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This article establishes equanimity as an important emotional ideal in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In showing how equanimity served to strengthen positive emotions and temper disruptive states, it promotes a more positive view of the era's emotional landscape. The article employs the pursuit of equanimity as an intimate analytical device for uncovering the agency of ordinary people, and thus offers historians a new perspective on momentous change and adversity in the early modern period. It charts personal experiences of adversity—from physical and spiritual threats to familial disputes, uncertain patriarchal power and economic precarity—alongside individual management of religious, social and political change following the English Reformations and during the Civil War. Where other scholars have examined how different social groups reactively negotiated new realities, this microhistorical study of one gentry family in the North West of England urges historians to refocus their attention on the proactive courses that people took. Through a detailed examination of 541 manuscript letters, domestic decorative schemes, and archaeological evidence of ritual practices of protection, the article uncovers how the Moretons of Little Moreton Hall in Cheshire managed change and mitigated disaster. It discusses instances where equanimity played a persistent role in motivating the family's actions and behaviours in daily life, and argues that practices designed to promote emotional harmony were crucial for preserving kinship networks and managing personal well-being, as well as gender relations within households, in early modern England. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional interpretations of the reign of Philip and Mary in England and Ireland (1554–58) have tended to investigate this short-lived episode from a strongly Anglocentric perspective. Such an approach has often hindered interpretations of crucial aspects of the reign that have wider implications for the study of Britain, Spain and Europe in an increasingly globalised world. Philip's creation of a new consultative body in 1555, the select council (consejo escogido), is a case in point. Conventionally viewed as a superfluous body that only worsened the alleged ungovernability of Mary's privy council—from which, it was claimed, it was never truly separate—it has been assumed that the select council was allowed to function nominally for a while to sustain Philip's ego. In fact, the creation of the select council responded to the deeply rooted conciliar traditions of Spain and England (based on Aristotelian notions of 'political friendship') and its actual level of activity disproves previous assumptions about its role and viability. The diplomatic negotiations undertaken by the English select councillors and their Spanish and Flemish counterparts place England firmly within the conciliar framework of the Spanish Monarchy and provide an invaluable window from which to explore the role of England as a fully integrated member of a composite monarchy extending from Naples and Oran to Lima and Mexico City. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the name change of the journal "Twentieth Century British History" to "Modern British History" and the reasons behind this change. The journal aims to broaden its scope beyond the 1990s and reflect its openness to work on the recent past. It also explores the challenges of defining "modernity" and "Britishness" in the field of modern British history, emphasizing the need to consider transnational contexts and expand methodologies and approaches. The article further examines the impact of digitization on historical research, highlighting both the opportunities and limitations it presents. It also addresses the importance of embracing digital methodologies and acknowledges the impact of working conditions and inequalities in higher education on the field of history. The issue of the journal includes various commentaries, roundtables, and reflections on the field, as well as showcasing the journal's initiatives and award-winning articles. The authors express gratitude to contributors and emphasize the significance of peer review in sustaining the vitality and robustness of the field. [Extracted from the article]

This article discusses the author's experiences teaching British history in the United States and the challenges and opportunities that arise from teaching history in a contemporary context. The author emphasizes the importance of situating Britain within its imperial and global relationships and using postcolonial methodologies to analyze the ways in which imperialism and colonialism have shaped the world. The author also highlights the significance of incorporating diverse perspectives and critical methodologies, such as creative assignments, to engage students and bridge the gap between the classroom and the world. Ultimately, the author aims to provide students with reparatory history that addresses the ongoing issues of colonialism and dispossession in the present day. [Extracted from the article]

This article discusses the place of Welsh history within higher education, particularly in the context of British history modules. The author, a Senior Lecturer in Modern Welsh History at Cardiff University, highlights the challenges and importance of incorporating Welsh history into primarily British history modules. They emphasize the entangled nature of social life and cultures between Wales and England, while also acknowledging the distinctiveness of Welsh history. The article also explores how students respond to Welsh history modules and the value of local library and archival connections for research. Overall, the author argues for a four nations approach to teaching British history that recognizes the complexity of national identity and the importance of diverse perspectives. [Extracted from the article]

The University of Derby offers a strong History program that focuses on modern British history from the eighteenth century. The curriculum emphasizes the interrelationships between the different parts of the UK and the wider British Isles, challenging present-mindedness and providing a broader context for understanding developments in modern British history. The program also ensures that students understand Britain's place in wider European and global history. The curriculum design emphasizes the development of research skills and offers opportunities for students to engage with external organizations and present their research at conferences. The program aims to produce confident and articulate graduates who can critically analyze historical themes and develop their own independent perspectives. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses the importance of breadth in teaching and research in the field of modern British history. The author emphasizes the value of interdisciplinary approaches and the need for researchers to have a strong understanding of both Britain and the wider world. The article also highlights the importance of research skills in navigating breadth and encourages a pluralistic approach to teaching and research. The author argues that a broader understanding of history can lead to a deeper understanding of modern Britain and its relationship with the world. [Extracted from the article]

