bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Fragmentation Of Political Opposition
Authors: Fulbrook Mary
Published: November 2023

‘Opposition ‘in Eastern European societies is a complex phenomenon. It may mean many different things, depending on who is designating what views, for what purposes: the spectrum thus ranges from principled factionalism within ruling communist parties, through a variety of theoretical critiques from the sidelines, to outright rejection of the aims and methods of the system in its entirety. In examining the history of the GDR, it is important to bear several distinct questions in mind. What forms of political opposition were present, and what were the organizational and structural, as well as ideological, characteristics of different types of opposition? My analysis would suggest that patterns of organization were at least as important as ideas in determining the degrees of impact made by different forms of opposition: being ‘against the system’ might mean virtually nothing, if it was an isolated and easily suppressed expression of discontent. Moreover, in seeking to explain the failure of any form of opposition prior to I989, it is just as important to examine the responses of authorities as the forms and aims of opposition. Patterns of political reaction and repression by the regime were arguably equally important in influencing the outcomes of oppositional outbursts.
Did the Ancients have an Antiquity? The Idea of Renaissance in the History of Classical Art
Authors: Settis Salvatore
Published: November 2023

Few passages in Western art literature can have been more influential than Pliny the Elder’s celebrated remark in his Natural History (xxx1v. 52): ‘Cessavit deinde ars, ac rursus Olympiade CLVI revixit’ [my emphasis]: (‘In the 121st Olympiad [i.e. 296-293 BC] art ceased to exist, to revive again in the 156th Olympiad [i.e. 156-153 BC]’). According to one current interpretation,1 Pliny points here to a period of stasis in the history of ancient art lasting 140 years, from about 296 to about 156 BC. Curiously enough, this is precisely the period in which the Pergamum school of sculpture flourished, which he nevertheless goes on to mention (xxx1v. 84).
Burckhardt Revisited from Social History
Authors: Cohn Samuel K
Published: November 2023

Since publication of Jacob Burckhardt’s Civilization of the Renaissance, social historians have extended the boundaries of his ‘civilization’ to encompass social groups and interests that at best he subsumed with vague phrases such as ‘the faith of the people’.1 New avenues of research, perhaps most importantly the history of the family, have recently used but have qualified Burckhardt’s Renaissance, some fitting new findings into the old paradigm,2 others rejecting it altogether.3 The social historian might, however, go beyond a simple affirmation or negation of Burckhardt (which a psychohistorian would argue is the same thing4) to penetrate the categories of his generalizations, showing inconsistencies in the match between, say, individualism and modernity.
The Italian Renaissance Tale as History
Authors: Mar Tines Lauro
Published: November 2023

Twenty years ago, coming from a historian, the title of this essay would have seemed odd indeed. Nowadays we live easily with the assumption that fiction and fictional modes have something to do with history. On the one hand, historians tell ‘stories’; they use narrative techniques; on the other, they deal with the stories of others, whether in state papers or private accounts. But wherever we find sustained historical testimony, there the resources of language—or of semiotic systems such as ritual—are being used not only to convey meaning but also to present a narrative structure.
Postscript
Authors: Scribner R W
Published: November 2023

There is often a moment in academic research when a territory that seems to have lain dry and un watered for many years suddenly receives a downpour of life bringing rain and blossoms into new life. The general field of this book, the image as historical evidence, is a good case in point. Few historians were interested in images in the 1970s and the soil was thought to be rather arid, yielding few returns of significance for any who chose to till it. During the 1980s, however, interest in the historical image flourished as never before as historians began to appreciate the value of images as historical sources, not least medievalists seeking to fill out a corpus of evidence that was often disconcertingly thin.
Overseas
Authors: Clark Peter
Published: November 2023

From the end of the seventeenth century clubs and societies advanced across the English-speaking world, making their presence felt not just in the principal plantations of America and the Indies, but in remote islands and tiny British enclaves around the globe. The accelerating pace of change was identified in Figure 4.z in Chapter 4. As well as the numerous associations of the old and new empire, we find a small number in British expatriate communities in continental Europe. Under George Ill the club was the greater British ruling class at social prayer. By looking at the general dynamics, processes, and problems of diffusion, and focusing on the special complexities of the overseas experience, we can shed further light, in rum, on the core features and function of British voluntary associations in the early modem period.
Impact
Authors: Clark Peter
Published: November 2023

