bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Impact of Central Institutions
Authors: Ribalta Pere Molas
Published: November 2023

The early modern period in Europe has been labelled by the French historian Yves Durand ‘the age of monarchies ‘, because monarchy was then the prevailing form of government. Of course, there were important exceptions: the Italian republics (Venice, Genoa) from the Middle Ages onwards, the Swiss cantons from the fourteenth century, and the United Provinces of the Netherlands from the second half of the sixteenth century. These exceptions stemmed to a large extent from the development of autonomous municipal government, but none the less they had all originally formed parts of some medieval monarchy, from which they had later separated in exceptional circumstances. But as a rule it was the monarchy which-to use a biological metaphor-became the growthpoint of the modern state. On the whole, the development of the state was the consequence of the expansion of monocratic power. The chief instruments of this expansion were new central institutions created to serve the prince, but which quite often became detached from his person and attached themselves to some transpersonal concept of the commonwealth.
Power Elites and Dependent Territories
Authors: Rao Anna Maria , Supphellen Steinar
Published: November 2023

In this chapter we shall discuss whether power elites in dependent territories present particular characteristics in comparison with those of other territories, and whether those characteristics are such as to make their study of special relevance to an understanding of the role of power elites in the origins of the modern state? First, how should we define ‘dependent ‘ territories in Europe from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century? In a study published in 1914, Robert Redslob defined the freedom of a territory as the ability to promulgate and defend its own laws. Consequently, he described dependency as the lack of such freedom, or as a lesser degree of freedom than that of territories directly integrated in a state.1 This definition however cannot be generalized and is not often applicable in our period. More recently, the social sciences have dealt with this problem2 with particular regard to theories of imperialism and economic development, ‘ often applied to Latin America. But these theories too, which deal with the problem of dependency from an economic point of view, appear inapplicable to the problem we are considering here.
The Competence of the Rural Commune
Authors: Blickle Peter
Published: November 2023

In Scandinavia, what is designated the communal sector of rural society should be restricted to public matters, such as administration of justice, military defence, and the opportunities which they afforded the prosecuting village communities or subjects. No survey of the number of such lawsuits has yet been made, only individual cases have been studied. In any case, it is clear that, on the whole, peasant resistance moved increasingly in the direction of juridification for the resolution of conflicts.
Summary
Authors: Blickle Peter
Published: November 2023

A number of similarities and parallels can be found in the development and constitution of the peasantry and rural communes, and their role in peasant resistance, between the territories of the Empire and the Scandinavian countries. This is true not only of the structure of the communes and the scope of their jurisdictions, but also of their relationship with the authorities and the steps they took to preserve their rights and further their interests as well as the form of their resistance and the solution of conflicts.
The Three Monarchies
Authors: Blickle Peter
Published: November 2023

While our three states have much in common—in particular the adherence to Roman Catholicism—their government systems were formed in different ways. These are analysed in detail elsewhere in the ESF ‘Origins of the Modern State in Europe’ programme, and it may therefore suffice to list briefly when they embarked on the road to absolutism: Spain from 1500, France from the late sixteenth century, Austria c.1630. The first victory of the centralizing state was a change in the political balance between monarch and opposition, without an immediate challenge or abolition of the established institutions like Cortes, Estates General and provincial estates, diets, or sovereign courts of the Parlement type. This early absolutism was political rather than institutional, and institutional rather than social. Considerable change was to follow over the two or three centuries of the early modern period, but without ever reaching the bottom layer of society or questioning the privileges of the highest social groups. The most profound institutional change was probably effected by the ‘Enlightened’ absolutism of Austria.
Popular Influences and Administration in the Early Modern State
Authors: Blickle Peter
Published: November 2023

The Holy Roman Empire and the territories in Germany were, figuratively speaking, elliptically constructed states. Their twin focuses were formed by the prince and the estates.This elliptical character was expressed institutionally in the assemblies of the estates.
Conclusion
Authors: Blickle Peter
Published: November 2023

The material considered in this Part makes it clear that the structures of government and society within the three states which form the basis of this comparative
A Whig Inheritance
Authors: Mitchell L G
Published: November 2023

William Lamb, second Viscount Melbourne, disliked the idea of biography. He particularly disliked any notion that his own life should be examined. Late in life, he looked back ‘with astonishment at the things I’ve done; they seem to me so absurd, and so wrong; it seems quite impossible, quite incredible’. He liked to claim that he had once been the assiduous keeper of a journal, but that ‘looking back to it some time afterwards he was so alarmed at what he saw that he made up his mind to destroy everything’. This was probably untrue. The gap between Melbourne’s public statements and behaviour and his private emotions was huge. No man hid his feelings more effectively. In this case, he kept a journal intermittently for the first thirty-four years of his life, and began an autobiography at roughly the same age. All these volumes survive. So far from destroying his past, Melbourne was intensely interested in it.
Tories, Radicals, Irishmen, a King, and Lord Grey, 1834-1841
Authors: Mitchell L G
Published: November 2023

