This chapter proposes that the three Shakespearean comedies set in France (Love’s Labour’s Lost, As You Like It, All’s Well That Ends Well) depend for their effect on particular perceptions and forms of knowledge concerning France on the part of contemporary audiences. The focus is on the earlier two plays, since All’s Well has been considered elsewhere. Love’s Labour’s Lost introduces insistent political allusions (mainly through the names of the characters), which nevertheless resist all efforts to detach them from their romantic-comic frame. The consequence is an unresolvable tension between comic and tragic tendencies that is focused in the unconventional conclusion. As You Like It might be supposed to reject the realistic in favour of the romantic by way of its exotic ‘French’ pastoral source – Thomas Lodge’s novel Rosalynde – but Lodge actually presents his setting with an insistence on material realities. Conversely, even as he downplays Lodge’s French specificity in favour of recognisable elements of ‘Englishness’, Shakespeare attaches to the French setting and characters a dimension of romance resulting in a destabilising doubleness: Arden/Ardennes, Robin Hood/Rowland de Boys.

This chapter details the founding of the first European institution, the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) in 1951, and of the European relance of 1957, which brought the European Economic Community (EEC) into existence. Using historical and archival research, it documents how important postwar leaders, particularly the first President of the European High Authority Jean Monnet, French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman, and German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, negotiated their differing memories and opposition from more traditional political actors to create the first European institutions. They all viewed the Second World War as an important historical rupture requiring basic changes to the political architecture of the continent. They believed that Europe’s experience of total war necessitated supranational cooperation as a way of curbing the violent tendencies of nationalism.

This chapter investigates the origins of concepts of press freedom in the anglophone world. It charts the ways in which arguments about freedom of speech in the English Parliament combined with practices and theories of petitioning to underwrite novel claims that press licensing should be temporarily loosened or suspended during the time of Parliament’s sitting. These claims for the relaxation of censorship during ‘Parliament-time’ were first extensively canvassed during the distempered parliaments of the 1620s. After 1640, and particularly after the convention of the Long Parliament in November of that year, rudimentary claims regarding the suspension of press licensing in ‘Parliament-time’ became more elaborate, and were articulated with escalating assertiveness, particularly by militant parliamentarians, and especially by so-called ‘independents’. During the English civil war of the 1640s, these formulations mutated into more general demands for the limitation or even abolition of press controls. In their most robust form, such arguments proposed that censorship and other forms of press regulation should be relaxed not merely in the ‘Parliament-time’ but at all times and under all just governments. This evolution represents an important development in the long, highly contested process whereby print controls were abandoned, as new assumptions and practices of press freedom and ‘freedom of speech’ gained purchase in the English-speaking world.

This chapter recounts the life, times and works of Moshe Lewin, a major historian of Stalinism. It shows how his life as a political activist and wartime refugee to the Soviet Union structured his later scholarship. The chapter also explores Lewin’s influence on a younger cohort of scholars, his efforts at field and institution-building, and the legacy of his work on Stalinism.

Seventeenth-century English Protestants believed that they possessed a ‘right’ to exercise something they called ‘freedom of speech’, which was a biblically mandated duty to speak the truth boldly by rebuking sin and proclaiming Christian doctrine. It is well known that early modern Christians sought to place limits on what they deemed ungodly speech, but, as this chapter argues, early Stuart Protestants also placed crucial limits on what they considered to be godly free speech. On their view, free speech should always be exercised to promote God’s glory and the good of those who heard it. There were circumstances in which even godly speech would not serve these ends, instead provoking blasphemous counter-speech, violence and spiritual harm to those who heard it. Stuart Protestants therefore identified various situations in which they advised private persons and ministers not to cast ‘pearls before swine’ (Matt. 7:6) and to remain silent rather than speak words of godly admonition or instruction. Their arguments drew together a series of terms that would (with different meanings and content) lie at the heart of later arguments about free speech and its proper limits: restricting ‘liberty’ of speech in order to prevent ‘harm’, ‘offence’ and violence. This combination of familiarity and foreignness, the chapter concludes, is precisely what makes these seventeenth-century discussions of free speech so relevant and useful for helping us to think more clearly about the purposes, circumstances and limits of free speech in our own time.

This chapter uses the anti-blasphemy legislation of the late 1690s and early 1720s to consider how early Georgian England differed from late Williamite England regarding freedom of speech in general and freedom of religious speech more particularly. So, what had changed between the passage of the Blasphemy Act of 1698 and the failure of the Blasphemy Bill in 1721? Parliament’s resolute determination to maintain the civil peace had not. What had changed, instead, was what most in Parliament thought constituted civil peace; what most in Parliament thought threatened civil peace; and what most in Parliament thought should be done to deal with perceived threats to civil peace. Moreover, what had changed in the two decades after the Blasphemy Act’s passage in 1698 was that the established church itself was riven even more deeply not simply about how to deal with public expressions of untruth but about what even constituted truth and untruth. Indeed, one of the striking things about the 1721 Blasphemy Bill was that some of its chief opponents were clerics; were clerics who believed that heresy and blasphemy were real; were clerics who believed that early eighteenth-century England abounded with heretics and blasphemers; and were clerics who would later prove willing to act on that belief. And yet they voted down a piece of legislation that promised to punish heretics and blasphemers. Put another way, they voted against the Blasphemy Bill not because they thought heretics and blasphemers did not need to be restrained but because they thought they should be restrained only under certain conditions. Principled support of free speech did not drive clerical opposition to the bill; reasons of state did.

