bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Napoleon and History Painting
Authors: Prendergast Christopher
Published: November 2023

This study is an inquiry into the fortunes, in both theory and practice, of the idea of history painting during the Napoleonic period. Its main argument is that under Napoleon, French history painting, especially battle painting, encountered a series of questions as to its nature and function. These questions arose in part from the (often contradictory) demands of a propaganda-machine operating within a postrevolutionary crisis of political legitimation, but also from changes in artistic taste which both retained and re-directed an earlier notion of the civic responsibilities of the history painter. This is a resolutely interdisciplinary book: drawing on perspectives from political thought and history, military theory and practice and art history, it centres on the work of the painter, Antoine-Jean Gros, and his controversial painting, La Bataille d'Eylau.
Compilation: Alsted’s Cursus philosophici encyclopaedia, 1609–1620
Authors: Hotson Howard
Published: November 2023

Alsted’s plans to succeed Keckermann as leader of the post-Ramist encyclopaedic project were hatched within months of the Danziger’s death. On 12 September 1609, only three days after receiving the gift of Keckermann’s works from Antonius (and presumably the commission to edit a collection of them), Alsted wrote to Kaspar Waser in Zurich, mourning the deaths of Keckermann and Joseph Scaliger. ‘It is for us’, he concluded (with no trace of irony), ‘to follow in their footsteps.’1 On Christmas Day of the same year he wrote to Albert Molnár invoking God’s aid ‘at this time, when the great lights of churches and schools are passing away’.2
Interim Conclusions
Authors: Hotson Howard
Published: November 2023

The first edition of the Encyclopaedia appeared in the spring of 1620 amidst an atmosphere of acute anxiety. After a decade of preparation, the work was submitted to the press at the very moment in which the continued existence of the academic and confessional community epitomized within it was called into question.
‘The Town I Loved So Well’: Derry and the Foundation of Field Day
Authors: Richtarik Marilynn J
Published: November 2023

The seal of the city of Derry features, in addition to the red cross on a white background which commemorates its association with the city of London, a tower and a grinning skeleton. This symbolizes that Derry is a walled city that rose ‘from the dead’. The visitor soon learns, however, that there are other stories told about the seal, including one about an avaricious Norman lord who was locked in the fortress by his relatives and left to starve to death. Like so many other fragments of Irish history, this legend strikes a resonant chord with events of more recent years in Northern Ireland where, over the past twenty-five years, civil division has yet again manifested itself in violence. Full of modern significance, too, is the grim joke locals tell about the grisly emblem. ‘What we say,’ the guard at the Guildhall explains, ‘is that’s a Derry man waiting for a job.’
The Blast of War
Authors: Woolrych Austin
Published: November 2023

There was no sharply defined beginning to the English Civil War. The king sought to give it one by ceremonially raising his standard at Nottingham on 22 August 1642 and summoning his subjects to aid him in suppressing the rebellion headed by the Earl of Essex, but even as a symbolic gesture this was to fall flat. There had already been clashes of arms in various parts of the country for some weeks past, and it would be many weeks more before Charles’s military commanders felt capable of offering battle. Very many of his subjects clung to a hope that open war might yet be averted by a negotiated settlement, or expected that if it came to the worst the quarrel might be decided by a single battle. Many thought first about the interests of their own communities and set about negotiating local pacts of neutrality, hoping thereby to keep any war there might be outside the bounds of their particular counties or cities.
The Conflict Widens
Authors: Woolrych Austin
Published: November 2023

Now that parliament realized that the path to victory would be long and hard, it was inevitable that it should pursue an alliance with the Scottish Covenanters. The king, however, had been first in seeking allies outside his English kingdom, and the diplomatic efforts of both sides in the course of 1643 turned what had begun as an English civil war into a true war of three kingdoms.

The situation in Ireland was complicated for both king and parliament. The Confederated catholics had established a form of provisional government, but they continued to profess their loyalty to the king, and they had strong reasons for wishing that he and not the parliament should win the war in England. The first General Assembly, which they summoned to Kilkenny in October 1642, had abjured the title of parliament because their oath of confederacy bound them to defend the king’s rights, which included the sole authority to summon a parliament. It had accepted the English common law as the law of Ireland and recognized the binding force of existing English statutes that legislated for Ireland, so long as they were not against the Roman Catholic religion or the liberties of the Irish people.
Climacteric II: ‘not a mere Mercenary Army’
Authors: Woolrych Austin
Published: November 2023