From its inception, the Melbourne administration attracted the attention of those keen to write its obituary. It was seen to be terminally ill from the moment of its birth. It was to be dismissed as terminally ill for the next seven years. After all, the Tories were against it, and that meant that the government would always face a hostile majority in the House of Lords. The King was barely for it. Earl Grey and his family were in theory supportive, but in fact acted in a manner that was disruptive. By so doing, they allowed the trusteeship of Whiggery to be disputed. As a result, Melbourne was forced to rely on the votes of Radicals and Irishmen, skittish creatures with a tendency to bolt.
Women and Private Life, 1828-1841
Authors: Mitchell L G
Published: November 2023

To understand fully Melbourne's performance as Home Secretary and Prime Minister it is vital to keep in mind the vicissitudes of his private life, for they informed everything he did. His marriage had left terrible scars. He had survived the experience by cauterizing his feelings. Avoiding emotional or intellectual commitment of any sort became his preferred option. He was horribly afraid of taking anything or anyone too seriously, lest such involvement should lead to the experiences of his marriage being repeated. An armour of amused and philosophical detachment was his everyday wear. It is just possible that the young Victoria unconsciously breached his emotional defences. Some contemporaries suspected that he was genuinely fond of her.
Victoria, 1837-1841
Authors: Mitchell L G
Published: November 2023

In June 1837, William IV died. He was succeeded by his niece, Victoria, who was just 18 years old. Not only was she young in years, she was also young in experience. Neither George IV nor William IV had allowed her to see much of the world, or to be trained for kingship. Worse, she had had few emotional points of reference. Her father, Edward, Duke of Kent, had died when she was a mere girl. Her mother was pretentious, ambitious, and increasingly resented. Trust and affection were therefore directed towards her governess, the Baroness Lehzen. For such a girl, spirited, enquiring but unknowing, to come upon the world suddenly as an anointed queen must have been an astonishing experience.
The Birth of Sensibility
Authors: Langford Paul
Published: November 2023

In the 1760s and 1770s there was a revolution in the making, called by some a sentimental revolution. In part its function was to express the middle-class need for a code of manners which challenged aristo cratic ideals and fashions. It also had a bearing on one of the most influential developments of the late eighteenth century, the search for the ‘sublime’ in religion, literature, architecture, and scenery. There was some concern about the threat which sentiment posed to conventional morality, but in an English context it ultimately served to stem the tide of deism and reinforce the religious conservatism of the day. Its most beneficial consequence was thought to be a heightened sensitivity to the social and moral problems brought by economic change. A new age of phil anthropy was horn, and a new generation of phil anthropists, armed with novel statistical techniques, sought a range of reforms. They were led by men such as Hanway and Howard, eccentric but earnest campaigners in the cause of self-conscious public improvement. Parliament found itself at the centre of an increasingly open debate about the proper direction of social policy. However, progress with institutional change was slow. Criminal law and the Poor Law, both subject to intense criticism, proved particularly resistant to the new climate of opinion. Yet there was a surge of interest in charitable activity, much of it devoted to the discipline as well as the relief of the labouring poor. ‘Sensibility’ found diverse and suitable objects of appeal in children, animals, and nonEuropean peoples. Many of the attitudes which were to characterize the evangelical revival of the age of Wilberforce were already to be glimpsed in that creation of the third quarter of the eighteenth century, the ‘man of feeling’.
Henry Mayr-Harting at Liverpool
Authors: Brooke Christopher
Published: November 2023

One cannot truly separate Mayr-Harting at Liverpool from Mayr-Harting at Oxford; for he brought with him all that was best of Oxford and Merton in a zeal to teach, dedication to the needs of his students, training in research widely and deeply based, and an ideal of a college and university community-which never led him to patronize the provincial university, yet never let him accept its methods and values with complacency. When we fostered a research student of outstanding brilliance in Ian Kershaw, Henry strongly advised him to move to Oxford-and told his supervisor afterwards. Later on, by an attraction as near infallible as a historian can admit, he followed Ian back to Oxford himself, and has been there ever since. But Liverpool has always meant much to him; and it was not only a ripple of the Isis which he brought to the Mersey: he brought too his own special gifts of charm, brilliant imagination, and incisiveness of mind. It was said of a famous boxer that no one was ever quite the same who had once felt his glove. None of us, staff or students-or the wide circle of his friends on Merseyside-went unaffected by him.
No Bishop, No King: The Ministerial Ideology of Kingship and Asser’S Res Gestae Aelfredi
Authors: Kempshall Matthew
Published: November 2023