This article discusses the experience of teaching modern British history in a social sciences context. The author, a historian of social policy, highlights the deep relationship between history and sociology, as well as other social sciences. They explain that teaching history outside of a history department requires considering what history is as a discipline. The author emphasizes the importance of teaching history to students studying related disciplines, such as sociology and criminology, and how history can provide a longer view of key issues. They also discuss the challenges and benefits of teaching and researching outside of a history department. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses the concept of inclusivity in teaching and learning modern British history in UK higher education. It explores how the idea of inclusivity has shaped research, teaching, and learning in the field, with a focus on new approaches to storytelling, pedagogical debates, and considerations of who learns this history. The article also highlights the challenges faced by historians in the current political climate, including attacks on critical approaches to studying Britain's history and concerns about access to education for socio-economic elites. The Open University is presented as an institution that plays a major role in widening access to studying modern British history, particularly for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. The article discusses the OU's distance learning model and the use of technology to create inclusive learning environments. It also acknowledges the limitations and barriers faced by certain groups of students, such as those in prison. The OU's curriculum design is described as an opportunity to teach a genuinely 'British' history that reflects the diverse identities and cultures of its students across the UK. The article concludes by emphasizing the importance of inclusive teaching and learning in building a more inclusive future for the field of modern British history. [Extracted from the article]

Nations have long since preoccupied historians. Histories of how nations came to be, how they persisted, and how nations were unmade are innumerable. As a political unit of analysis, the nation has fascinated and divided. On the one hand, histories of the nation have traced the origins of particular nation states, analysing how a large body of people becomes united within a geographic territory through a shared language, a shared identity, and a shared culture. On the other hand, such histories have been criticized for reifying the nation-state, stressing the majority over the minority, and ultimately for obfuscating differences. The nation as a structure can indeed serve the needs of the ruling establishment to create a governing society. How then, can historians retain the nation as a unit of analysis without for example valorizing England in histories of the UK? Why is it so often that in histories of Britain, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales are mentioned as a comparable case and not the focus itself? Is it possible to ensure that histories of the British Isles reject and refuse implicit hierarchies that routinely prioritize one nation over other nations? Fundamentally, is it even worthwhile to study the nation instead of, for example, focusing on specific gendered groups, or ethnic communities or labour movements for instance? By focusing on thematic experiences rather than the nation-state can historians avoid inadvertently reproducing structural inequality in twenty-first-century Britain? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the first issue of the renamed journal, Modern British History co-editor Erik Linstrum convened a group of scholars to reflect on the past, present, and possible futures of the field. The resulting contributions make no claim to provide a comprehensive or representative survey. Rather, they offer a variety of perspectives on where modern British history has been and where it might be going. Several contributions, written by former editors of Twentieth Century British History , drawn on the history of the journal as a way of thinking about the direction of the field and its subfields. Others consider the place of modern Britain in the wider discipline of history, grappling with questions of temporality and embodiment; the institutional and material contexts of scholarship; the role of national histories in a transnational world; and the response of historical writing to epidemiological, humanitarian, and ecological crisis. The sequence of contributions mirrors the evolution of the journal since its founding in 1990, beginning with political history and gradually encompassing a much broader range of subjects and methodologies as well as an expanded geographical ambit. Here are archive stories, pleas for new subjects, roadmaps for new approaches to old subjects, and attempts to identify master narratives. Taken together, these contributions demonstrate that modern British history has many houses—which is both a sign of intellectual vitality and a challenge for anyone wishing to generalize about the 'state of the field'. If British modernity remains an abundant resource for 'thinking with', its contours and frontiers are tantalizingly up for grabs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Driven by the quality of sources rather than their representativeness, the history of English agriculture has been written primarily from the perspective of well-documented large farms to the neglect of smallholders and cottagers who for centuries cultivated the greater part of the nation's farmland but left scant records. The superb series recording the mediocre and low crop yields of the expansive demesnes of great lords has long been adopted for the productivity of all medieval England's arable and is deeply embedded in economic and social histories and calculations of economic growth and the welfare of the population. Yet no convincing justification for this supposition has ever been made, and an increasing flow of research and analysis indicates that the productivity of land varied markedly