themselves with political democracy.
The First Government: Distintegration and Downfall
Authors: Matthew H C G
Published: November 2023

The disestablishment of the Irish Church, the Irish Land Act, and the Education Act of 1870, three of the triumphs of the century, were bought at a high legislative price. In June 1869 the Cabinet for the first time considered ‘Bills Abandoned’, and the midsummer purge of bills proposed but not passed became a distinctive feature of the ministry.
A Prime Minister’s Private Life
Authors: Matthew H C G
Published: November 2023

Few politicians in peacetime can have been more fully stretched than Gladstone in his first ministry. The description of the previous two chapters has tried to indicate the main areas of government activity in which he involved himself. Any reader of this survey could not but be puzzled by Lord Houghton’s view, that Gladstone had a ‘one idea at a time faculty’, a view which has had an eminent following since. It may be that Gladstone sometimes presented himself as having one idea at a time, and it is certainly the case that a departmental minister, trying to cope with a line of policy in which the Prime Minister was interesting himself; must have felt that he was Gladstone’s sole object of attention. But the first ministry shows Gladstone at the height of political awareness, sensitive to the implications of every phrase in every letter on a vast range of topics. Certainly he was more interested in some topics than in others, and he was completely identified with three of the government’s main bills.
Home Rule, Land, and the Proposed Pacification of Ireland 1886
Authors: Matthew H C G
Published: November 2023

The Queen’s commission to form a government arrived at a quarter past midnight on the morning of Saturday, 30 January 1886, brought by her Secretary, Sir Henry Ponsonby, just as Gladstone was going to bed: ‘in came Sir H. Ponsonby with verbal communication from H.M. which I at once accepted’. Ponsonby was late because G.J. Goschen, whom he had been told to sound out about the possibility of a coalition government of Whigs and Tories, had been out till midnight.
‘Successive snapping of the threads’
Authors: Matthew H C G
Published: November 2023

Gladstone never again entered the House of Commons, in which he had first set foot as an MP sixty-one years previously, in 1833. He again declined the Queen’s offer of a peerage, and made it clear to his wife that in his view she should likewise decline a peerage for herself.† He thus died plain ’Mr.’, an almost unique reticence for a Prime Minister.‡ To accept a title at the same time as declaring the House of Lords the central political question of the future would not, in the history of the British political elite’s attempts to come to terms with constitutional change, have been an exceptional or even an unusual irony. But its refusal went beyond mere consistency. For all the many honours he had recommended for others, Gladstone always saw himself as a commoner. His veneration for hereditary land tenure and the social system that accompanied it was well established.
Mastering the Revolution
Authors: Sheehan James J
Published: November 2023

Most 60 per cent of the German population changed rulers during the revolutionary period. Among the were the inhabitants of Hausen, a village that had once been part of the Habsburgs’ western lands and then was given by Napoleon to Frédérick of Württemberg in return for his support during the campaign of 1805. To mark the beginning of his rule, Frédérick ordered special religious ceremonies to be held throughout his new domain.
The Growth Of Participatory Politics, 1830-1848
Authors: Sheehan James J
Published: November 2023

IN HIS introductory essay to the first edition of the Staatslexikon (1834), Theodor Welcker described the contemporary period as a distinctively ‘political era’. Never before, he argued, had the ambitions of individuals and nations taken such a manifestly political form, never had the clash of parties so dominated people’s thought and action. Welcker was surely correct. During the 1830s and 1840s Germans’ interest in public affairs steadily increased. Political news, diluted but not destroyed by the censors, found its way into the daily Press; theories and opinions on political matters were expressed in lexicons and lecture halls, periodicals and public meetings. The social, literary, and scholarly institutions that sustained the public sphere extended their reach, diversified their functions, and deepened their social base. ‘All of human reality’, Julius Froebel believed, ‘is subsumed under the unity of politics’. Politics even threatened to permeate the private space of Biedermeier sociability: as one hostess complained in the 1830s, ‘The affliction of political conversation was no longer to be excluded from the drawing room’.
The Erasmusstiftung and Europe: The Institution, Organization, and Activity of the Foundation of Erasmus of Rotterdam from 1538 to 1600*
Authors: Felici Lucia
Published: November 2023