Clubs and societies were clearly among the most numerous, divots, and dynamic organization in la1e Georgian society. Challenged only by drinking houses and churches in their level of support, they flourished throughout the urban system, and came to occupy a central position in British social life.where as diaries of the late seventeenth century recorded largely traditional social activities, with only minor reference to clubs and societies, by 1 800 association meetings figure time and again in the pages of private journals. That of the American Samuel Curwen, who lived in London after 1775, shows him to have been a keen devotee of voluntary societies. Over two months, in February and March 1781, he took part almost twenty times in a society-related event, going to meetings of the SPG, the Je Ne Sais Quoi Club, and his great love, the masonic order, with it lodge nights and less formal gatherings of brethrtcn. Though he went in smart company to auction rooms, teams, coffee-houses, eating houses, and church, only private sociali7.ing, usually at home with fellow lodgers, surpassed his society commitments. Another London diarist, the artist Joseph f’arington, noted how luring the winter of 1793-4 he spent much of his time (apart from private socializing) at meetings of the Royal Academy, the Royal Academy Club, and the Society of Antiquaries. Particularly striking (as with Curwen) was the amount of time spent informally with other dub members, way from formal meetings, suggesting a wider, tipple effect across social life.
Work and Retirement, the 1830s to 1930s
Authors: Thane Pat
Published: November 2023

Pensions enabled some older people, and forced others, to give up paid work earlier in life than might otherwise have been possible. The development of pensions, and of formalized pension ages have been described by some as aspects of a process of marginalizing and degrading older people in the twentieth century, as they were progressively excluded from paid work and the social status assumed to be associated with it. We have seen that the degraded work into which many old people had been forced over many centuries was hardly status-enhancing. More prosperous older people whose paid work did confer status were generally powerful enough to resist encroachment upon that status by involuntary pensioned retirement.
‘Kinship Does not Stop at the Front Door’: Old People and their Families, the 1830s to 1930s
Authors: Thane Pat
Published: November 2023

How important were families, alongside poor relief, pensions, and paid work in enabling older people to survive in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? And what role did the generations play in each other’s emotional as well as material lives? The richer variety of sources compared with earlier periods conveys a range of vivid images which merge into a clear if complex picture of family relationships.
A Remarkable Discovery of Secret Need’: Pensioners in the 1940s
Authors: Thane Pat
Published: November 2023

A negative view of the probable social impact of the increasing numbers of older people in Britain was perhaps understandable, in view of the poor health and living conditions of very many older people in the 1930s and 1940s. These conditions were made shockingly evident by the revelations following the introduction of Supplementary Assistance in 1940. The Old Age and Widows’ Pensions Act, 1940, transferred responsibility for the welfare of old people from the local authorities (the successors to the Poor Law Boards) to the former Unemployment Assistance Board. This had been established in 1934 as the first official body empowered to undertake welfare work on a national scale.
The Rage of Party
Authors: Prest Wilfrid
Published: November 2023

The circumstances of William and Mary’s accession could only strengthen the contemporary belief ‘that there have been more shakes and convulsions in the government of England than in that of any other nation’.1 Nor was there much initial reason to think that this latest development would prove more success¬ ful than previous attempts to establish a stable constitutional and political order, in 1660, 1657, 1653, and 1641. Not until after-some would say long after-the defeat of James H’s plans to regain his throne with French assistance, and then the death in 1714 of hisdaughter Anne, the last Stuart monarch, did the permanence and longer-term significance of 1688-9 become clear. Over the intervening quarter-century William and Mary, and Anne, together with the Revolution settlement which they embodied, faced the threat of Jacobite efforts to restore first James II and then his son (‘James III’, otherwise known as the Old Pretender).
Religious Belief and Practice
Authors: Prest Wilfrid
Published: November 2023

The influential French author Voltaire, whose extended London visit in the mid-1720s reflected a growing European interest in things English, depicted political and religious liberty as characteristic of this ‘country of sectarists’, where ‘everyone is permitted to serve God in whatever mode or fashion he thinks proper’.1 In point of fact, the Blasphemy Act of 1698 made denying the doctrine of the Trinity, the truth of Christianity, or the authority of Scripture punishable by up to three years’ imprisonment. Those publishing theologically heterodox opinions also risked prosecution for blasphemous libel. Yet it must immediately be added that these legal provisions were rarely invoked, and attempts in the early 1720s to strengthen them failed to win parliamentary sup¬ port. For all Hobbes’s fears, no heretic had been executed in England since the early seventeenth century (although a 19-year-old theological student was hanged for heresy in Edinburgh in 1698). To that extent, Voltaire’s central point holds good: by George H’s reign religious diversity had come to stay.
Radicals, Reformers, and the French Revolution
Authors: Prest Wilfrid
Published: November 2023

In 1781 the clergyman economist Dean Josiah Tucker (1712-99) attacked English supporters of the American rebels, claiming that among other ‘gross errors and absurdities’, they must logically uphold the principle that ‘not even women nor children ought to be excluded from the right of voting’. Yet seven years later a London audience characterized as ‘numerous and polite’endorsed the proposition that ‘the extraordinary abilities of the ladies in the present age demand academical honours from the universities’, together with the rights both to vote and stand for Parliament. Few who heard or participated in this public debate would have regarded themselves as radicals or reformers. The former term was not yet in common use, and it seems likely that ‘rational entertainment’, not the promotion of constitutional or social change, was the main purpose of the evening.
Ireland in the Post-War World, 1945-1969
Authors: O’Halpin Eunan
Published: November 2023