Writing about the character and achievements of a distinguished individual can constitute more than just an encomium. It can also acknowledge the nurture an author has received, discharge a debt of friendship, present an instructive exemplar for imitation, and ensure that a testament will be handed down to the memory of posterity. The consequences for writing about the life and conduct of an early medieval king are considerable. If it is not just a vehicle for praise but also a means of instruction, then a modern categorization as ‘historiography’ should not be allowed to conceal the different possibilities which may have underpinned the original composition. Given the subtlety of the connection between a prescriptive and a descriptive vita, between the presentation of an ideal and the historical reality to which it may, or may not, have corresponded, the recovery of such meaning frequently depends on identifying the audience for which a text was written.
Events That Led To Sainthood: Sanctity and the Reformers in the Eleventh Century
Authors: Cushing Kathleen G
Published: November 2023

Few historians would look to measure the eleventh-century reformers in terms of sanctity, especially those associated with Pope Gregory VII. Indeed, an abiding image of the Gregorian reforming circle is of men of practical expediency who preferred the harsher lines of polemic and law to the finer spiritual leanings of contemplation and salvation that are generally thought to characterize sanctity. Though this clearly is a one-sided view of the religious vision of the reformers, it is a stereotype that persists in modern historiography. Somewhat more surprising, it is a view that also finds support in the Lives of some eleventh-century reformers.
Philipon versus Louis-Philippe: Political Caricature, 1830–1835
Authors: Kerr David S
Published: November 2023

Philipon’s political allegiance became a matter of controversy the moment he emerged from obscurity in the aftermath of the July Revolution, and no consensus has yet been reached as to what his political opinions were, or indeed whether he had any at all. Contemporaries who dismissed caricature as immoral, or at best frivolous, questioned the sincerity of his political commitment.
Caricature and its Publics
Authors: Kerr David S
Published: November 2023

Confidence in the power of caricature was fostered by the widespread belief that the French were both especially gifted satirists and peculiarly susceptible to ridicule, and by the fact that it was taken to be a distinctly democratic institution. Champ Fleury considered that caricature was, along with the press, ‘le cri des citoyens’, a political voice for the disfranchised. Caricaturists, he believed, acted as interpreters for the masses: ‘Ceux que ceuxcine prevent expr merest traduit par les hommes dont la mission consiste à mettre en lumiere les sentiments in times du peuple. ’ They performed this function by crystallizing the people’s hopes and antipathies into convenient symbols. ‘Symbolisateurs sans le savoir’ caricaturists, it was thought, manufactured a language in which (in Michelet’s words) ‘le peuple puisse parler au peuple’. Philipon himself made a similar claim about the popular nature of caricature in September 1835. In the final issue of La Caricature he argued that he and his artists had produced their work ‘sous !’inspiration du peuple don’t nous n’etions en quelque sorte que les secretaires et les peintres’.
Picturing The Past
Authors: Mitchell Rosemary
Published: November 2023

This monograph is a wide-ranging and sophisticated analysis of representations in text and image of the English past between 1830 and 1870. It consists of a series of inter-related case-studies of illustrated history books, ranging from editions of David Humes History of England to W. H. Ainsworths The Tower of London (1840). It contributes to present debates on nationalism, highlighting the complex and variable nature of cultural constructions of identity. Simultaneously, if offers an overall interpretation of historiographical change in early and mid-Victorian Britain, focusing in particular on the transition from picturesque reconstructions of the English past to the scientific approaches of the professional historian. Genuinely interdisciplinary, Picturing the Past presents new perspectives on traditional studies of Victorian historiography, literature, and illustration. It explores relationships between text and image, author, illustrator, and publisher, in the production of illustrated historical texts, often drawing on neglected material in publishers archives. The tendency to analyse text and image, fiction and non-fiction, popular and elite publications in isolation from each other is challenged in the interests of a more complex and nuanced portrait of the middle-class Victorian historical consciousness.
Experiments with History: The Later Novels of W. H. Ainsworth and their Illustrations and the Decline of the Picturesque Historical Novel
Authors: Mitchell Rosemary
Published: November 2023

During a conversation with John Forster in 1870, Robert Browning mentioned meeting the novelist William Harrison Ainsworth; the biographer of Dickens exclaimed ‘Good Heavens! ... is he still alive ? ’ The obscurity of the novelist who had once been seen as the rival of Dickens reflected the difficulties of continuing to write the picturesque historical fiction typical of the 1830s and 1840s after the middle of the century.
Policing and Punishment in London, 1660-1750
Authors: Beattie J M
Published: November 2023

This study examines the considerable changes that took place in the criminal justice system in the City of London in the century after the Restoration, well before the inauguration of the so-called 'age of reform'. The policing institutions of the City were transformed in response to the problems created by the rapid expansion of the metropolis during the early modern period, and as a consequence of the emergence of a polite urban culture. At the same time, the City authorities were instrumental in the establishment of new forms of punishment - particularly transportation to the American colonies and confinement at hard labour - that for the first time made secondary sanctions available to the English courts for convicted felons and diminished the reliance on the terror created by capital punishment. The book investigates why in the century after 1660 the elements of an alternative means of dealing with crime in urban society were emerging in policing, in the practices and procedures of prosecution, and in the establishment of new forms of punishment.
The Revolution, Crime, and Punishment in London, 1690-1713
Authors: Beattie J M
Published: November 2023