The Erasmusstiftung, the foundation instituted according to the testamentary disposition of Erasmus of Rotterdam, began its activities in Basel in 1538. The goals of the foundation, which survives to the present day, were to contribute to the intellectual formation of the young and to their entry into the world of work, to support indigent men of culture and of faith, to assist the poor, and to overcome confessional and geographical barriers with a view to realizing those ecumenical and humanistic ideals for which Erasmus had been the greatest spokesman. And this in the sixteenth century, in an age marked by the division of the Corpus Christianum and by the development of state and ecclesiastical structures typical of early-modern Europe. In its characteristic features and in the aims it set for itself, therefore, the Erasmusstiftung represents not only a significant element of the social and cultural reality of sixteenth-century Europe, but also an important vantage point from which to investigate aspects of the general history of that century.
William Crosse, Regius Professor of Civil Law in the University of Glasgow, 1746–1749:A Failure of Enlightened Patronage
Authors: Cairns* John W
Published: November 2023

Maarten Ultee has recently written in this journal that ‘[t]here were close links between knowledge and power in the early modern period, and historians of universities are in an excellent position to explore them.’ An important way of examining such links is by studies of how individual professors came to be appointed. To see who was able to influence professorial appointments is to acquire an insight not only into who exercised power at any given time in the shifting politics that characterized early modern societies, but also into how they exercised it. Controlling elections to university chairs was a means of controlling dissemination of knowledge, as the choice of a particular professor affected how and with what success a discipline was taught. The formal methods of election to professorships in early-modern Europe varied considerably from country to country, and, indeed, from institution to institution within one country. Neither the study of the formal regulations on appointing professors found in university statutes, nor the knowledge that chairs were in the gift of the crown or other patrons exhausts the explanation of how particular appointments came about. What is required is detailed investigation of how individual professors gained their positions. While little of such work has been carried out, that that has been done demonstrates how important it is to undertake it. Exploring professors’ social and political connections provides insight into their intellectual concerns. Such studies will allow us to develop a more nuanced understanding of the professoriate and universities of early-modern Europe.
Republican Virtues and the Free State: Conceptual Frame and Meaning in Early Modern Europe and North America
Authors: öschl Thomas Fr
Published: November 2023

Republican theory has always underlined that the key to understanding a free state is the importance of the Law. Citizens in a republic depend upon the law which they make for themselves-they do not depend upon the arbitrary will of one prince. This conviction might be called the ‘founding article’ of republican constitutions as well as of a genuine republican self-perception. The conception of a respublica libera requires citizens with equal legal rights. It was thought that a republic could only function properly if the basic equality of the citizens was guaranteed and respected. Political participation on equal terms was the precondition for all citizens consenting to laws made by themselves and which they would obey. In his famous dedication to the Republic of Geneva in his Discours surl’in égalit é (1755) Rousseau emphasized that it was precisely this that was the true citizen’s pride.’
Art
Authors: Waywell Geoffrey
Published: November 2023

The legacy of Roman art can best be appreciated through the medium of sculpture. That is not to say that other art-forms such as ivories, coins, engraved gems, mosaics or wall-paintings were not influential on the minds and hands of later artists at differing periods, but it is only in sculpture that one can trace the continuity of Rome’s artistic heritage.
“The latchkey to power”
Authors: Wright Jonathan
Published: November 2023