in accordance with the size and function of farms, with the output per acre of large farms constrained by the need to control costs in order to sell surpluses at a profit, while smallholders, at the cost of low and frequently abysmal labour productivity, produced higher yields by striving to maximize output using abundant family labour to secure subsistence from meagre acreages. An appraisal of farming across the centuries and the continents from the Middle Ages to modern times clearly shows that an inverse relationship generally prevailed between farm size and land productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reassesses conceptions of the religious conformity required of public magistrates in the 1560s through the prism of William Cecil's schemes for reformation of the state. Scholars have argued that 'the Crown's' aims in defining the conformity of subjects were 'political' rather than 'evangelical' and primarily focused on securing obedience. This article argues instead that leading Protestants, clerical and lay, viewed the creation of the Christian commonwealth as a joint enterprise of minister and magistrate. In private memoranda, Cecil insisted that the security of the polity was dependent on magistrates who possessed 'inward' Protestantism 'of the hart'. Cecil's earliest scheme for an 'Instrument of Association' binding the Protestant elite, was devised in this period, fuelled by his vision of the Protestant polity not as 'monarchical republic' of virtuous citizens, but a 'confessional state' governed by a network of officials bound by loyalty to Crown and church. The article concludes by analysing the Privy Council's attempts to secure the closer conformity of the magistracy to the religious settlement by subscription. In November 1569, local officials across the realm were compelled to subscribe to the Act of Uniformity and to promise to take the eucharist on a regular basis, a sacramental requirement not required of officials by statute law until the Restoration. The aspiration of the Protestant regime to require stricter religious conformity of its public officials indicates that 'conformity' itself was a nebulous concept, which could be imposed on targeted groups at different times and places and through variant means. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This note identifies, for the first time, the author of Love and Horror , a mock-heroic parody of the gothic novel published under the pseudonym 'Ircastrensis' in 1812. The Revd Henry Barry (1781-1850) wrote at least one other novel before settling into a comfortable life as a Wiltshire rector and unsuccessful dabbler in British history and Shakespearean emendation; among his several children was the much better known Victorian novelist Emma Newby (1826-1899), who in 1862 edited her father's final book, a 'manual of happiness'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contends that common representations of the history of the British economy and economic policy in the 'Golden Age' period (circa 1950–73) as a story of 'failure' rely overwhelmingly on one measure, that of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth. Drawing on the foundational criticisms of this metric made by Simon Kuznets, it is argued that, for this period of British economic history, shortfalls in measured GDP growth in comparison with other rich countries are a very poor measure of changes in economic well-being in the UK. If we follow this argument and discard the belief that one metric can summarize trends in such well-being, the notion of 'failure' in this period should be set aside in favour of a more nuanced, multidimensional assessment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arthurian symbolism utilized by King Henry VIII in Habsburg diplomacy was a tribute to his esteemed mythic forefather, King Arthur, who commanded great respect from countless individuals, not least his imperial cousins. This article proposes that the King Arthur pageant at the 1522 London entry of Charles V was part of Henry's broader use of Arthuriana in Habsburg political theatre, inspired by Maximilian I's pseudo-ancestry. This article provides a new insight into Henry's attempts to engage in the power politics of early sixteenth-century Europe and the use of British history in forging connections with his political rival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the teaching of twentieth-century British history to French undergraduates. It highlights the efforts made by French teachers and scholars to "decenter" their focus and move away from an overly Anglo-centric approach. This includes exploring the complexities of inter-national relations within the UK, as well as addressing racial, class, and gender dynamics both within and outside the country. The article also mentions the challenges faced in balancing different perspectives and topics, as well as the need for a diverse range of primary sources. Overall, the French teaching field has shown adaptability and responsiveness to current research shifts. [Extracted from the article]

Jim Tomlinson's article, "De-industrialization Not Decline: A New Meta-narrative for Post-war British History," challenges the prevailing narrative of British post-war economic history. Tomlinson argues that the concept of "decline" is problematic and masks the specific structural and economic welfare effects of deindustrialization. He suggests that deindustrialization is a long-term process that has been occurring since the post-war period, with peak manufacturing employment in 1955. Tomlinson's work has influenced scholars to study the nuanced effects of deindustrialization in different regions and cities of Britain, as well as its interaction with other historical processes such as decolonization. [Extracted from the article]

This article discusses the concept of "declinism" in modern British history and proposes an alternative meta-narrative called "de-industrialization." The author, Jim Tomlinson, argues that the perception of Britain's decline in the post-war period was based more on perception than reality. Instead, he suggests that de-industrialization and the expansion of the service economy have had significant effects on British society and politics, including wage inequalities, job insecurity, and changes in the social security system. Tomlinson's work also highlights the global nature of de-industrialization and its impact on women entering the workforce. Overall, this alternative meta-narrative provides important insights into the economic and social realities of post-war Britain. [Extracted from the article]