In a controversial passage in his Ireland since the Famine,F. S. L. Lyons wrote that the consequence of neutrality for Ireland was her almost total isolation from the rest of mankind ... It was as if an entire people had been condemned to live in Plato’s cave, with their backs to the fire of life and deriving their only knowledge of what went on outside from the flickering shadows thrown on the wall before their eyes by the men and women who passed to and fro behind them. When after six years they emerged, dazzled, from the cave into the light of day, it was to a new and vastly different world.
Introduction
Authors: Gash Norman
Published: November 2023

In the literary landscape of the early nineteenth century, Robert Smith Surtees, creator of Jorrocks and some of the best fox-hunting scenes in the English language, is an isolated figure. That such a man was a novelist at all is an oddity. Squire of Hamsterley Hall in County Durham, landowner, magistrate, member of a family which could trace its ancestry back to the eleventh century, he was typical of the gentry who ruled the countryside but a rare animal among the middle-class intelligentsia who formed the literati of his time. It is significant that while he took little trouble to conceal his authorship, he never allowed his name to be affixed to any of his novels. When one magazine editor disobeyed his express injunction to that effect Surtees at once broke off the connection and (supreme sacrifice for a writer) abandoned the story in midstream. Even more untypical of the literary establishment of the age than the author himself are his novels. They were neither improving, nor compassionate, nor propagandist. Surtees was a satirist but the aim of his satire was not the amendment of manners but the entertainment of his readers. Most men, he once privately noted, take pleasure in satire as long as it is not directed against themselves.
County Society
Authors: Gash Norman
Published: November 2023

On one feature of aristocratic country life—the great house-parties which figure so prominently in Victorian diaries and correspondence—Surtees has little to say. Possibly he never took part in any. There is Jorrocks’ accidental incursion into the company at Onger Castle; but the occasion was the young earl’s twenty-first birthday and the party consisted of ‘people in the neighbourhood, sprinkled with a few idle Honourables, who lend themselves out to garnish country-houses in the dull season’ —and on whom the author is plainly indisposed to linger. Otherwise all we have is a derisive fling at that secondary form of aristocratic hospitality which was exercised in the interests of electoral power. Since, after the recognizable parody of the duke of Donkeyton in Hillingdon Hall, Surtees and his family had been struck off the duke of Northumberland’s guest list, this was perhaps paying off a personal score. In Plain or Ringlets the duke of Tergiversation has a fixed scale of appropriate entertainment, depending on whether the guests are loyal adherents, probable supporters, or possible defectors—dinners for the first category, lunches for the second, and fetes for the third. ‘A person may be brought to the neutral ground of a fete’, observes Surtees, ‘who might shy at the apparent downright committal of a dinner.’ This system of graduated hospitality was capable of further refinement, for the duke on another occasion invites Captain Cambo and Mr Cheadle for a day’s shooting followed by dinner in the hope of getting them to cast both their votes for his party instead of splitting them.
The Decline Of Elegance
Authors: Gash Norman
Published: November 2023

To Surtees one of the great social changes in his lifetime was the increase in comfort at the expense of elegance. To a historian it might seem a natural development in which national prosperity, a wider distribution of wealth, the growth of technology, and the popularity of utilitarian ideas all played a part. Surtees was less inclined to analyse the causes than to criticize the consequences; in particular the vulgarity which permeated much of Victorian culture. It was observable most clearly perhaps in the fine arts: in architecture the collapse of a coherent native tradition, in design the emphasis on decoration rather than form, in painting the vogue for realistic detail and literary subjects. Surtees never showed much interest in those fields, but he was a keen and minute recorder of costume; and it was here that he chiefly noted the decline of style. Take, for example, his reference to the vanished days when Mr Puffington was a young swell in London, a period which can be approximately placed in the 1820s.
Women
Authors: Zweiniger-Bargielowska Ina
Published: November 2023

The discussion of popular attitudes has highlighted gender differences and the purpose of this chapter is to examine the gendered implications of the austerity policy by focusing on women’s experiences and attitudes. Women in their role as housewives and mothers were primarily responsible for implementing the policy on a daily basis. Rationing and shortages of food and miscellaneous consumer goods added to the housewife’s burdens while the introduction of welfare foods contributed towards improving the health of mothers and children. During the 1940s housewifery and motherhood acquired an enhanced sense of national importance since the successful implementation of rationing and other economy measures was vital in maintaining public health and morale. Housewifery was no longer regarded as a private concern but rather as a central component of the war effort and post-war reconstruction. Thus the housewife’s battle on the kitchen front was as critical to victory as that of the soldier or the worker in essential industry. This pivotal female contribution was recognized by the government, resulting in an unprecedented outpouring of propaganda aimed to help women to adapt their housewifery skills and child-rearing techniques to wartime conditions as well as to raise standards generally. For example, a Ministry of Information pamphlet declared that housewives’ ‘part in the war is no mean one.
Familial, Neighbourhood, and Communal Resources for Childbirth
Authors: Marks Lara V
Published: November 2023