The elections of June 1920 were a watershed both for the Republic and the DVP. The coalition of SPD, Centre, and DDP, which had seemed to promise a secure future for the Republic in January 1919, lost its majority, and it was unclear how a new government was to be formed. This faced the DVP with a critical decision, one which was to recur repeatedly in the years that followed. Would it remain in opposition, thus protecting its right flank from the DNVP, or would it form a minority coalition with the parties of the middle, or even a so-called “great coalition” which included the SPD in a majority government? Stresemann had never been in any doubt that the proper place for the DVP was in government, and his success in the elections gave him the chance to put this policy into practice. He faced opposition from the DNVP, which naturally made the most of his willingness to form a coalition with the DDP and Centre Party in June 1920 and the readiness he expressed to see this extended to the SPD. He also faced opposition from within the DVP, which did not find it easy to make the transition from a party of middle-class protest to a party of government. The DVP followed his leadership, though with increasing reluctance, until his death in October 1929. This was an essentially personal achievement, a mark of his skill and authority within the party.
“A gleam of light on the otherwise dark horizon”
Authors: Wright Jonathan
Published: November 2023

Between November 1923 when Stresemann resigned with the French still supreme in the Ruhr and October 1925 when the treaties of Locarno were signed, the situation in Europe was transformed. Under American and British pressure France gave up the Ruhr in return for Germany accepting international obligations.
Eighteenth-century politics
Authors: Sheehan James J
Published: November 2023

IN the introduction to his History of Osnabriick, first published in 1768, Justus Moser noted that the vocabulary of contemporary politics did not fit the traditional institutions he was trying to describe. As a result, he lamented, ‘my words often have to struggle with my feelings’. Especially troublesome were terms like Freiheit and Eigentum, ‘freedom’ and ‘property’, because they no longer conveyed the cluster of meanings Moser needed to recreate his fatherland’s past. Moser recognized that this disjunction between language and institutions was a product of the political transformations which he watched from his vantage point in Osnabriick, the small north German city-state where he spent most of his life. With an area of forty-five square miles and a population of about 125,000, Osnabriick retained a set of institutions that represented what Friedrich Meinecke called ‘the very epitome of all that was old fashioned in the old German empire’. Outside its jealously guarded frontiers, however, powerful forces were at work, creating the basis of a new kind of politics and a new political language. Moser, a lawyer in the service of his city, was intensely aware of these changes and of the threat they posed to everything he loved and admired. His history was a struggle to preserve, at least in words, a way oflife he felt was swiftly slipping away.
Mastering the Revolution
Authors: Sheehan James J
Published: November 2023

XMos T 60 per cent of the German population changed rulers during the revolutionary period. Among thein were the inhabitants of Hausen, a village that had once been part of the Habsburgs’ western lands and then was given by Napoleon to Frederick of Wiirttemberg in return for his support during the campaign of 1805. To mark the beginning of his rule, Frederick ordered special religious ceremonies to be held throughout his new domain. On 19 January 1806, therefore, the villagers of Hausen gathered to hear Pastor Knoblauch pray for their new monarch:Francis, He the most excellent emperor, was our father and with childlike love we were loyal to him. . . . Frederick, He the most glorious and merciful father of our Land, will be your father, with care and mercy he will regard you as his children We have lost one father, God has given us in him, our Frederick, another.
The Economic and Social Structure
Authors: Mcdowell R B
Published: November 2023

The eighteenth century, so far as western Europe was concerned, possessed a distinctive flavour, preserved for posterity in its architecture and in its prose. It was a self-assured era, balanced, energetic and elegant, precise and restrained, confident that its standards of reference were soundly selected and consciously civilized. These qualities strike an observer with such force and clarity that for a moment other aspects of the age may be obscured. Outward assurance could mask uncertainties and doubts; and beneath the polished surface of a well-mannered and ordered life there was discontent and ugly violence. An Irish magazine could in the same issue print neatly turned verses about nymphs and swains and grim reports of assaults and affrays. During the last decade of the century revolution starkly revealed many of the tensions in European society and brought home to the established world how frail were the foundations on which its civilization rested.
Administration and politics
Authors: Mcdowell R B
Published: November 2023