The system of criminal administration in late seventeenth-century London had been shaped by changes in the law and in the practice of the courts over the previous two centuries in what might be regarded as a first phase of an early modern response to the problems of urban crime. With respect to serious violence against the person, or property offences accompanied by the threat of violence, the criminal law had been altered in the sixteenth century by the powerful idea that benefit of clergy could be controlled and limited by statute. In a stream of Tudor enactments the saving power of clerical privilege was sharply restricted by being granted only to men who could prove their literacy in court (adapting its ecclesiastical origins to a social purpose) and, even more tellingly, by being removed altogether from the most heinous and feared crimes.
Church and politics, c.750–c.1100
Authors: Byrne F . J
Published: November 2023

while copying the text of the gospel of Mark into the manuscript known as the Book of Armagh (T.C.D. MS 58) at Armagh, a young scribe added in the margin the name ‘Kellakh’. He used the fanciful mixture of Greek and Latin script that he had employed previously, when completing the gospel of Matthew ‘in feria Matthi’—on the evangelist’s own feast-day. He used this decorative script again to record his own name, Ferdomnach, and that of Torbati, the heir of Patrick at whose dictate he and his two companions were compiling a book that was to contain the New Testament, the Life of St Martin, and the Epistles of Patrick himself (St Martin’s nephew, as some thought, and certainly his emulator)
Visual arts and society
Authors: Richardson Hilary
Published: November 2023

From then onwards the golden age of art in Ireland began to unfold. It was a time when Irish craftsmen reached a point of excellence never surpassed in the history of the island. Works produced then, such as the Tara brooch (pl. 64) or the Book of Kells (pl. 65), are of world-wide renown, themselves the hallmark of what is generally identified as Irish art. Between the seventh and the twelfth centuries the full range of Irish art was at its best. It was a period of astonishing activity. There is no doubt that this span of time included a phase so brilliant that it equates in Irish terms with the Florence of the renaissance, or the Paris of more recent days.
The archaeology of Ireland’s viking-age towns
Authors: Wallace Patrick F
Published: November 2023

Summaries of the excavations undertaken at Waterford, Wexford, and Limerick, as well as the publication of the first half-dozen or so volumes of reports of the National Museum of Ireland’s excavations in Dublin, have already appeared. An interim report appeared on one of the Wexford sites as well as a valuable synthesis for Waterford, and relevant documentary references have been assembled in the case of Cork. Most recently, a general comparison of the physical attributes that survive in the archaeological record—location, layout, defences, and building types—shows that the later Viking-age towns shared many traits, that there was such a thing as the Hiberno-Norse town, and that the Dublin excavations, impressive though they are, need no longer be stud- ied in isolation.
High-kings with opposition, 1072–1166
Authors: Gan Marie Therese F lana
Published: November 2023

This ensured that Brian Bóruma’s immediate successors failed to match his achievements in pursuit of the high-kingship of Ireland. Tadg was slain at the instigation of Donnchad in 1023, but his removal did not terminate Dál Cais dynastic dissension since Tadg’s son, Toirrdelbach, took over his father’s ambition to be king of Munster. A decisive factor in the struggle between uncle and nephew was the alliance concluded between Toirrdelbach and Diarmait mac Má na mBó, king of Leinster (1042–72). In 1063 Toirrdelbach succeeded in deposing Donnchad, who was to die in exile in Rome in 1064.
Progress and Piety: Liberal Hostility
Authors: Blackbourn David
Published: November 2023

To the liberal mind Marpingen was symptomatic of Catholic superstition and credulity. At the same time, resistance to the measures taken by the state confirmed many liberals in their view that Catholics were fractious subjects, led by their clerical masters (and by French example) into disloyalty. In this double set of responses we can see the liberal view of the Kulturkampf in microcosm. For the Kulturkampj, often depicted as a rather arid squabble between church and state, was actually much more than that. The term itself was coined by RudolfVirchow, the doctor, pathologist, scientific popularizer, and left-liberal politician. It means literally ‘struggle of civilizations’, and liberals certainly saw it as a decisive encounter that would shape Germany’s future. It was, for them, a conflict between progress and piety, in which material advance, science, and moral improvement were pitted against backwardness, ignorance, and superstition. The terms in which liberals denounced events in Marpingen give a clear picture of their world-view during the 1870s, and their ferocity shows what they felt to be at stake. The enthusiasm with which many, National Liberals in particular, applauded the coercive methods used in the village also gives a measure of the ambivalent relationship between liberal goals and Bismarckian methods.
The German Lourdes? Marpingen in the Twentieth Century
Authors: Blackbourn David
Published: November 2023