The general rendezvous on Kentford Heath opened not only a dramatically new chapter in the army’s history but one of those phases of discontinuity and accelerated change that I have called climacterics. The next nineteen months witnessed repercussions that neither the soldiers nor most of the politicians had either foreseen or desired: an attempted conservative coup in London, a resultant military confrontation, the army’s assumption (improvised step by step) of a dominant role in British politics, a second civil war in which the Scottish army fought against the English parliament, and finally the execution of the king and the abolition (in England) of the monarchy. In June 1647, however, the aims of the parties that precipitated the crisis were still largely negative. The presbyterian politicians wanted to eliminate the army as an obstacle to their own plans for reinstating the king, while the army sought only to avert its own destruction, secure its soldiers’ rights, and prevent a partisan peace that would betray much that it thought it had fought for. Neither side was seeking drastic political change; they differed not as to whether the king should be restored to his regal authority but over the constitutional terms upon which he should be allowed to resume it.
Quest for a Settlement
Authors: Woolrych Austin
Published: November 2023

Neither the people of England, nor those who watched aghast from Scotland, Ireland, and continental Europe, could tell what the outcome would be of that horrifying act at Whitehall on 30 January 1649. It seemed there might be no end to its revolutionary consequences. An anointed king had been brought to trial and execution by a fragment of one house of parliament, first elected more than eight years earlier, and now claiming to act by the supreme authority of the sovereign people’s representatives. The Rump followed up the regicide with acts abolishing the office of king and the House of Lords. It called them acts, not ordinances, because they required no other assent now but that of the Commons. But behind the Rump stood the army, to whose force it owed its power, and the army might not sustain it for long, since its first intention had been to dissolve the parliament rather than purge it. The Rumpers themselves promised, in their act of 17 March that abolished the monarchy, ‘that they will put a period to the sitting of the present parliament, and dissolve the same so soon as may possibly stand with the safety of the people that hath betrusted them’.1
‘A Story of My Own Weakness and Folly’?
Authors: Woolrych Austin
Published: November 2023

Addressing members of another parliament four years later, Cromwell described his attempt to set up a new supreme authority in place of the Rump as ‘a story of my own weakness and folly’.1 Perhaps he took too much of the blame for what was really a collective decision, and perhaps he was rather hard on himself.

He started off with some advantages. The country and the capital took his coup very calmly, for the Rump had few mourners besides the Rumpers. He hardly exaggerated when he said later that ‘there was not so much as the barking of a dog’,2 and a wag who pinned a notice on the door of the Commons’ chamber reading ‘This House is to be let, now unfurnished’ caught the public mood. One small petition apart, there were no demonstrations of protest against the expulsion; the army was solidly behind Cromwell, and the gathered churches were positively jubilant. But he and his fellow-officers were so unprepared for the responsibility they had undertaken that they needed time to consider how to provide even temporarily for the government of the country. Their public declaration of 22 April promised vaguely enough to call to it ‘persons of approved fidelity and honesty’, and privately they consulted a number of the more sympathetic former MPs on how best to fill the constitutional vacuum.
The Protectorate in Scotland, Ireland, and Europe
Authors: Woolrych Austin
Published: November 2023

If Scotland and Ireland have remained in the background through the last three chapters, it is because their political role following the Cromwellian conquests was mainly passive. Both countries were to play a dramatic part in the restoration of Charles II, but throughout Cromwell’s Protectorate they were subordinate to England, though in different degrees. Government in Scotland was far more considerate of Scottish interests, and more open to Scottish participation, than in Ireland.
North-Eastern England During The Wars Of The Roses
Authors: Pollard A J
Published: November 2023

This is the first modern scholarly study of north-eastern England during the Wars of the Roses. For a fleeting period in the late fifteenth century, the North dominated England: it was both the adopted home and the power base of Richard III. But this is more than simply an account of the rise and fall of the last Plantagenet as the Lord of the North. A. J. Pollard analyses regional politics and the interrelationship between province and centre from the beginning of the Neville-Percy feud in the 1450s to the establishment of Tudor authority by 1500. Themes explored include Anglo-Scottish relations, local government, the structure of landed society, the wealth, power, and the outlook of lords and gentry, and the economy of the region. Dr Pollard sets political history in the context of the period, and paints a detailed portrait of lay society, based on intensive research among local records. He shows that, contrary to some recent views, the North-East was in certain significant respects more feudal, more conservative and, by the early sixteenth century, poorer than the South-East of England.
Living and Dying in England 1100–1540
Authors: Harvey Barbara
Published: November 2023

This is an authoritative account of daily life in Westminster Abbey, one of medieval England's greatest monastic communities. It is also a wide-ranging exploration of some major themes in the social history of the Middle Ages and early sixteenth century, by one of its most distinguished historians. Barbara Harvey exploits the exceptionally rich archives of the Benedictine foundation of Westminster to the full, offering numerous vivid insights into the lives of the Westminster monks, their dependants, and their benefactors. She examines the charitable practices of the monks, their food and drink, their illnesses and their deaths, the number and conditions of employment of their servants, and their controversial practice of granting corrodies (pensions made up in large measure of benefits in kind). All these topics Miss Harvey considers in the context both of religious institutions in general, and of the secular world. Full of colour and interest, Living and Dying in England is an original and highly readable contribution to medieval history, and that of the early sixteenth century.
The Late Medieval Church and Clergy
Authors: Skeeters Martha C
Published: November 2023