The forum shows that I correctly diagnosed the place that 'people's war' has in the historiography of the Second World War; that, if anything, I underestimated the grip that the connected series of beliefs about 'people's war' have come to have over some historians of the British Second World War; and how difficult it is to start a conversation about framing assumptions and the nature of the historiography of the war. In this response I aim to get above the din of detail and try to understand the underlying positions being taken by the respondents. I will try to tease out their rather hidden assumptions, in order to clarify better what is at issue and at stake, thereby making a fresh attempt to take this discussion forward. I will also extend the discussion by considering works that have already rejected the conceptualisation of 'people's war' defended in this forum. I hope that my original paper and the forum itself will together make the case that we need fresh ways of thinking about the British Second World War, as well as suggest that new ways are already in being and that the concept of 'people's war' as currently used by many historians needs to be abandoned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the 1970s saw an important change in the attitude of the British state to civil technological projects. It focuses on supersonic aviation and nuclear power policy as its case-studies, which were the key areas of techno-nationalist investment in the post-war period. It shows that Whitehall became radically more sceptical about state-led Research and Development, scrapped many core long-term projects, and cut back others. The politics and timing of this shift matter for our wider understanding of post-war British history, the history of technology, and histories of 'neo-liberalism'. Thatcherism is supposed to have brought with it the decisive move away from industrial intervention by the state. Such a characterisation, while containing important truths, makes it difficult to see that the retreat from the most spectacular industrial investments of the British state in fact occurred during the 1970s in what was an economic liberalism from within, rather than a 'neo-liberalism' from without. This paper also challenges the narrative that the 'technological disillusion' of the 1970s came via the New Left and environmentalists, demonstrating the importance of an expert critique focused on economic and industrial arguments that emerged from inside the state itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How might historians narrate Britain's past if we centre imperial racial formation and its contestations? The thirtieth anniversary of Paul Gilroy's There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation provided an opportunity for a new generation of scholars to consider the frameworks of race in British history. In 1987, Gilroy challenged Marxist approaches that treated race as secondary to or even a mechanistic expression of class inequality. He showed that the failure to account for race and empire positioned racialized subjects as perpetual outsiders. Taking up Gilroy's analysis as a point of departure, this thematic issue brings together analyses of the state, institutions, and individuals to propose new periodizations, geographies, and methodologies for understanding twentieth-century British history. In this introduction, Marc Matera, Radhika Natarajan, Kennetta Hammond Perry, Camilla Schofield, and Rob Waters describe the five-year conversation that led to this thematic issue, introduce their respective essays, and explain why race must be understood not as a descriptive category but as an analytical framework for understanding Britain's past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the polemical history of John White's First Century of Scandalous, Malignant Priests (1643) to argue that the revolutionary public culture of England's mid-century civil wars transformed seventeenth-century libellous politics by rendering ad hominem defamation into a routine element of formal partisan print culture for the first time in English history. The article concludes by demonstrating that when the Century reappeared in print eighty years later to excoriate a new generation of clergymen, public defamation had become a mundane, although still controversial, element of English political culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One thing above others is known widely about the so-called 'English' cadence: that it is not English. Ever since musicologists of the mid-twentieth century named it, the cadence has laboured under the guise of its deceptiveness. However, as argued in this article, the cadence has much to tell us about the musical culture of England at the end of the sixteeenth and into the seventeenth century, during which period it was popular. The 'English' cadence shines a light on the movement towards tonality, the twilight period of solmization, and the understanding of false relations. An etymology of the cadence, making use of etymology's older, more playful, punning role as the rhetorical trope etymologia , demonstrates that (English or not), the cadence has much to tell us about this poignant period of English history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians have long been accustomed to viewing ordinary men and women in the early modern English countryside as illiterate. They are thought to have had neither the opportunity nor the desire to acquire reading and writing skills that were superfluous to their everyday lives. This article challenges such a view. It draws on a sample of signed legal testimonies from the rural south-west of England, and pays particular attention to the different types of mark that deponents made. These marks have conventionally been treated as indicators of illiteracy. In fact, they reveal the existence of a hierarchy of writing skills, and widespread pen competency across social class and gender. This leads to a reassessment of how and why literacy skills might have been obtained by ordinary people. What emerges is that basic forms of literacy — the ability to make meaningful shapes with a pen, and the capacity to decipher individual letters — were both easy to pick up and of considerable utility when navigating the challenges of everyday rural life. The term 'illiterate' fails to do justice to this resourceful rural culture. The methodology deployed here could potentially be used to challenge assumptions of illiteracy in other times and places. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The late medieval period was an important phase in the history of political communication in England, as more people than ever before became involved in debates about royal governance. The first half of the fourteenth century, however, has been relatively under-studied in this regard. This article analyses a set of arguments put forward during a revolt led by Henry, earl of Lancaster, in 1328–29. After outlining the revolt's historical and historiographical context, the article reveals how three key themes—the provision of advice; the moral responsibilities attached to royal finance; and the state of the king's peace—were contested in 1328–29. It then turns to the public orientation of these arguments to suggest that this contest reveals a growing need to engage a political public in order to acquire legitimacy when seeking to reform, or to defend, the direction of royal government. In turn, this helped to set out what the most legitimate paths of political action were and what terms needed to be taken up to describe them by those who wished to involve themselves in the politics of kingship. It is argued that Lancaster's revolt held a significant position in a much broader history of political communication in England, in which political legitimacy in the exercise of royal authority was claimed before, evaluated by, and generated through a critical body of public opinion which interacted with Plantagenet rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2020 the Anglo-American world marked the 400th anniversary of the trans-Atlantic Mayflower voyage with a programme of activities. Intensive and focused interest in the story of the Mayflower is not a new phenomenon—especially in the United States, where it is the bedrock of the nation's 'origin story'. But the tale of the Pilgrims has historically also captured the British imagination. This article outlines a chronology for understanding the cultural importance in Britain of this voyage, from the New England chroniclers to the postcolonial critiques of historians today. In between, it offers a thematic analysis of the different groups which could use the story in their construction of morality and identity, from Romanticists and abolitionists to Anglo-American diplomats and civic boosters. Understanding the afterlife of the voyage in this long perspective, we argue, provides us with a more nuanced understanding of how ideas of history develop and evolve within broader arenas of politics and civil society. We use the concept of historical culture: an approach that is attuned to the interplay between memory, public history, heritage and popular history, and across forms of media (novels, plays, film) and spaces of interaction (cities, politics, movements). As the vogue for commemoration continues to exert power in Britain and beyond, and so does an increasing demand for more critical approaches to historical redress, we thus develop a critical framework that understands the powerful draw of 'history'—both past and present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jones notes that even birth control reformers such as Marie Stopes were "unable to distinguish between caps that could be used for uterus support and those for contraception" (p. 37). Keywords: Birth control; Technology; Commerce; Medicalization; British history; United States history EN Birth control Technology Commerce Medicalization British history United States history 337 340 4 07/11/23 20230701 NES 230701 With the collapse of abortion rights in the United States, the right to legal contraception may not be far behind. Continued research into the historical and sociological aspects of contraception is now more vital than ever to help us understand the legal and medical context of potential bans, and historians Claire L. Jones and Donna J. Drucker give us two excellent new books to consider. [Extracted from the article]

The shoe buckle of the eighteenth century is an alien object today. At the time, shoes were manufactured without fastenings and the buckle was purchased separately. This offered opportunities for decoration, particularly for men, whose shoes were otherwise plain and unchanging. Over the course of the century, buckles grew larger and more elaborate, reaching their apogee in the 'Artois' style of the 1780s. In the wake of the French Revolution, buckles came to be associated with effeminacy and the excesses of the aristocracy, so fell from fashion. This article explores the roles of gender and class in this story, and will challenge the usual association of the buckle with foppery, demonstrating that they were consistent with mainstream masculinities until the 1790s. In order to understand the shoe buckle's significance, the article engages with it as a material artefact. With their intricate mechanisms, complex processes of fastening, and roles in meaningful rituals, shoe buckles give us an insight into haptic practices and the embodiment of gender. The article therefore makes the case that shoe buckles were characteristic of masculinities, material practices and social identities in eighteenth-century Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Malcolm Chase (1957–2020) was the pre-eminent scholar of the Chartist democratic movement, and more broadly, of working-class political and social action in early nineteenth-century Britain. His work in many respects shaped a shift in the study of Chartism within labour and cultural history. Rejecting the inward-looking diversion into the 'linguistic turn' of the early 1990s, Chase offered a broader and holistic view of not only what class, political radicalism and the land meant to working-class people, but also how it was a lived experience expressed in action as well as words. This article is a re-appreciation of Chase's major contribution to the field. It charts the origins and development of Chartist studies, and surveys recent publications, including the wide range of articles published on Chartism in the English Historical Review. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This crucial period saw Britain unsuccessfully pressure Ireland to ease its strict neutrality policy. Garner does not rush to judge the U.K.-U.S. frustration with Irish neutrality policy, nor does she dismiss de Valera's insistence that a strict neutrality policy was essential for the development of an independent Irish identity. Much has been written on Ireland's wartime neutrality, but in I Friends and Enemies i , Karen Garner examines the trilateral relationship between the United States, the United Kingdom, and Ireland during the war. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses the slave-trading British family, The Laces, with an emphasis on their social and economic history to investigate the concept of slavery reparations. Topics include the family’s history with slavery starting with the patriarch of the family, Ambrose Lace, and his role as a slave ship captain in the 1767 massacre in Calabar, the family law firm in the nineteenth century with slave traders as clients, and Ambrose’s great-grandson’s attempts to erase slavery from their family history. [EPC]