In the 1870s Marpingen was the focus of extraordinary attention as the would-be German Lourdes. Then, for two generations, it became simply a village like many others in the Saarland. The pell-mell growth of the coalfield turned Marpingen into a village of pitmen: by 1910 two-thirds of the population depended on the earnings of 400 miners, a dependence that made them vulnerable during the bitter strikes of 1889–93 and the lay-offs that followed Mining became not only the principal source of family income, but the axis on which social and recreational life turned; even the physical appearance of the village changed as one-storey miner-peasant houses sprang up along the roads and paths leading out of Marpingen. With the dominance of mining came renewed clerical complaints about excessive drinking, dancing, and late-night unruliness, behaviour that new church-fostered organizations and a popular mission failed to tame. In all of this Marpingen was fairly typical of the experience of Saarland mining villages in the decades before the First World War. The militancy during the strike years was in line with the greater militancy shown by miners from the northern peripheral zone of the coalfield in 1889–93.
The West
Authors: Pethybridge Roger
Published: November 2023

THE Western borderlands of Soviet Russia were the nearest to Moscow of all frontier regions, yet they were relatively neglected by historians and travellers alike.1 Even by 1926 party contacts between the capital and Smolensk were to remain mostly at the written rather than at the human level. Arnold Toynbee once argued that it is the ‘barbaric’ vital periphery that finally topples a declining civilization, but this maxim does not hold for the Russian Revolution. The political centre suffered a series of heart attacks from 1905 onwards, of which the body of society as a whole was only to become fully aware after 1928. Despite Lenin’s theory of national self-determination, the new Soviet Union still embraced the great bulk of the old imperial domains, including minorities like the Georgians and the Ukrainians who had been civilized for centuries before the denizens of what was to become Muscovy. After the Civil War Bolshevik control expanded easily from its bastion which had been reduced to the size of medieval Muscovy. The Tambov revolt and other peasant disturbances were soon contained and squashed.
Cultural Crossroads in Petrograd
Authors: Pethybridge Roger
Published: November 2023

The fate of Petrograd as the supreme source of high political action for over two hundred years had been sealed from the moment when the Bolsheviks took the decision to move the government to Moscow in March 1918. The party leaders and their infant administrative machine were far from being the only drain on the city’s human resources. Most of the aristocracy and all the Tsarist bureaucracy had vanished, and with them had gone the large number of foreigners whose money and connections had permeated the economic life of the city for so long. The labour vacuum created by the swift departure of the political, social, and economic elites was enormous. In 1910 about 200,000 people had been employed by government offices or private persons alone, that is roughly as many as were then working in the city’s factories. Scholarly accounts of the depopulation of Petrograd in the years 1917-21 have paid scant attention to the factors just mentioned. Much more has been made of the exodus to the countryside by all classes due to the shortage of food and fuel and to disease.
Political Reflections on Society 1922-1926
Authors: Pethybridge Roger
Published: November 2023

Although Moscow did not have a monopoly over cultural controls at the start of NEP, it was certainly all-powerful with regard to political and economic decisions. Moreover the balance in the cultural sphere was tilting away from Petrograd, marked by the move to Moscow of several groups of intellectuals. The old capital was therefore of supreme importance on account of the interaction of its political, economic, and cultural elites which constantly brought out new ideas on how to manage society at large. Far too often in previous histories of the early Soviet period these ideas have been considered in a geographical vacuum. Theories were formulated by Soviet leaders with insufficient regard to realities outside Moscow. All the more reason, then, to investigate this dichotomy and the reasons for it. There was even a lack of precise knowledge about areas under the politicians’ noses, as will be seen in the next chapter, dealing with the changing conditions of the Moscow working class between 1922 and 1926.
The Proletariat in Theory and in Practice
Authors: Pethybridge Roger
Published: November 2023

This is the last of four consecutive chapters devoted to the political heights of Soviet society in NEP. In Bolshevik theory and aspiration the party should have been joined by the proletariat, its favoured class, in the deliberations and man cruvres surveyed in these pages, but in reality it has scarcely merited any attention so far. It would be inconceivable, however, to neglect the changing condition of the working class up until 1926, since it still remained the social springboard from which the plunge into heavy industrialization was to be taken. This future was heralded by the programme adopted at the Fourteen th Party Congress in December r 925. Yet as of r 926 only approximately one out of every thirty citizens of the Soviet Union could be classified as a worker of any kind. Thus the allotment of even one chapter out of seven (the other six being concerned with peasant-dominated localities) is out of all proportion to the proletariat’s numerical strength in NEP. It was only from 1927 onwards that its political weight was to have more impact on the party than the crushing burden of the peasantry. What follows here focuses mainly on the influential Moscow proletariat in r 926, though its ramifications in time and space are also considered in order to highlight its special political significance in the overall working-class scene around mid-NEP.
Smolensk Guberniia in 1926
Authors: Pethybridge Roger
Published: November 2023