The church was at the heart of life in late medieval Bristol as in other large towns and cities. One of the benefits of urban life for both laity and clergy was the diversity of religious institutions. For the laity it meant varieties of religious expression, and perhaps experience, as one moved from mass and a sermon at one’s own parish church to offer at another, to an outdoor sermon at a friary or on St Augustine’s Green or at Redcliffe Cross. In the city merely the glimpse of a church’s interior through an open door on a busy way could excite a religious emotion or invite the passer-by to worship. One imagines the many visitors to the monastery church at St Augustine’s when the Corporation’s representatives, the Mayor and Council, worshipped there on Easter and the Monday after. And undoubtedly many extraparochial worshippers joined the Mayor and Council when they heard a sermon at St Mary Redcliffe on Whitsunday. The very existence of eighteen parish churches within the city offered opportunity not only for variety but for the exercise of preference in choosing preachers, priests, and choirs, and the clamour of bells served as a constant reminder. For the urban laity there were choices which the villager never knew.
Itroduction
Authors: Goodman Anthony
Published: November 2023

The personality and policies of Richard II, and the long-term significance of his reign, were matters of debate and controversy among suspicious and worried contemporaries, and they have remained matters of debate and controversy ever since. Judgements by those who had known him personally, or who had lived under his rule, that he was a tyrant or a foolish king, have echoed long. The theme that he was, with Edward II and Henry VI, one of a trinity of notably crass and unsuccessful rulers, has had a long currency. His rule, arguably, exemplified m governance, whose features were the stuff of bad dreams for the subjects of the later medieval English monarchy. A locus classicus for the indictment of this scarifying trinity is the manifesto against Edward IV ‘s government put out in 1469 by George duke of Clarence, George Neville, archbishop of York, and the earl of Warwick.1 Edward ‘s rule was compared in this manifesto to theirs, which had led ‘to their destruction and the great hurt and impoverishment of this land ‘. The three kings had estranged the great lords of their blood from their secret council, and relied on the advice of those who had no respect for the lords ‘ interests and those of the realm in general, but who impoverished the Crown for their own enrichment, encouraged the imposition of unjust taxes and forfeitures, and generated disorder and crime through their practice of maintenance.
The Great Acceleration, 1912 —1913
Authors: Stevenson David
Published: November 2023

Events in Eastern and in Western Europe must now be brought to their convergence. Continental diplomacy in the last two years of Great-Power peace centred on the outbreak and the aftermath of the Balkan Wars. With constant turmoil in the Eastern Mediterranean it was understood in every chancellery that the situation was much more strained, and at the climax of the winter crisis of 1912-13 Europe reached unprecedented levels of immediate military readiness. In addition, the crisis spectacularly intensified the drive for medium-term preparedness, expressed in massive spending increases and a string of major army laws. Diplomatic and military developments interacted ever more closely, and armaments competition and crisis management must be seen as aspects of a single phenomenon.
Men Versus the State
Authors: Taylor M W
Published: November 2023

Men Versus the State is a study both of the political philosophy of Herbert Spencer (considered by many to be the greatest philosopher of Victorian Britain) and of the ideas of the Individualists, a group of political thinkers inspired by him to uphold the policy of laissez-faire during the 1880s and 1890s. Despite their important contribution to nineteenth-century political debate, these thinkers have been neglected by historians, who have concentrated on the advocates of an enhanced role for government in economic and social affairs. The Individualists were forceful critics of this tendency to expand the frontiers of the State. This, the first comprehensive study of their ideas, sheds new light on the nature of late Victorian political argument. The book also provides an original perspective on Spencer's political philosophy, which provided Individualism with much of its intellectual justification. It will be of interest to anyone who wishes to set free-market conservatism in a historical context.
Rival Claimants To The Benthamite Heritage
Authors: Taylor M W
Published: November 2023

It was argued in the Introduction that the closing decades of the late nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of a sustained debate concerning the true meaning of liberalism. The aim of the present chapter is to demonstrate that, contrary to the Individualists’ own self image as the only legitimate heirs of the Benthamites, the relationship between Individualism and the radicalism of the second quarter of the nineteenth century was more complex than the Individualists them selves believed. While it is undeniable that there were substantial theoretical continuities between Benthamite radicalism and Individual ism, it will be shown that the former contained within itself a number of tensions or ambiguities which enabled the New Radicals as well as the Individualists to lay claim to the Benthamite heritage. Both parties to the dispute reconciled these tensions in contrasting ways, but the fact that they shared a common perception of their existence, and of the need to overcome them, indicates that each side was engaged in a process of theoretical revision. While the innovations produced by the Individual ists were less self-conscious than those of the New Radicals, they did not simply restate the old utilitarian doctrine in the changed conditions of the late nineteenth century, but transformed it in a conservative direction.
Justice, Property, and Natural Right
Authors: Taylor M W
Published: November 2023