In many societies childbirth is an occasion which relies on the help of the family and the local neighbourhood. The use Jewish women made of these resources was different before and after migration. Unable to call on the kinship and communal ties that had existed in Eastern Europe, Jewish women’s experiences of childbirth and infant care in East London were distinct from those of their mothers. Arriving in a new and strange environment, many Jewish women not only faced the difficulties of giving birth separated from their traditional support, but also of being attended by carers who did not always appreciate their customs or speak their language. In this situation childbirth could be a traumatic event, reinforcing the isolation and problems Jewish immigrants experienced when settling in East London.
Local Voluntary Hospitals and Maternity Care
Authors: Marks Lara V
Published: November 2023

In addition to the alternative schemes set up by Jewish communal organizations, Jewish mothers had particularly good access to maternity care from host institutions. Despite, or possibly because of, its poor social and economic situation, East London was characterized by a large number of charitable maternity services from early on. Such provision was vital to mothers facing the continual strain of bearing infants on a low income. Although the abundant maternity facilities in the area could do little to prevent the economic and social hardships many mothers suffered, they none the less appear to have had an important influence on the rate of maternal mortality. As has been shown, maternal mortality was much lower in East London than the rest of London or England and Wales (see Fig. 2.11).
The Kingdom of Germany
Authors: Reynolds Susan
Published: November 2023

The kingdom of Germany is taken here to cover all the territory included in the great kingdom, whatever it was called at different times before 1300, that developed out of the eastern part of the Carolingian empire. The chapter will include some material on Lotharingia, but touches on the kingdoms of Burgundy and Provence only in the twelfth century. Some of the material on the former middle kingdom has already been used in the chapters on France: to some extent the untidiness and overlaps reflect an untidy historical situation and overlapping historiographical traditions. My coverage of a huge and varied area is in any case so patchy that overlaps or omissions on the edges seem relatively unimportant. Like every other chapter, this one ignores a mass of regional and local variations. It is not that I believe them to have been insignificant: my hypothesis is, as usual, rather that the traditional interpretation of regional differences has been postulated on a premiss about the nature of political and property relations that needs to be revised before the differences can be .
City-State and Market Economy
Authors: Hocquet Jean-Claude
Published: November 2023

The city-state was the political creation of a commercial metropolis which, through war, diplomacy or purchase, succeeded in enlarging the territorial framework of the original urban commune and in dominating its hinterland of small and middling towns and villages. The geographical extent of the city-state depended on the size of the metropolis as well as its demographic and economic power; it was clearly also related to the importance of the surrounding towns and territorial principalities. Thus, in the fifteenth century, the commune of Venice, which had emerged from the buffer duchy between the Byzantine empire in the east and the Carolingian empire in the west, conquered an extensive territorial state in Italy at the expense of other urban lordships and continued to expand until it came up against other powerful cities such as Milan and Florence.
The formation of the english legal system, 1150-1400
Authors: Brand Paul
Published: November 2023

The process of state-building in England began well before the Norman Conquest of rn66. The tenth-century conquest by the kings of Wessex of those parts of England which had fallen under the control of Scandinavian invaders cre ated a single political unit covering the whole country. The new kings of England possessed a rudimentary central bureaucracy for handling their financial affairs and for giving orders and making grants in their name and also local agents in each county or shire. After the Norman Conquest a French-speaking and largely Nor man feudal aristocracy took the place of the existing English ruling class but the new Anglo-Norman monarchs were largely successful in resisting any dilution in the powers of the English monarchy and were able to insist on the duty ofloyalty which all free men owed to the Crown. By the twelfth century we begin to find evidence of the kind of specialization of function within the royal administration that gives rise to distinctive institutions possessing their own bureaucratic rou tines and creating their own archives.
The Operation of Royal Grace in Castile, 1250-1530, and the Origins of the Council of the Chamber
Authors: Dios Salustiano de
Published: November 2023