Almost all Irishmen who claimed gentility shared an absorbing interest in politics. The great majority of the population, engaged in a strenuous never-ending endeavour to secure subsistence, was of course not in touch with the methods by which political ideas and news were communicated, newspapers, pamphlets, county meetings, clubs and dinner tables. But in addition to the great landed families, a substantial number of middle-class men, minor landowners, large farmers, professional men and businessmen, as freemen, freeholders or burgesses, possessed a share, albeit a minute one, in political power. Even if, as was probable, his vote had to be cast in accordance with the declared will of a landlord or borough owner, an elector could pride himself on being a member of a political elite. Theoretically, he exercised independently a privilege and a responsibility, and convention required that at election times he should be approached with courteous deference. Politics offered opportunities for serving the public, winning distinction and gaining valuable prizes. It was in the political arena that great territorial families competed to improve their local or national status, and political news and political gossip, often spiced with malice, were prominent features in the newspaper press, that great and growing source of information and entertainment.
Parliamentary reform and protection
Authors: Mcdowell R B
Published: November 2023

In the early eighties Ireland was politically buoyant and restless. A series of constitutional debates characterized by close argument, intense feeling and high rhetoric, with in the background the volunteers arrayed and alert, and a great Atlantic war in progress, had terminated dramatically by what appeared to be complete capitulation on the part of the government and the imperial parliament. Political thinking had been stimulated, Irishmen had learned to work the machinery of agitation, they had seen parliament lagging behind the public and had at last realized what a limited control the intelligent and respectable public seemed to exercise over the house of commons.
Fitzwilliam’s viceroyalty
Authors: Mcdowell R B
Published: November 2023

In the summer of 1794 it seemed that Irish politics had entered a period of comparative calm. The parliamentary reform movement had stalled, the catholics appeared for the immediate future to be satisfied and if the outcome of the fierce conflict being waged on the north-east borders of France was uncertain, the naval victory of the glorious first of June ensured that war would be kept well away from Ireland. Conscious of the revolutionary menace, old parliamentary opponents in both Great Britain and Ireland were coming together. In Ireland Grattan energetically supported the government’s war policy, in Great Britain Pitt and the Portland whigs finally coalesced. But what was expected to be an era of co-operation and broadly based government soon ended in Ireland with an unhappy misunderstanding, bitter recriminations and sharpened antagomsms.
Ireland and the great French war
Authors: Mcdowell R B
Published: November 2023

Not only did the French revolution strongly influence Irish political thinking, but Ireland was closely involved in the revolutionary wars and the great struggle against Napoleon. Ireland both added to Great Britain’s strategic responsibilities by greatly increasing the area to be defended and made a considerable contribution to the imperial war effort.
The Collegiate Movement in Italian Universities in the Late Middle Ages
Authors: Denley Peter
Published: November 2023

In the social and institutional historiography of medieval universities Italy has had the part of Cinderella. The Northern European ‘system’ has been extensively researched, and is largely the basis for our image of medieval universities; but it is still the case that historians outside Italy tend at most to append to their observations a few comments to the effect that Italy was different, without real understanding of why or how this was so. This is nowhere more clear than in the historiography of the collegiate movement. The assumption that Italy has little to offer here is almost universal. There are several reasons for this. Partly, of course, it is because success and longevity breed their own historiography. There will be historians of Oxford and Cambridge colleges for as long as those colleges continue to flourish. By contrast, hardly any of the Italian colleges survived into modern times, and those that did were transformed, or have histories of discontinuity.
As Irish as any City in America
Authors: Byron Reginald
Published: November 2023

The arrival of large numbers of Famine immigrants in the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century had far-reaching consequences for the ethnic composition of many American cities, not least because the great preponderance of Famine immigrants were Catholic; they were the first Catholics to arrive in the United States in large numbers. Until then, the country remained predominantly Protestant. Among these Protestants were many people of Irish ancestry. Since the sixteenth century, between a fifth and a quarter of the population of Ireland has been Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Quaker, and today well over half of the 40 million Americans who trace their ancestry to Ireland are Protestant.