One of the most profound tensions between the liberal principles and conservative intentions of lndividualist thought is found in its account of justice, and in particular the doctrine of natural rights. Basing their claims variously on the principle of desert or on a pre-social natural right to property, the Individualists argued that each individual had a moral right to the produce of his labour power. This doctrine has a long history as part of the liberal tradition; as Ryan has pointed out, it ‘has been a commonplace of political and economic radicalism for three hundred years.’ The Individualists were accordingly committed to a theory of justice the revolutionary implications of which ‘conservatism has had a continuous struggle to defuse.’ At the same time, however, the Individualists also wished to turn this doctrine to the conservative purpose of providing an intellectual justification for the established distribution of property in late Victorian Britain. Despite the vast gulf between the extremes of opulence and poverty, despite the ‘unearned’ income derived from inherited wealth, the Individualists wished to contend that any interference with the rights of property would constitute an in justice. The present chapter will explore this tension between the Individualists’ conceptions of justice and their defence of the existing social order, and in particular it will examine their attempts to escape the radical implications of their own principles.
Introduction: Forms of Illusion
Authors: Ingram Edward
Published: November 2023

The British are supposed in the nineteenth century not to have made commitments in peacetime. So the marquis of Salisbury told Prince Bismarck, as each tried to persuade the other to bear the burden of supporting Austria-Hungary against Russia. Great Britain was an oddity between 1894 and 1914 in not being in permanent peacetime alliance with another European state. The British had made an alliance against another European state, however, with Japan against Russia in 1902. Too much has been made of the Anglo Japanese alliance, which was hardly a novelty. The British were accustomed to making alliances with Asiatic states; to seeing European states as their likely enemy. Many of their alliances could be ignored, and have been by British diplomatic historians buried in dispatches from Paris and Vienna.
Transfers of Power, 1822-1826
Authors: Ingram Edward
Published: November 2023

How the Persian Connection should be managed was partly the cause and partly the result of a series of disputes in the r 820s among the groups forming the British and Persian governments, which led to rapid transfers of power within both. At different times the Connection seemed a barrier to individual promotion, the success of a faction, or the triumph of a principle. The cause of the trouble was still the whereabouts of the Russo-Persian frontier in Transcaucasia: ‘if the Russian frontier discussions were settled, few subjects would arise requiring reference to the Home authorities and then matters would proceed smoothly’. They had not been settled, however, and until they were would cause disputes and, eventually, war. At the centre of the disputes among the Qajars stood Abbas Mirza and among the British, George Canning, made foreign secretary, to almost general regret, upon Castlereagh’s suicide in 1822 and prime minister-for the six months before his death-upon the earl of Liverpool’s retirement in the spring of I 827.
Conclusion
Authors: Ingram Edward
Published: November 2023

The history of the Persian Connection between 1798 and I 828 is divided into two parts. During the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the British discussed the nature and extent of their strategic interests in Persia-in the Persian Gulf until 1822-and the possible ways to protect them. After the wars a substantive interest turned into a symbolic one. Owing to Great Britain’s failure to restrain Russia, she had to find a way to support her claims to help manage developments in the Middle East. Anglo-Russian rivalry would spread in the 1830s into regions of Central Asia remote from the frontiers and protectorates of both states. Russian troops would advance south-east beyond Khiva, British troops north-west beyond Balkh. The advance to Balkh signified both the success and the failure of British policy. Despite the disastrous retreat from Kabul in 1842, the British showed in the First Afghan War that, if they chose, they had the capability to march an army to the heart of Central Asia. They had intended, however, that diplomacy should stand in for troops.
Anglo-French Diplomacy and the Transition from Sail to Screw
Authors: Hamilton C I
Published: November 2023

The two fleets that so nearly clashed with one another in 1839-40 were composed predominantly of wooden, unarmoured sailingvessels. Such craft had long been the backbone of naval power, but from 1815 were being improved at a greater pace than ever before. Each new vessel of a given rate was larger than its predecessor, carrying more or heavier guns (and often both). Furthermore, naval architects were continually refining their art. There were occasional embarrassments, such as the discovery by the French that the great new four-decker Valmy (launched in 1847) had insufficient stability, and needed extra timber worked in around the waterline (a soufflage).
The Militarization of Naval Warfare in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: Tactics and Strategy
Authors: Hamilton C I
Published: November 2023