We now plunge back into the mainstream of social life. We return to it via the same river we first entered into it in 1922. Yet, as with a river, some things are the same in the Smolensk area, others changed by the waters of time which move history on. The territory of Smolensk guberniia in 1926 included the same area and had the same administrative arrangements as in 1922. This situation was to continue until 1929. However, the boundaries of the Belorussian Republic just to the west were only finally established in 1926. This delay was due to the upheavals of the Revolution and the Civil War which had split the Belorussians up and handed them out to differing nations. By 1926 11 per cent of all Belorussians lived outside the boundaries of the newly formed Republic. Quite a few of these lived in the Smolensk guberniia, though some were to be found as far away as Siberia.1 Nearly 45 per cent of the national rate of increase of the rural population in Belorussia emigrated to towns in the Republic between 1923 and 1927.
Tver Guberniia
Authors: Pethybridge Roger
Published: November 2023

Moving north-east from Smolensk guberniia, a travelling kustar in 1926 would cross into Tver guberniia. Both provinces abutted on Moscow guberniia. Whereas Smolensk connected the capital via the railway to Western Europe, the city of Tver lay on the line to Leningrad. The north and east of Tver guberniia were on the route to nowhere in particular, and the hinterland was so densely forested as to provide a natural barrier to good communications and enlightenment of all kinds. The 1926 census shows the population of Tver guberniia to be 2,242,350,just 50,239 less than Smolensk. Nearly all of them were Great Russians (unlike Smolensk), though there was a small group of 140,567 Karelians. Those living in Tver city totalled rn8,413, whilst the rest of the inhabitants were dispersed over a scattered firmament of small-scale settlements: no less than 263,503 of these existed in an area larger than the whole of Holland or Switzerland. Tver city lay near the more densely populated southern edge of the guberniia, looking towards Moscow.
Conclusion
Authors: Pethybridge Roger
Published: November 2023

There has been no intention in this book to detect the essence of NEP, since there was none. The evaporations that float across to us through time derive from a multitude of scattered pot-pourris. Neither has it been possible to cover all aspects of society and politics.
Rites of Blood
Authors: Evans Richard J
Published: November 2023

A German execution in the early modern period usually began with a formal meeting of the court, held in the town hall or the representative building of the sovereign authority, to announce the verdict to the offender. In the south German town of Dillingen, for example, the rules for this occasion, drawn up in 1716, laid down that the offender had to be brought in chains to the town hall and released to stand before the two judges and five ‘honest citizens’. Here a summary of the confession would be read out. All present had to sign it, including the prisoner, who could of course append a cross or mark if unable to write. At this point the prisoner was formally handed over from the representative of the princely authority under which Dillingen fell, to the town council, whose duty it was to make the necessary arrangements for the execution. The presiding official then told the offender:
Farewell Songs and Moral Speeches
Authors: Evans Richard J
Published: November 2023

On his visit to Munich in 1781, the writer Friedrich Nicolai was horrified to find that ‘death sentences are printed in numbered editions alongside the Urgicht or confession of every condemned criminal’ and were sold on the streets ‘in their thousands’. The ‘moral speeches’ which accompanied them were, he complained, ‘miserable doggerel’:

People believe in a simplistic way that they ought to deter robbers and improve the morals of the common people. They contain idiotic reflections and disgusting, horrible descriptions, which are repeated in a different manner for each death sentence and are necessarily bound in the end to render the people insensitive to feeling.
The Revival of Abolitionism
Authors: Evans Richard J
Published: November 2023

As the political climate began to relax a little after the departure of Bismarck and the ending of the Anti-Socialist Law in 1890, opposition to the death penalty began to revive. It was fuelled by the sharp increase in the number of executions that took place in the early years of this decade. The issue of capital punishment had been effectively dormant since the early 1870s. But now the left-liberal opponents of the death penalty began to raise their voices in protest once more. Many of their arguments were familiar ones. They continued to believe in the ameliorative theory of punishment. The left-liberal Berliner Tageblatt declared in 1907: ‘Capital punishment is reprehensible from a human and a Christian point of view because it prematurely destroys the inner developmental potential of the condemned person.’
‘Healthy Popular Feeling’
Authors: Evans Richard J
Published: November 2023

By the beginning of 1932 it was widely expected that the minority Prussian cabinet led by the Social Democrat Otto Braun, assailed on all sides and weakened by the electoral success of the National Socialists, would be replaced by a conservative government willing to implement the death penalty. So, in a classic example of the way in which conservative civil servants managed to undermine, or disregard, the authority of left-of-centre governments in the Weimar Republic, officials in the Ministry of Justice began refusing to forward clemency cases to the Prussian cabinet. This left a number of prisoners on death row in a state of considerable uncertainty about their eventual fate, a situation which few officials in the judicial bureaucracy found very satisfactory.
The Adventures of Reason, or From Reason to the Supreme Being
Authors: Vovelle Michel
Published: November 2023