No student of the history oflate medieval Castile can fail to be struck by the commitment of the rulers of that kingdom to strengthening their power in the field oflegislation as well as in that of the administration of justice and government.1 Yet the theme of royal grace has been largely neglected by schol ars interested in this stretch of Spanish history2-and this despite the fact that the distribution of grace and favour (gracia, merced) provided those rulers with one of the most readily available means of realizing that power and extending its scope in both juridical and political terms. In the operation of royal grace the absolutist tendencies of the age were given their clearest expression, moreover, for, in addition to effecting profound changes throughout a society character ized at every level by juridical privilege and inequality, functioning at first inde pendently of positive law eventually royal grace succeeded in arrogating to itself many of that law’s salient characteristics. In time this was to prove to have been a development of central importance for every department of Castilian society.
The Habsburg Monarchy in the Eighteenth Century: The Birth of the Modern Centralized State
Authors: Ogris Werner
Published: November 2023

This chapter, about the Habsburg Monarchy in the eighteenth century, falls towards the end of the volume’s chronological span-and rightly so. For it does not deal with the origins, further development, or final consolidation of the European states in the course of the entire medieval and the early modern periods. Instead, it takes the reader up to the middle and the second half of the eighteenth century, into the ageof(Enlightened) absolutism, Enlightenment, and natural law.
Conclusions: Models, Instruments, Principles
Authors: Padoa-Schioppa Antonio
Published: November 2023

It will take a long time and a wide range of experts to provide a full evalu ation of what so many scholars of such differing academic backgrounds have established in the great ‘open workshop’ (as Jean-Philippe Genet has called it) of the two big research projects on the origins of the modern European state. This is true also of the question of the relationship between the modern state and the law: a vast field of enquiry in which not only the chapters in this volume, but also much of the work of the other teams, already published or in the course of publication, invalidates old certainties, poses stimulating questions, trains beams of light in new directions, and suggests new possibilities of synthesis.
Introduction
Authors: Reinhard Wolfgang
Published: November 2023

During the past thousand years, from the high Middle Ages until the present day; the power and the institutions of certain central governments in Europe have been growing continuously at the expense of other autonomous holders of political power and at the expense of the subjects. The final outcome is the modern European power state, defined by a continuous territory with a distinct borderline and by complete external sovereignty, by the monopoly of every kind of legitimate use offorce, and by a homogeneous mass of subjects each of whom has the same rights and duties.
Staying on Top: Socio-Cultural Reproduction of European Power Elites
Authors: Braun Rudolf
Published: November 2023

In order to define the fields of observation and scope of research, some general introductory comments are needed. What is to be understood by sociocultural reproduction? The central concern of this study is the intergenerational securing and, if possible, the advancement, of social position; the key questions are: what were the ways and means of getting to the top, of staying on top, and of preventing social decline? Which offensive and defensive strategies were deployed to achieve these aims? Which social networks and alliances were of assistance? What material and non-material costs were incurred in the process?
The Main Areas of Confrontation: Thematic Survey
Authors: Blickle Peter
Published: November 2023

Confrontations normally focused on questions of physical survival and cultural identity, but fiscal rebellions could also involve political issues. Indirect taxes on the other hand (for example, excise duties) always provoked widespread discontent. The state had created a series of monopolies, particularly for levies on trade and commerce, and some of them were farmed out. Occasionally, the peasants took violent action and in such cases they could count on the estates’ support. However, as soon as the monarch agreed to a compromise by allowing the estates to collect the taxes themselves, this coalition between lords and peasants broke down as well.
Messages And Responses
Authors: Blickle Peter
Published: November 2023

What values inspired acts of resistance? They could be quite varied and contradictory: we have seen that the defence of traditional rights was important, but so was the struggle for autonomy and the desire of various corporate bodies to be represented in the political process. Certain groups, furthermore, fought against abuses of hierarchical privileges, and also, in economic riots, for their basic right of existence. Here, and in the demands for freedom of conscience, we encounter a much wider and more fundamental principle: human rights. The message was therefore ambiguous: a conservative appeal for preservation and tradition, and an innovative desire for individual freedom and human rights.
Legislation ‘from below’
Authors: Blickle Peter
Published: November 2023

For Germany, evidence concerning the ability of the subject to influence the legislative process must be pursued through a literature on regional and local history which is both extensive and detailed in its line of questioning. This approach must always be supplemented by specific archival research in order to arrive at even an approximate answer to the questions raised.Two examples will serve as illustration here. These give an impression, on the one hand, of the breadth of the legislative matters to which the subject contributed; and on the other, they permit us to quantify that influence.
Norms and Values of the Peasantry in the Period of State Formation: A Comparative
Authors: Blickle Peter
Published: November 2023

The majority of the population in the early modern period consisted of peasants and tenant farmers, servants, day labourers, and craftsmen living in the countryside. Together with the lower classes in the towns, they were the people— ordinary man. They belonged to a culture which Peter Burke calls ‘the little tradition’, in contrast to ‘the great tradition’ which was maintained by educated and articulate élites.
The Low Countries
Authors: Blickle Peter
Published: November 2023