Probably the most obvious point about the ideas current in our period concerning naval tactics is the initial painful slowness with which they changed to meet the fact of steam-power. From the early 1840s onwards, numbers of powerfully engined steamers were in service in the British and French navies, yet they were not generally seen as introducing any radically new tactical element; instead, they were assumed to be simply a valuable means of supplementing existing plans.
Dockyards and Naval Architects
Authors: Hamilton C I
Published: November 2023

War is the decisive test of military organizations, and the Crimean War showed up well certain deficiencies in the government dockyards in Britain and France. With respect to the royal dockyards, the war with Russia had demonstrated one fundamental difficulty—that of distribution. Whilst Deptford, Woolwich, Sheerness, Chatham, Portsmouth, Devonport, and Pembroke were admirably suited for a war with France, this was not so when Russia was the enemy. There was a proposal in 1855 that a dockyard should be built on the east coast of Scotland, to serve as a Baltic base should one again prove necessary.
Ireland
Authors: Johnson P A
Published: November 2023

York had received a summons to the Parliament of 1445 as a matter of course, but he was at Honfleur on 21 September, and it was not until the opening of the third session, on 20 October, that he arrived in England. He had some private business to pursue concerning the lordship of Crickhowell, but this could have been left to proctors. His presence was necessitated by Henry Vi’s determination to have a peace with the French. In pursuit of this, it was Henry’s intention to go to France in person, an intention which was already public knowledge before the session began. As the session advanced, the king’s confidence grew, and on 19 December he arranged an extension of the truce until April 1447, and on 22 December set in motion the voluntary surrender of Le Mans.
Popularity And Problems
Authors: Johnson P A
Published: November 2023

On 7 September Duke Richard arrived in Denbigh.1 It had been a journey not without incident. Originally intending to land at Beaumaris, he had met with stiff resistance from local officials. They were acting not on their own intiative, as they made clear, but on orders which had their origins in the king’s household, even from the king’s chamber.2 Against this opposition it is doubtful whether York managed a landing, and had he done so he would have had to negotiate Conway Castle, held against him by Bartholomew Bolde. More probably he sailed on thirty miles east to the Clwyd estuary where, as lord of Denbigh, he could feel more secure.
Dartford
Authors: Johnson P A
Published: November 2023

Some time over the Christmas season York received word that the king was publicly advertising his displeasure, and on 9 January he signed and sealed a declaration protesting his loyalty to his king. Conscious, perhaps, that such protestations required a more public commitment, he invited the bishop of Hereford and the earl of Shrewsbury to Ludlow, there to tender him an oath on the sacrament and report his sincerity to the king. They were, further, to report his willingness to repeat the oath before nominees of the king, should he so desire it. The only thing York did not offer to do was to go to Henry and declare his loyalty in person. Duke Richard was a worried man. The whole tone of the letter is deferential in the extreme, yet, less than a month later, he was defiantly demanding the removal of the duke of Somerset, insisting that without this there would be no case or tranquillity in the land. The change is so abrupt as to merit attention.
The Confraternities of Late Medieval Florence: An Overview
Authors: Henderson John
Published: November 2023

The previous chapter has argued that to understand their emergence, Italian confraternities should be seen in relation to a wide range of institutions in both the early and late Middle Ages. While confraternities grew out of the forms and practices of earlier groups, their distinctive character owed most to late medieval institutions from the friars, on the one hand, to political, social, and economic associations, on the other. This chapter will examine the development of Florentine confraternities, compare briefly their administrative structure with other corporations in the city, and end by asking how distinct were Florentine confraternities from similar associations in other Italian cities.
The Laudesi Companies
Authors: Henderson John
Published: November 2023

The foundation of laudesi companies in central Italy has to be seen against the background of the enormous growth in the popularity of the Virgin Mary in the Middle Ages. From the twelfth century this movement had received its main impetus from the Cistercian and Premonstratensian orders, for, as Dante recalled, Bernard of Clairvaux was enamoured with the Regina delcielo. However, by the time that Dante wrote the Paradiso, the main propagators of the Marian cult had become the Mendicant orders. Dominic chose Mary to be the patron of his order and, as Humbert of Romans recorded, she became the constant theme of Dominican sermons: ‘We preach continuously of her glory and that of her son.’ The Servites went further and claimed Mary as their true founder, who had established them ‘for her service, her glory, and her glorification’. It was no coincidence that three of the Florentine friaries should have been dedicated to Mary: the Dominican S. Maria Novella, the Servite SS Annunziata, and the Carmelite S. Maria del Carmine. Her influence,
Death, Funerals, and Bequests
Authors: Henderson John
Published: November 2023