The built environment is central to modern history. However, scholars have paid much more attention to buildings' architecture, appearance, and layout, than to their interior decoration, materiality and sensory qualities. There is great opportunity for historians in these latter areas of study. This article makes a case for the value of putting colour at the centre of research, as a material part of the making of modern Britain. It focuses on the uses of 'white', or rather surfaces and objects in many shades of white, and takes the case study of twentieth-century British hospitals to do so. It shows that whiteness stayed important in modern British hospitals as part of an expanding colour palette, rather than being replaced or relegated with the rise of the pastel-colour welfare state, particularly as a symbol of hygiene but also as a continued part of creating 'modern' and 'humanistic' hospitals. This article also suggests that historians might productively use material concepts to understand relationships between continuity and change, rather than adhering to the traditional political periodizations that dominate modern British history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the practice of 'requisitioning' public meetings in Great Britain and Ireland. These written requests to office-holders emerged in Ireland and then Great Britain, following bitter contests over the authenticity and authority of addresses and meetings claiming to represent a county or town in the decade after 1769. If the Seditious Meetings Acts privileged meetings officially convened by local elites, they also codified the practice of householders signing their own advertisements to requisition meetings under magisterial oversight. This would, especially when revolutionary threats receded and local justices' sympathies permitted, allow local organisers some legal and constitutional claims to public assembly, even if Peterloo demonstrated the continuing threat of the Riot Act. Alongside bi-partisan opportunism encouraging public meetings, the article emphasises the creative use of constitutional and legal claims by 'political entrepreneurs'. Comparison with Ireland demonstrates ministers' greater recourse to new legislation and executive powers, but also the exchange of political practices with Great Britain. The prosecution of intimidating numbers, rather than seditious conduct, after 1842 diminished the role of requisitions, as did the hybridisation of 'public meetings'. This was not so much the loss of a demotic form of community deliberation, but a proliferation and multiplication of the meetings—and voices—claiming to represent public opinion. The changing uses of a subscriptional practice can illuminate the relationship between government initiatives and local enforcement, and highlight the talents of those forging new meanings of the law, the constitution, and the political nation from restrictive procedures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This brief-report details my experiences teaching critical theory at the intersection of race/ class/ gender/ sexuality/ nationality through analogue mapping exercises from my tutorial room at Murdoch University in Western Australia to a group mapping project at the 2018 Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) at the University of Victoria, Canada (UVic). Given the proximity of both countries to the history of the British Empire and current affiliation of both with the Commonwealth, my report details teaching efforts to mediate against a "pedagogy of the digitally oppressed." In drawing on the formative concept offered by Brazilian educator-theorist Paulo Freire, I juxtapose the analogue mapping exercises through interposed lens of postcolonial, race, and queer theory. Recognizing the dominant ideologies encoded within technology, I narrate the process in which team members and I from the QDH: Queer Digital Humanities seminar produced participatory, de-centralized maps as counter sites of identity to the colonialist spaces and insignias on the UVic campus. I conclude with collective queer of colour principles which undergird the DHSI exercise, which is a modality of what might best be described as "anti-colonial Q-mapping." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter examines the conceptualization of Catholic liturgical practices within the Protestant anti-Catholic polemics of early modern England. I argue that, insofar as Protestants typically glossed such practices as 'idolatry', and thus, as the worship of a false god, Protestants explicitly accused Catholics of falling victim to the deceptive tendencies of their imaginations. Hence, for English Protestants, Catholics were responsible for transforming the good news of the Gospel into a mere fiction of their own making. More than a mere rhetorical posture — though of course it was also that — it is here argued that Protestant anti-Catholic polemic encodes a more generalized anxiety about the role of imagination within religious, social and political life, and thus serves as a microcosm of larger-scale transformations within the intellectual and political discourse of early modern England. Most obviously, the emphasis on the imagination, in particular within Protestant polemics, indicates a new context into which traditional scholastic psychological categories were forced in order to accommodate confessional differentiation and the new political realities of a post-Reformation world. Thus, by understanding just what Protestant polemicists meant by fictions, we can open up deeper continuities across the intellectual and political discourse of the period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By the early modern period, libelling a private individual had been legally redefined and was being tried at the court of Star Chamber, alongside cases relating to the monarch or government. This brought the ruination of individual reputations by spreading false rumours into the same realm as the circulation of nationally significant false news. Private libels typically took the form of verses, impersonations, mock ceremonies or visual symbols that were read, sung, posted, and published; they exploited the defamatory potential of fictional reconstructions of local disputes in order to exacerbate conflicts within provincial communities. This chapter argues that private libels provide evidence for a novel multimedia practice of circulating disinformation that blended fact and fiction amongst the social networks of early modern England. It examines two cases, one centred upon a libellous verse and the other on mock proclamations, to establish the significance of literary and performance techniques in libellous disinformation. The chapter also explores the significance of 'disreputation' for the