The Low Countries have been a highly urbanized region ever since the eleventh century. This makes it particularly appropriate to consider this region as one of the cases where the tension between the self-created public sphere of the cities conflicted with the state-making efforts of monarchs. Here, the interaction between cities and states obviously contributed substantially to the ultimate shape of the early modern state, both in the United Provinces and in the Habsburg-ruled Southern Netherlands. Until the end of the sixteenth century, the core of the economic system of north-western Europe was located in Flanders and Brabant; afterwards it shifted to Holland. Therefore, it seems logical to focus on the Dutch Republic for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and on the southern and western territories for the earlier period
Italy
Authors: Blickle Peter
Published: November 2023

If we observe processes of state formation from an Italian vantage point, and most particularly if we wish to examine the part which citizens, peasants, commoners, and their organizations played in state formation, we must first necessarily pause to define terms. Italy represents an extreme case, so extreme as to cast doubt on widely accepted schemes, or general narratives, of European history. That this is so—rather than that parts of Italy (as Germany, the Low Countries, Catalonia, and other ‘atypical’ areas) are exceptions to a clear course of events taking place elsewhere—cannot be proved here. None the less we hope to show that an analysis of the Italian situation may help to clarify underlying issues of general import.
Conclusion
Authors: Blickle Peter
Published: November 2023

The relationships between autonomous cities and state building in Europe conformed to a general rhythm of urban political life. From the original communalism of the high Middle Ages, this path led through an era of internal devolution and external expansion in the later Middle Ages to an era of contraction, concentration, and oligarchy from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. While common to many sectors of ‘the urban belt’, however, this pattern was by no means universal. Italy, in particular, shows exceptional features: the formation of states founded on cities; the political representation of an entire kingdom by the élites of one large city, Naples; the subjection of city-based power to an alliance between central government and rural communes at Milan; and the centralized federation of urban élites that constituted the Venetian state.
Marriage and Catastrophe, 1805-1816
Authors: Mitchell L G
Published: November 2023

The marriage between William Lamb and Caroline Ponsonby was one of the most extraordinary unions of the whole nineteenth century. It was a catastrophe for both parties. It generated so much heat and noise that it became the stock-in trade of novelists. Benjamin Disraeli, Mrs Humphry Ward, Bulwer Lytton and his wife, and Thomas Lister were just a few of the writers, who allegedly drew on the Lamb marriage for copy. Notoriously, Lady Caroline Lamb did the same thing. The pain of this marriage was never private, therefore. Over and over again, Melbourne was confronted by its failure. Newspaper owners and booksellers ensured that his marriage was always in the public eye. For a man of fastidious sensitivities, such publicity was odious. In response to it, his instinct was to retire from public view. Any thought of a career in politics had to be abandoned. Lamb simply withdrew into himself When he once again became a public figure, after Caroline’s death, he was a changed man. A carapace of cynicism shielded him from any further emotional commitments. He was in many ways damaged beyond repair.
Prime Minister:, 1834-1841
Authors: Mitchell L G
Published: November 2023

William Lamb became Prime Minister only as the result of an extended, political crisis that so muddled loyalties and affiliations that he found himself in charge of the government. Difficulties started in May 1834 with the resignation of four members of Grey’s Cabinet over Irish policies. In July, Melbourne was appointed Prime Minister. In November, he was dismissed even though he still enjoyed a majority in the House of Commons. For five months, Peel attempted to lead a minority government, but, when this experiment failed, Melbourne was reinstated in office in April 1835. For nearly a year, there was turmoil right across the political spectrum. The confusion of 1829 30 was re-enacted. Many Tories had never forgiven Peel and Wellington for their role in Catholic Emancipation, and the antipathy was reciprocated.
Robin’s Reign, 1727-1742
Authors: Langford Paul
Published: November 2023

Though the accession of George II aroused wide spread expectations of change, both at home and abroad, the new King eventually endorsed the men and measures of his predecessor. The reign began in remarkably tranquil circumstances, with no suggestion of a reviving Jacobite threat. It confirmed the growing stature of Sir Robert Walpole, and simultaneously served to identify him with the ills of contemporary society. A galaxy of literary talents exposed the faults of his ‘system’ and created an enduring image of corruption as the prime characteristic of the ‘Robin ocracy’. Yet Walpole’s supremacy showed increasing signs of strain in the mid-173os. His excise scheme proved a major miscalculation, and caused a crisis at court, as well as exposing him to severe criticism inside and outside Parliament. It enabled his opponents to appeal to ‘Country’ sentiment rather than to narrow party prejudices. Divisions within the royal family provided a focus for aristocratic opposition. Episcopal unrest at the deistic tendencies visible in court life endangered the alliance of Whig politicians and Whig Churchmen. An outbreak of anticlericalism in the House of Commons made it easier for Dissenters to challenge the privileges of the Church, and the con sequent religious tensions, added an element of instability to ministerial politics. Above all there was growing
New Improvements
Authors: Langford Paul
Published: November 2023