Preceding chapters have outlined the devotional services provided by the laudesi and disciplinati companies of Florence for members during their lifetime and also hinted at their social and political functions. The focus of this chapter will shift to examine the spiritual benefits which accrued to members after their death, in particular funerals and commemorative masses. However, as we have already indicated, the acceptance of bequests often involved confraternities in a whole series of administrative and devotional functions which could lead to modification in the main orientation of their activities. The second part of this chapter will address this theme in relation to two of the most affluent confraternities in Florence, the laudesi company of S. Pier Martire in S. Maria Novella and the company of the miraculous Madonna of Orsanmichele.
Piety and Charity: Orsanmichele and a Public Cult
Authors: Henderson John
Published: November 2023

The very location of the miraculous Madonna of Orsanmichele represented a blend of the secular and sacred. The oratory was equidistant between the two main symbols of communal and ecclesiastical power, the Palazzo Vecchio and the cathedral. Furthermore, while the Piazza of Orsanmichele fulfilled principally a secular role as the site of the city’s grain-market, this area had an even longer tradition of worship. It had been the site of the Cistercian church of S. Michele in Orto, which had been demolished in 1249 in order to create the grain-market. In 1284 a Loggia was built to provide shelter for the grain merchants,2 and it was on one of its pillars that an image of the Virgin was represented. Over the next seven years a cult developed around the Madonna, probably among the merchants and their customers. The cult acquired a corporate status with the foundation of the laudesi company in 1291, and by the following year, as Villani recounted, the Madonna began to work miracles curing large numbers of sick people.
Introduction
Authors: Rogers R
Published: November 2023

The importance of siege warfare in the twelfth century manifests itself in the political and military history of the period. As commentators have noted, sometimes in exasperation, much of the military activity of the age revolved around fortifications. In such an environment an ability to conduct and endure siege operations was fundamental. Blockade and attrition were the staples of siege warfare in this period as in most others. Many fortifications were stormed in onslaughts in which the number and ardour of attackers were paramount. Yet some positions were taken by assaults based on complex machinery which overcame stone and personnel defences. On one hand, castles and cities were either captured or compelled to seek a negotiated surrender. On the other, the failure of a major attack and the destruction of large and expensive siege engines on occasion brought an end to the siege.
Siege Operations In The Establishment Of Norman Authority In Italy And Sicily
Authors: Rogers R
Published: November 2023

The establishment of Norman authority in southern Italy and Sicily was one of the age’s great military and political achievements, rivalling the creation of the crusader states in its significance for the Mediterranean. Norman military endeavours included much siege warfare conducted against Muslim, Byzantine, and Italian fortifications and urban centres. While the region’s terrain and political divisions affected patterns of siege warfare, the techniques employed were also influenced by the military resources available to Norman commanders. However different the strategic context, Norman siege operations may be compared with major undertakings in other areas of the Mediterranean. Although many sieges of the Norman establishment occurred before the First Crusade, they merit discussion in order to identify patterns of conflict. At the least such an examination will provide an example of Latin siegecraft in the Mediterranean before the twelfth century and perhaps underscore some of the distinctive characteristics of operations in the Levant. Moreover, it will set the stage for one of the twelfth century’s great practitioners of siege warfare, Roger II.
Cities And Siege Warfare: Lombardy In The Twelfth Century
Authors: Rogers R
Published: November 2023

So far in this study urban communities have been the objectives of besiegers and have seldom engaged in offensive operations, except in seaborne expeditions along the shores of the Mediterranean. An examination of warfare in twelfth-century Lombardy permits us to view siege warfare waged by inland cities against one another. The forces which generated the urban growth of the later eleventh and twelfth centuries also fuelled conflicts between the nascent city-states of the Po valley. When these conflicts became armed, they involved considerable siege operations against cities and their outlying fortifications as well as raiding and harassment.
Seaborne Siege Warfare: The Italian Maritime States And Latin Expansion
Authors: Rogers R
Published: November 2023

Throughout this study we have observed the importance of ltalian maritime forces and individual engineers in Latin siege warfare. Having examined siege warfare from the perspective of Latin states and rulers, it is appropriate to shift our focus to the arsenals and counting houses of the Italian maritime republics. In so doing we may not only assess the importance ofltalian maritime powers in Latin siege warfare, but also develop an understanding of Latin expansion in the twelfth¬century Mediterranean.
Introduction
Authors: Marrison Andrew
Published: November 2023

This study is concerned principally with that frontier where the worlds of business and politics collide. Specifically, it seeks to explore the objectives and strategies of protectionist businessmen, and the organizations through which they were pursued, in a period during which conflict over the tariff was a dominant theme of British politics. It is not, essentially, concerned with the question of whether there was an economically valid case for some measure of Tariff Reform in the period between 1900 and 1932. Nevertheless, it would seem useful to start with a discussion of that question. Protectionists are often dismissed simply as ‘rent-seekers’, the success of their policies seen as inimical to the wider public good. But to approach the historical record with such stylized preconceptions both obscures and distorts. The Tariff Reformers recognized truths and tendencies to which their adversaries were blind. Even if we conclude that their prescriptions were misguided, inappropriate, or worse, we will at least have located their concerns within the longer-run pattern of British economic development.
The Establishment of the Tariff Commission
Authors: Marrison Andrew
Published: November 2023