categories of private and public. It argues that private libels were a crucial feature of the social backdrop to established forms of oral, print and manuscript communication, which impacted upon common perceptions of trustworthiness of information and public official figures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our modern concept of political free speech as an individual political right was first elaborated in detail three hundred years ago by two London journalists, Thomas Gordon and John Trenchard, in their best-selling, endlessly reprinted, anonymous newspaper column, known as 'Cato's Letters' (1720–23). As is well known, Cato's novel ideas about speech and press freedom proved hugely influential, especially in the American colonies. Because they underpin the peculiar formulation of the First Amendment of the United States' constitution, their impact is still with us today. But Trenchard and Gordon's own lives and motives are remarkably obscure, and how they managed to formulate a completely new way of thinking about politics and public debate has remained an unexplored puzzle. Nor has it previously been appreciated that their arguments, as well as refocusing existing discussions of press liberty, directly engaged long-standing concerns about false news and public deception. Drawing on newly discovered printed and manuscript evidence, this essay reveals the deliberately misleading character of their ideology, and the reasons for its hidden partiality. It shows both how political freedom of speech first came to be systematically conceived of as a mechanism for truth, an antidote to falsehood, and the foundation of all liberty — and that, ironically, this new and powerful theory was itself but a partial, biased fiction about the world. That is a paradox whose consequences we are still living with. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

V. L. Ménage, who died in 2015, was Lecturer and then Professor at the University of London's School of Oriental & African Studies from 1955 until 1983, and one of the pioneers of Ottoman history in the United Kingdom. Ottoman Historical Documents: The Institutions of an Empire By V. L. Ménage, edited by Colin Imber The great majority of the translated sources are as Ménage wrote them, although in a few cases Imber has provided new translations where the original was missing, or replaced one of Ménage's sources with a more suitable alternative. [Extracted from the article]

Chapter two is the first of three stages of English translation of the Daoist Scriptures: 'The Nineteenth Century: The Gobbling Up of English Translations of the Daoist Scriptures'. During this period, the number of translators and the number of translations were relatively small, making this stage the beginning of English translations of the Daoist scriptures. Chapter Three is the second of the three stages of English translation of the Daoist scriptures: 'Before the 1970s: the Development of English Translation of the Daoist Scriptures'. [Extracted from the article]

In recent decades, scholars of modern British history have increasingly revisited the classic social science of the post-war period. Within this 'social scientific turn' in modern British history we can discern closely-related but distinct strands of work. One group of historians, influenced by intellectual history and political history methods, have examined how post-war social science and social scientists have shaped modern British politics and culture. Other historians have engaged closely with the original research materials of post-war social science as source bases for understanding lived experience, and explored the gulf between how sociologists and researchers talked about people, and how they understood themselves. Understanding the different aims and methods with which modern British historians have engaged with post-war social research is essential to understanding the methodology and value of the 'social scientific turn' in modern British history today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article re-examines the place of the Middle Ages in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century English culture. In doing so, it presents an argument about the interrelationship of landscape, history and English national identity. Emphasising the importance of the medieval past to mainstream constructions of Englishness, the article shows how this importance largely derived from the felt presence of the Middle Ages in the physical environment, in the landscape of England. Their history congealed in the fields, forests, hills, towns and villages of the present day, the Middle Ages were readily accessible through imaginative agency and possessed of vital contemporary meaning. Embodied experience of landscape offered Victorians and Edwardians compelling evidence of the long continuities of English national history, from Anglo-Saxon times onwards. In an increasingly democratic context, the medieval presence in the landscape was evidence of the continuity not only of the institutions of the realm, but of the English people themselves. Until at least the First World War, and perhaps beyond, the tangible heritage of the Middle Ages in the English landscape served as an important source of reassurance of the nation's endurance and progress, amid the transformations of modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explains why Æthelflaed, ruler of Mercia, mattered to writers of history in twelfth-century England. It argues that these writers evaluated and compared rulers based not on sex or bloodline, but on the quality of a ruler's achievements relative to the set and scale of challenges the ruler faced. They thought Æthelflaed remarkable because her triumphs for Mercia distinguished her from other rulers. The article shows that a new understanding of attitudes in twelfth-century England towards rulers, past and present, is required. It accounts for the absence of gendered comments about rulers, as well as the presence of non-binary concepts of gender, in medieval writing. It also challenges the enduring idea that Latin writers imposed a shared, Wessex-dominated national vision on the English past. They asserted Mercia's independence under Æthelflaed's sole rule, which shows that English regional interests persisted in the historical imagination long after the Norman Conquest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although there was no complete census in England until 1801, there had been counts of people for various purposes in towns and villages since the sixteenth century, and by the end of the seventeenth century political arithmeticians were trying to calculate the total population and its demographic characteristics from a range of documents, old and new. There