Are we certain that we know what the Cult of Reason in Year II really was? Put as bluntly as this, the question appears paradoxical. Received ideas and clichés have been well preserved: the memory of the 20 Brumaire ceremony at the cathedral in Paris has come down to us, as has that of the similar events at Strasbourg, Nevers, Nancy, Bordeaux, and elsewhere. Late nineteenth-century local historians provided detailed descrip tions of what happened in various places. But for many of them, even to the present day, the prevailing image has been of the triumphant atheism of a handful of extremists, illustrated by the presence of living goddesses, traditionally believed to have been prostitutes or girls from the Opera. To remain at this level would be to ignore all the historical writing devoted to this subject with such good effect at the tum of the century. In his seminal 1892 article, Alphonse Aulard discussed the Cult of Reason and the Cult of the Supreme Being; in 1895 the Abbé Sicard published ‘In Search of a Civil Religion’; in 1905 Albert Mathiez dealt with the origins of the revolutionary cults.
Introduction: The Old Dispensation
Authors: Vital David
Published: November 2023

On 18 December 1744, in the wake of the siege and occupation of Prague in the course of the War of the Austrian Succession and the suspicion (unfounded, as it later turned out) that the Jews of Prague had given aid and support to the Prussians, Maria Theresa of Austria decreed the total and immediate expulsion of the distinguished and long-settled Jewish community of Prague. It was to be carried out almost immediately. It was to be followed in short order by the expulsion of all Jews from all of Bohemia and Moravia. Gzeirot (punitive decrees) of this and other kinds were familiar enough to Jews everywhere throughout their history. The fortunate knew them as a permanent possibility. The less fortunate knew them as a palpable menace. The rule was to do whatever could be done to have them revoked; if not revoked postponed; if not postponed watered down; and if that could not be managed then so far as possible circumvented. What was understood by all, high and low, was that if all else failed, the Jews upon whom the gzeira fell would have to learn to live with it if it was possible to do so and to move on to other lands if it was not. There were no real choices. Outright (for example, armed) resistance was out of the question. Gzeirot, it was necessary to recognize, were characteristic, and in the long term unchanging and unchangeable features of the Exile itself. They might take the form of an increase in the burden of taxation so sudden, steep, and extortionate as to be barely sustainable, or fresh restrictions on-or, worse, an absolute prohibition of-residence in, or temporary entry into, a designated town or territory.
Denmark: The Sociology of Accusations
Authors: Johansen Jens christian v.
Published: November 2023

THE earliest cases of Danish witchcraft legislation are found in Section 7 of the Scanian Church Law and Section 11 of the Sealandian Church Law, promulgated about 1170; both mention sorcery, although only in connection with homicide. The secular Jutlandic law of 1241,2 on the other hand, contains no mention of sorcery in its original version, whereas a manuscript from the fifteenth century includes a section (book m, chapter 69) providing a detailed description of procedures to be adopted in cases of witchcraft and sorcery.
Introduction
Authors: Hitchins Keith
Published: November 2023

The evolution of modern Rumania took place over some two centuries, between the latter half of the eighteenth century and the end of the Second World War. Discernible in this long process were two stages, each with its own distinct characteristics. The first was one of transition as the Rumanians of the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia moved away from the patriarchal traditions of the Byzantine-Orthodox South-east toward the dynamic innovations of the West. During the second stage currents of change already manifest coalesced, and modern Rumania, in the strict meaning of the term, came into being. The critical date separating the two stages, to the extent that a single year may represent such a division, is 1866.
The Reign of King Charles,1881–1914
Authors: Hitchins Keith
Published: November 2023

The political structure of the Rumanian Kingdom between 1881 and 1914 remained essentially that of the Principality. The Constitution of 1866, modified in 1884, notably in matters affecting the franchise, provided the general framework for political activity.
The Rumanians Outside Rumania
Authors: Hitchins Keith
Published: November 2023

Many Rumanians in the second half of the nineteenth century continued to live outside the borders of the United Principalities and the Rumanian Kingdom. As of 1900, there were approximately 2,.785,000 in Hungary (the historical principality of Transylvania and the adjoining regions of the Banat, Crişana, and Maramure ş), 230,000 in Bukovina, and 1,092,000 in Bessarabia. In some ways their course of development under Hungarian, Austrian, and Russian administration, respectively, was similar. They were unable to participate in political life as distinct ethnic communities, and their cultural life was under constant pressure from an unsympathetic government bureaucracy.
Politics, 1919–1940
Authors: Hitchins Keith
Published: November 2023

The main issue in Rumanian political life in the inter-war period was the contest between democracy and authoritarianism. The prospects for the consolidation of a parliamentary system based upon Western European practice seemed bright in the early 1920s. The enactment of universal manhood suffrage held out the hope that government by oligarchy would soon be a relic of the past. The leaders of the Rumanian National Party of Transylvania and the Peasant Party of the Old Kingdom, which had broad support, were committed to the full participation of all citizens in the political process and to genuine consultations with the voters through fair elections. Both the Peasantists, who were otherwise wary of following Western models, and the Europeanists, who were certain that Rumania was destined to follow the Western path of development, were committed to parliamentary government. Among the general population, too, there was at least latent support for a democratic political experiment. When given the opportunity to express their preferences freely, as in the election of 1928, they voted overwhelmingly for those parties which stood for democracy. Formidable obstacles stood in the way of political change.
Foreign Policy, 1919–1940
Authors: Hitchins Keith
Published: November 2023