Parliamentary sovereignty was employed for commercial benefit and material improvement, as well as in constitutional controversy. Turnpike legislation created a national transport network, which, in addition to its economic effects, was perceived to have social and cultural consequences. A series of inland navigation acts made the 1760s and 1770s the first, formative decades of the canal age, and added to the wonders of the English world. ‘Improvement Acts’ were used on a wide scale to transform the amenities of towns and cities. On the land there was a great increase in the use of parliamentary enclosure bills. The entrepreneurial activity with which this mass of legislation was associated caused considerable heart searching, complacent though much of the commercial spirit of the age may seem in retrospect. The rapid growth of towns, and especially the suburban expansion of the metropolis, gave rise to debate about the social and moral repercussions of urban change. Agricultural investment, praised for its impact on productivity, was also criticized for its corrosive effect on rural paternalism. The traditional economy of the open-field village, and the old sense of harmony which bound together hierarchical communities, seemed to be vanishing together. Such concern was increased by the food shortages and price inflation of the period.
Britannia’s Distress, 1770-1783
Authors: Langford Paul
Published: November 2023

Lord North’S ministry began propitiously. Much of its success derived from North’s gifts as a parliamentarian, much too from the confidence which he inspired among the back-bench country gentlemen. It was clear, however, that the ferments of the 1760s had had permanent consequences, not least in the searching scrutiny to which the traditional assumptions of the eigheenth-century constitution were subjected by critics of the regime. These included Dissenters in matters of Church as well as State. North’s handling of imperial affairs, in India, in Canada, and in America, suggested resourcefulness and firmness. His decision to use force against the American colonies was widely supported and positively strengthened his political position. But when the war began to go badly in 1777, a crisis of unpre cedented dimensions unfolded. Recognition of American independence came to be seen as unavoidable. Something of the same sort threatened in Ireland with the appearance of the Volunteer movement. In England a campaign in favour of’ economical reform’, and to a lesser extent parliamentary reform, made itself felt. The Gordon Riots of 1780 heightened the sense of impending catastrophe. North’s survival until the surrender at Yorktown nearly two years later only postponed a resolution of these conflicts. The Peace was unpopular, though less humiliating than had been feared.
This Happy Constitution
Authors: Langford Paul
Published: November 2023

The changes which marked eighteenth-century life were sometimes difficult to absorb, not least in political matters, where tradition and the ‘ancient constitution’ were much prized. Different interpretations of the Revolution of I688 rested on the assumption that its function had been to restore old laws and liberties rather than introduce new ones. The contemporary achievement was often thought of as one of preservation, especially the maintenance of balanced government against the encroachments of the Crown and the nobility. But there was also clear evidence that the State was undergoing a transformation, as the requirements of war, the growth of deficit financing, and the expansion of government took effect. It was not, by Continental standards, an authoritarian State; it was, however, an extremely flexible and resilient one. Public administration was relatively decentralized, and a marked degree of particularism and provincialism suggested almost a federal structure. But at its core was the consolidated power of Parliament and the doctrine of parliamentary supremacy. The very prominence of Parliament laid it open to criticism in the late eighteenth century. Yet in terms of its primary function, the representation of a diverse and increasingly prosperous society, it proved both efficient and adaptable. The result was not oligarchy in any meaningful sense, but neither did it have any tendency to democracy.
Introduction: Problem and method
Authors: Saul Nigel
Published: November 2023

Cobham is a picturesque little village set on a ridge of the North Downs near Rochester. Its single narrow street is rich in vernacular architecture. On the north side, at the western end, is the celebrated Leather Bottle, where Charles Dickens’s Mr Pickwick discovered the curiously inscribed stone. A little to the east is the eighteenth-century Darnley Arms, and further on Mr Gander’s shop, a fine timber-framed dwelling of the fifteenth century. A mile or so beyond the village, set deep in a wooded park is Cobham Hall, the seventeenth-century seat of the dukes of Lennox and later of the earls of Darnley. At the opposite end of the village, on rising ground, is an older set of buildings. Fronting straight onto the street is the fourteenth- and seventeenth-century Stone House, a mainly flint structure which was once a school. Further up, and set back, are the buildings of the chantry college founded in 1362 by John, Lord Cobham. Adjacent to the college, and at the highest point, is the church of St Mary Magdalene. This large, dignified building, dating mainly from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, spreads long and low among the trees. Externally, it exudes aristocratic presence as it stands high above the street Internally, it disappoints a little: the design is austere, and the nineteenth-century fittings and stained glass are unworthy. Yet to many this church is a place of pilgrimage. Visitors are drawn here from all over the world. For stretching impressively across the chancel floor is the largest and most spectacular collection of brasses in Britain.
The Market for Brasses
Authors: Saul Nigel
Published: November 2023