had even been projects to collect new data from parish registers which in some respects anticipated the civil registers of vital events finally established in 1837. The aim of this paper is to look again at the invention in the sixteenth century of the sources later used for demographic investigation, especially parish registers and bills of mortality; to demonstrate that their value for such purposes was appreciated by contemporaries earlier than has often been assumed; and to show why, when their utility declined in the eighteenth century, it proved impossible to reform them. Pressure from political arithmeticians and a growing sector of the medical profession to redesign the established machinery of registration had no effect because it had become a monopoly in the hands of an ecclesiastical establishment determined to defend it. In the 1530s England acquired a precocious system of national registration, potentially adaptable to multiple uses, but it scarcely changed at all for three hundred years because there was no agreement on how to adapt or replace it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians of both the medieval and early modern eras have characterised the governing structures of rural communities as being dominated by local elites. However, interpretations are hampered by a lack of clear criteria against which to evaluate whether a village-governance regime was 'open,' and characterised by wide participation, or 'closed', and characterised by the narrow restriction of office to an elite group, making it difficult to draw comparisons across time and space. This article uses a set of quantitative methodologies to solve this problem. It examines presentment juries in the manorial court, a governing institution which straddles the late medieval and early modern period, in three case-study communities for the period from 1310 to 1600. By applying four measures of participation, the article reveals that post-Black Death juries were characterised by a nuanced system of restriction. They were open in the sense that a large proportion of the male population, drawn from a wide range of families, acted as jurors and there was a continuous turnover in jury panels. However, they were also closed in that a small group of prominent individuals and families served a disproportionately frequent number of times. The results also question an established narrative of increasing monopolisation of village governance by a new 'middling sort' over the sixteenth century. Instead, change over time and space reveals a variable set of trends, with no universal linear pattern. The inflexibility of manorial institutions, combined with local demographic regimes and trends in landholding, led to significant differences in political participation between communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning in January 2021, Twentieth Century British History asked a group of scholars to reflect on what decolonization means to the field of British history. Twentieth Century British History co-editor Erik Linstrum (University of Virginia) posed questions over email for three rounds of discussion which concluded in December 2021. Stuart Ward (University of Copenhagen), Vanessa Ogle (University of California, Berkeley), and Saima Nasar (University of Bristol) took part. Priyamvada Gopal (Cambridge University) offered a final comment from the perspective of postcolonial studies. Contributions have been lightly edited but the relatively conversational style and flow of ideas in the original exchange have been preserved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Auchinleck Manuscript was produced in the 1330s in London and is best known to scholars of Middle English literature on account of the romances that it transmits. Several of these texts treat the establishment and defense of England and it has been argued that their interest in English history is matched by the language in which almost all of the manuscript's texts are written: English. This article reconsiders the Englishness of the Auchinleck Manuscript via a quantitative analysis of its lexis. We show that a comparatively large proportion of the Auchinleck lexicon has connections to French and that, of these words with French connections, many do not appear to have been much used in English writing before the 1300s. Our statistics are derived via program scripts that match Auchinleck lexicon items to headword entries in the Middle English Dictionary and collect data pertaining to word etymology and earliest dates of citation from those entries. Where previous studies have emphasized the porous boundaries between English and French in 14th-century English contexts, we posit that some poets might aim to make creative capital out of the deliberate juxtaposition of the languages. The argument is supported by a series of visualizations; interactive versions of these visualizations and the data on which they are based are archived at our project website (https://solliryc.github.io/AuchinleckDataViz/). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why did women's roles change so dramatically in the West in the period after 1945? These years saw major changes in those roles, and in dominant understandings of female selfhood, from a model based on self-abnegation to one based on self-fulfilment. The roots of this shift have often been located in the post-1968 feminist movement and in economic change. Examining this question through the lens of Great Britain, this article, however, centres working-class women as drivers of these changes, drawing on oral history interviews with over 100 women from coalfield communities. In the decades after 1950, these women constructed a new vernacular discourse of gender equality which had profound implications for the position of women in society. This vernacular discourse shared some similarities with post-1968 feminism, but rather than focusing on the division of domestic and paid labour, or sexual violence, it emphasized women's autonomy, individuality and voice. In constructing it, working-class women drew on pervasive post-war ideas about equality and democracy, discourses of individualism and individual fulfilment, and discourses of 'companionate' marriage and 'child-centred' parenting in order to make claims for women's rights. Through doing so, they constructed women not only as wives and mothers, but also as free and equal individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information related to Reginald, Lord Cobham of Sterborough, marshal of the English army who died in 1361. It informs that Cobham's prominence in warfare and governance in the middle of the fourteenth century has drawn the attention of numerous modern historians of fourteenth-century England and of medieval warfare.