By the autumn of 190_3, Chamberlain was in close consultation with three men who were to be central figures in the Commission’s operation. Sir Vincent Caillard, the financial director of Vickers, was already known as the author of three articles in the National Review advocating imperial unity through preference. Sir Arthur Pearson was chairman of the TRL Executive and, as proprietor of the Daify Express, had run an energetic campaign which centred around the higher level of employment to be gained from Tariff Reform. Henry Chaplin, whose extravagance lost him his Lincolnshire estate of Blankney in the 1890s, remained throughout the remainder of his colourful life the leading spokesman of the agricultural interest in Parliament. For him, Tariff Reform was merely a resumption of the Fair Trade agitation of the 1880s after a brief flirtation with bimetallism. Reminiscing on the foundation of the Tariff Commission in 1917, all three spoke of a formative meeting with Hewins at Caillard’s rooms in Half Moon Street. Pearson’s claim, on that occasion, to have been ‘mainly instrumental in, or responsible for, its foundation’ was exaggerated, though he did play an important role in early finance. Rather, the surviving evidence supports Hewins’ claim, made in his autobiography, that he was the initiator.
The Outer Courts of the Temple
Authors: Marrison Andrew
Published: November 2023

During the debate on the Import Duties Bill in February 1932, Clement Attlee likened Neville Chamberlain to the ‘chief priest’ at the sacrifice of Free Trade, sitting flanked by his new acolytes, Runciman and Sir John Simon. ‘The real prophets of the new era,’ he observed sardonically, referring to Croft and Amery, ‘have to be content with the outer courts of the temple.’’ As the world toppled into depression after 1929, the last resistance to protectionism within the British business community crumbled. Croft’s backbench forces now dominated the Conservative Party. Yet, as ever, business waited upon politics. And politics sought a way in which protection might be introduced as a national policy in political rhetoric a policy to unite and not divide, but in the eyes of the cynical or the calculating, a policy for which the Conservatives could not be held solely responsible.
Preparing for Self.-Govemment
Authors: Follis Bryan A
Published: November 2023

In tackling the problems relating to the creation of Northern Ireland, and in making preparations for the establishment of self-government, Clark had to work from scratch. His efforts to build a suitable administrative service for Northern Ireland were further handicapped in that the existing all-Ireland system was bureaucratic, cumbersome, and quite unsuited to modem needs. Consequently, it did not provide Clark with a sound basis on which to work nor could it simply be conveniently divided into two parts to serve the new governments. Among the more important measures which Clark carried out in anticipation of the administrative separation of Northern Ireland was the drafting of a scheme for a civil service. Before devising the scheme, he and his staff sought, through an exhausting series of meetings in January 1921, the opinion and advice of civil servants m Dublin and London. By 7 February 1921 he was able to forward to Sir James Craig a detailed scheme for the organization of ministries, with an accompanying staff-chart for the proposed Northern Ireland government and administration. At Craig’s request a copy of the draft scheme was passed to Adam Duffin, chairman of Belfast Chamber of Commerce, for his comments.
Preserving Self-Govemment
Authors: Follis Bryan A
Published: November 2023

The treaty for securing a political settlement signed on 6 December 1921 by the British Government and Sinn Fein outraged Ulster unionists. They were particularly alarmed by the provisions for a Boundary Commission to modify the border between Northern Ireland and the new Irish Free State. Just as the treaty created an expectation among nationalists ‘that Northern Ireland would soon disappear and a notion that its territory was a legitimate target for seizure’, so it ‘heightened apprehensions among Unionists, particularly those living in border areas, who were alarmed to the point of panic at the possibility of being transferred to the Free State’.
Modes Of Popular Dissent
Authors: Fulbrook Mary
Published: November 2023

There was clearly a major difference between the Third Reich and the GDR in this respect. The Third Reich was at least in origin carried on a tidal wave of enthusiasm which, even if never characteristic of a majority of the population, was sufficiently widespread and genuine to provide Nazism with a basis of popular support never enjoyed to such an extent by the communist regime in the GDR. The early years of the Third Reich were, moreover, characterized by improvements in living standards for many sectors of the population, combined with a return to full employment, a restoration of a degree of national pride, and a sense of movement upwards and onwards. At least among significant sections of the population these trends, combined with a carefully tended presentation of Hitler as the charismatic Fuhrer, did much to provide a real basis of support for the regime. There was nevertheless a significant proportion of the population in Nazi Germany who, right from the start, were characterized rather by degrees of disgruntlement, grumbling, and partial or sporadic nonconformity.
Introduction
Authors: Brown Alison
Published: November 2023