In the 1380s, when the 3rd Lord Cobham was commmissioning the fittings for the Cobham chancel, the art of brass engraving in England was already a century old. There is evidence that brasses were being produced in London by the 1280s or earlier, and that effigial incised slabs were being made well before that. By Lord Cobham’s time brasses had become much the most popular form of funerary monument, and in the marblers’ workshops around St Paul’s churchyard in London there was something approaching mass production.
The Brasses at Cobham
Authors: Saul Nigel
Published: November 2023

Cobham boasts a collection of no fewer than twenty medieval brasses, the majority of them, mainly those of the Cobham family and their kin, in the chancel, and the remainder in the nave aisles. There is one important Renaissance monument, the splendid alabaster and marble tomb of the Cobhams’ descendant George Brooke, Lord Cobham (d. 1558), in front of the high altar. There are also memorials to the Brookes’ successors, the Bligh earls of Darnley, in the vault beneath the chancel.
Why Did Eadfrith Write the Lindisfarne Gospels?
Authors: Gameson Richard
Published: November 2023

The Lindisfarne Gospels is—thanks to the colophon that was added to it in the tenth century—one of the few relatively secure footholds in the shifting sands of Insular book production, palaeography, and illumination (pls. 3-5). Written, we are told, by Eadfrith, ‘bishop of the Lindisfarne Church’, bound by l Ethelwald, ‘bishop of the Lindisfarne islanders’, and (subsequently) encased in precious metal and gems by Billfrith the anchorite, this deservedly famous manuscript establishes Lind isfarne at the end of the seventh century as a supremely accomplished scriptorium. It shows, moreover, something of the resources and activities of that centre at the time. The scriptorium evidently had access, for instance, to a good Italian Vulgate text, and to a set of evangelist portraits.
Thomas Becket: Martyr, Saint-and Friend?
Authors: Haseldine Julian
Published: November 2023

Thomas Becket, arriving more than half a century too late for the investiture contest, has fired devotion and kindled confusion since his abrupt and complete conversion to the cause of the Church in n62. The immediate issues of the conflict he engendered were obviously different. For many his claims were questionable and his stance provocative, yet his devotees included one of the most erudite and politically sophisticated scholars of the day, John of Salisbury. His cult rapidly overwhelmed Canterbury, the church whose resources his actions had so depleted.
The Picturesque Face of the Past: The 1840s Novels of William Harrison Ainsworth
Authors: Mitchell Rosemary
Published: November 2023

Among all the objects of art [wrote the eighteenth-century theorist of the picturesque, William Gilpin], the picturesque eye is perhaps most inquisitive after the elegant relics of ancient architecture; the ruined tower, the Gothic arch, the remains of castles and abbeys ... They are consecrated by time, and almost deserve the veneration we pay to works of nature itself.
John Lingard’s History of England: A Catholic History
Authors: Mitchell Rosemary
Published: November 2023

Nineteenth-century Catholic writers of history faced an audience potentially more hostile than that met by women historians; like women historians, they aimed to subvert, adapt, and revise the dominant historical discourse. In this narrative, however, Protestantism had been enshrined since at least the seventeenth century as an important element in the formation and expression of English national identity.
Thackeray, A’Beckett, and Leech: ‘The Dignity of History’
Authors: Mitchell Rosemary
Published: November 2023

The dignity of history sadly diminishes as we grow better acquainted with the materials which compose it. In our orthodox history-books the characters move on as a gaudy playhouse procession, a glittering pageant of kings and warriors, and stately ladies ... Only he who sits very near to the stage can discover of what stuff the spectacle is made. The kings are poor creatures, taken from the dregs of the company; the noble knights are dirty dwarfs in tin foil; the fair ladies are painted hags with cracked feathers and soiled trains. One wonders how gas and distance could ever have rendered them so enchanting ...
The Abuse of Antiquity and the Uses of Myth: The Illustrated Historical Novel after 1850
Authors: Mitchell Rosemary
Published: November 2023

‘I hope it’s not historical Mr Trollope? ... whatever you do, don’t be historical, your historical novel is not worth a damn [La Vendee (1850) ]. Thus the foreman of Hurst and Blackett to Anthony Trollope in 1857, when the novelist presented the manuscript of The Three Clerks (1858) to him. Trollope achieved great literary success in the 1860s and 1870s partially because he had abandoned historical fiction in favour of novels about English contemporary life.
Policing the Night Streets
Authors: Beattie J M
Published: November 2023

Constables were not regularly drawn into daytime surveillance. Night was a different matter. It had been recognized for centuries that the coming of darkness to the unlit streets of a town brought a heightened threat of danger, that the night gave cover to the disorderly and immoral, and to those bent on robbery or burglary or who in other ways threatened physical harm to people in the streets and in their houses.