The primary objective of Rumania’s foreign policy throughout the inter-war period was to maintain the frontiers drawn at the end of the First World War. All Rumanian political parties, except the Communist, were consistent supporters of the Versailles system, a stance which dictated the choice of allies and provided continuity with the foreign policy pursued in the years immediately before the outbreak of the war. Rumanian politicians regarded France and, to a lesser extent, Britain as the chief guarantors of the peace settlement and relied upon them to counter threats to the territorial status quo in Eastern Europe from the Soviet Union, Germany, and the lesser revisionist states, Hungary and Bulgaria. Rumanian governments also sought to preserve the Versailles system by other means.
The Second World War,1940–1944
Authors: Hitchins Keith
Published: November 2023

The cession of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina at the end of June 1940, added to the undisguised aversion of the National Peasant and Liberal parties to the royal dictatorship and the homicidal tendencies of the Iron Guard toward the royal person. obliged Carol, whose prestige had reached its nadir, to turn to General Ion Antonescu as the one person capable of controlling the dangerous situation. The choice of Antonescu was not an easy one, for the dedicated career officer had made no secret either of his contempt for Carol or of his own ambition.
The Transition, 1944–1947
Authors: Hitchins Keith
Published: November 2023

The institutions and the spirit that had guided their country’s evolution since the middle of the nineteenth century had brought Rumanians closer to Europe. In politics parliamentary government had served as their model, even if practice had sometimes fallen short of the ideal; the economy, slowly but no less deliberately, had moved toward a Western capitalist-entrepreneurial and market-oriented system; the social structure had gradually assumed a Western pattern, as manifested by the predominance of the middle class in inter-war political and economic life; and the majority of intellectuals and politicians had not wavered in their belief that they were a part of Europe. The process of nation building itself-the creation of Greater Rumania and its defence was a quintessentially European phenomenon. This Rumania was replaced by another beginning in 1944. After the overthrow of the Antonescu dictatorship the country’s course of development took an abrupt turn away from Europe toward the East.
The Place Of Paris In A Divided France
Authors: Thompson Guy Llewelyn
Published: November 2023

On I December 1420 King Henry V of England made his formal royal entry into Paris as regent of France and heir to the throne. The French king, Charles VI, was beside him; just behind rode the duke of Burgundy, foremost peer of France. The Parisians lined the streets, glad to welcome their king and his new ally, and the duke whom they regarded as their special leader. Although the chapter of Notre-Dame, irritated by the efforts of Henry and the duke of Burgundy to impose their nominee as bishop, declined to step more than a few yards outside the cathedral, the rest of the population was welcoming, even enthusiastic, decorating the streets and as far as possible dressing in red as a sign of celebration.
Paris And England: The Search For Independence
Authors: Thompson Guy Llewelyn
Published: November 2023

One of Henry V’s objectives following the treaty of Troyes was to ensure that the kingdoms of England and France were kept as independent as possible. Indeed, his subjects would have expected nothing less, for a basic principle of the treaty, ratified by the Estates-General in France and the Parliament in England, was that all the customs and laws of each kingdom should be preserved. Plainly essential to the French, who had had to accept the imposition of a foreign monarch, this was no less important to the English, who wished for assurance that they would never be subject to the kingdom of France and that they would not be required to continue paying for the fighting overseas. The question of money was therefore of fundamental importance, because in English eyes the war could now properly be regarded as a strictly French affair, with the regent of France (Henry) subduing a troublesome rival (the dauphin).
Politics And Society
Authors: Thompson Guy Llewelyn
Published: November 2023

The image of Anglo-Burgundian Paris we have developed so far is that of a society administered and governed largely by consensus. Given the limited resources available, this was inevitable. A token presence of English and Burgundian soldiers and a few dozen erratic sergeants from the Chatelet could not keep an unwilling population in subjection and, though a dizainier could doubtless contribute much in the way of local knowledge, his primary loyalty was to his friends in the street and, after that, to the prevot des marchands and the Hotel de Ville. Thus, without some measure of agreement from the population at large, there could be little chance of action with the necessary common purpose. The final section of this book will describe the sources of this consensus and indicate its limitations. Inevitably, we will consider the relations between the Parisians and the English: how far they were able to act as allies and how, in the end, the regime could not be sustained. We will also discuss the cohesive effect of religion, and especially the large publicceremonies that were so numerous in this period. Before this, however, we should establish a more general picture of Parisian society at the time of the Burgundian ascendancy and the English intervention.