It is high time to re-evaluate the Renaissance. Everyone agrees that the Burckhardtian paradigm is outmoded, with its emphasis on individualism and progress and-far worse in the eyes of some-its bold attempt to characterize the period as a whole. But without Burckhardt’s belief in a unifying Zeitgeist, it has been difficult to find an alternative and less deterministic way of discussing Renaissance culture in its historical context. As a result, Renaissance studies have gone in many different directions, so that art, music, literature, and history are now normally treated as separate disciplines. The period itself has become progressively indistinct, overlapped on one side by the later Middle Ages, which it is claimed anticipated Renaissance individualism and artistic culture, and on the other by the early mod ern period, with its scientific discoveries and inventions. At the same time as these local frontier disputes have been taking place, the barbarians have been foregathering to assault the foundations of this highbrow territory in the name of ‘the New History’: history from below, quantitative history, history of the body-and of the silent voices missing from traditional history.
Individuals and Families as Patrons of Culture in Quattrocento Florence
Authors: Kent F W
Published: November 2023

According to the late Felix Gilbert, a number of recent English speaking historians of Renaissance Florence have written ‘books on Florence without the Renaissance’. ‘One must wish’, Gilbert added, ‘it will not be entirely forgotten that what originally brought scholars into the Florentine archives was the quest for an explanation and understanding of the unique achievements of Florence’s culture’.1 While a number of the archival scholars to whom Gilbert refers in fact had other, rich and perfectly legitimate concerns, his implied reproach still has the power to discomfort those of us raised, so to speak, on Jacob Burckhardt. And there have been other critics who have found wanting the synthesizing abilities, not to say cultural sensibilities, of the archive-obsessed. Barbara Diefendorf, referring specifically to historians of the family, has asked ‘if it is possible to establish a relationship and not just a mere juxtaposition between family culture and Renaissance culture.
The Republic’s Two Bodies: Body Metaphors in Italian Renaissance Political Thought
Authors: Najemy John M
Published: November 2023

AT the centre of a whole series of Renaissance cultural myths including some political ones—lies a particular and famous image of the human body: stately, proportioned, elegant, prominently visible but always decorous, a dream of idealized beauty that, by some curious irony, is often classified under the rubric of naturalistic representation. The Renaissance celebrated the harmony, order, and dignity of the human body in terms that owed much to the ancient Greek analogy of man and the universe as well as to Biblical notions of the similitude of God and man. ‘What harmony of limbs, what shapeliness of features, what figure, what face could be or even be thought of as more beautiful than the human?’ wrote Giannozzo Manetti in book I (‘On the Distinguished Attributes of the Human Body’) of his On the Dignity and Excellence of Man.
Introduction
Authors: Clark Peter
Published: November 2023

Soon after the accession of George II, in 1730, a small club of local men sat drinking in the snug parlour of a Westminster alehouse, gathered together to learn mathematics, so that ‘by their mutual assistance and indefatigable industry they are now become masters of logarithmical arithmetic and some of them greatly advanced in algebra’. The sanctity’s aim, along with drinking and socializing, was collective improvement-for it was ‘a fundamental rule of this society not to conceal any new improvement from another member before tackling mathematics they had taught themselves trench. In Scotland, at the small town of Culross on the north bank of the Forth, the brethren of a bee-keeping club, a group of town tradesmen, met every fortnight from the 1750s to hear discourses about bees and to discuss the movement of their hives, their business leavened by a quarterly dinner of fish and bread and butter. About the same time on the other side of the Atlantic, at the port town of Annapolis, with its elegant wooden houses by the dock, an expatriate Scotsman, Alexander Hamilton, offered in his ‘History of the Ancient and 1-Ionourablc Tuesday Club’ a delicious mock-heroic, politically satirical, account of club meetings there, replete with the speeches, sallies, scuffles, songs, and ceremonies, as well as the wit and wisdom of members, mostly gentlemen, merchants, and professional men.
Membership
Authors: Clark Peter
Published: November 2023

Joseph Farmer, merchant and member of a Liverpool club in George Ill’s reign, had ‘little types, on bigger than the other, long nose, thin lantern jaws, bare upper lips, mouth from ear to car resembling a shark’s . his visage long and narrow’. Most of his colleagues were little better, one distinguished by a ‘hottcntot complexion’, others ‘inexpressibly odd and ugly’ or with ‘no upper teeth’; many seem to have had dental problems. Such were the members of the eponymous Ugly face Club, for which the entrance qualification was to be a bachelor with ‘something odd, remarkable, droll, or out of the way in his fiz’. Apart from this facial eccentricity, however, the membership was fairly typical of many eighteenth-century societies.