The conclusion explores the broader implications of the book’s principal thesis in terms of rethinking the historiography on the Vietnam War, as well as the history of communism, capitalism, democracy and imperialism. If the war, in its early phase, was not a conflict between communism and democracy, but a contest between two different forms of anti-colonialist communism, then the South Vietnamese state was simply a failed experiment in liberal democracy, as it has often been characterized. Instead, the conclusion contends that the project of the First Republic could perhaps be better described as an aborted attempt to establish an alternative version of communism. If this project was ultimately compromised by its complicity with US imperialism, its Personalist ideology, nevertheless, was perhaps more radical than that of the Vietnamese Communist Party in its critique of capitalism and bourgeois democracy. Whereas the early Republic was undermined with the aid of US officials, who denounced its lack of democracy, the Party, after winning the war, would employ the power of the communist state to implement a program of capitalist modernization.

It is usually assumed that speech is ‘free’ if it is not met with punishment from governing authorities. ‘Freedom of speech’ involves a right to speak without fear of governmental reprisal. In the Tudor period, discussions around counsel, and the associated ideas of parrhesia and kairos, lead us to another way of considering the ‘freedom’ of speech: that it is not the absence of punishment which makes speech free, but rather the choice to speak freely regardless of such reprisal. In this way, the discussion is not about the limits and boundaries of free speech, but about the way in which speaking truth is itself freeing, regardless of the consequences. This chapter uncovers this way of thinking in the work of Thomas Elyot, especially his two pieces produced in 1533: Pasquil the Playne and Of the Knowledge Which Maketh a Wise Man. Drawing particularly on the work of Isocrates and Plutarch, Elyot sets out that the demands of ‘right timing’ (kairos) necessitate frank speech in order to limit the otherwise unrestrained passions of a monarch, regardless if these will be met with punishment or not. Such speech, Elyot maintains is not just ‘free’ in itself but is itself liberating: for the speaker – no matter the consequences; for the listener – even when forced to listen or obey; and for the commonwealth. In this view freedom of speech moves from a right to a duty, and the mechanism of freedom from the extent of governmental control to the speech act of the individual. This freeing speech can (and ought to for Elyot) exist in contexts in which modern freedom of speech does not.

The violence of the war of attrition would result in widespread rural depopulation. Following the collapse of the First Republic, the program of social revolution in the countryside would be replaced by an “urban revolution,” aimed at isolating the insurgency by displacing the rural population en masse. In the cities, moreover, the policies implemented by the later Republican regimes would help to precipitate the emergence of an enormous consumer society, dependent on American aid. Chapter 5 looks at the rise of a new popular culture, which would become an increasingly pervasive phenomenon in South Vietnamese cities in the mid-1960s as the violence continued to escalate in the countryside. Contrary to Communist accounts, this mass culture was not a product of US cultural imperialism. Rather, it was an unintended effect of policies implemented by the later Republic governments, in accordance with the American aim of establishing a bastion of liberal democracy and free market capitalism. Freed from the censorship imposed by the early Republic, the market for media would increasingly divert the efforts of South Vietnamese intellectuals away from the creation of high culture and art toward the production of mass entertainment.

Adulthood is culturally conditioned, a social category, and its attributes and meanings have changed over time and across cultures. This chapter investigates what the achievement of maturity meant in the later medieval period, the entrance points to this phase, and the experience of adulthood. While behavioural and physical qualities frequently lay behind definitions of maturity, there were a number of 'events' that marked the progression to adulthood. Of these, the closest to a universal rite of passage was marriage. Marrying in late medieval Europe was a process that marked the establishment of a new social and spiritual union. Marriage, parenthood, inheritance, and the establishment of one's own business or an official governing position were key transitional points, as they had transformative qualities that changed a person's status. The chapter also focuses on female widowhood because widowers had far less prominence than widows in medieval Europe.

There are many different ways of accessing information about material culture through observation, examination and other forms of investigation. This chapter works through the main methods of analysis for working with objects. Here, the opportunities and constraints of examining objects in person are also discussed. The chapter is arranged in sections, the first dealing with methods of investigating objects physically, the second section considers contextual research and the last section discusses ways to further extend the research process on the basis of the first two modes of analysis.

The book concludes with a short epilogue, reviewing the evidence of the contradictions, ambiguities and paradoxes of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. It considers how members pushed the parameters of gender and class to forge modern new identities.

The 'county community' in later medieval England enjoyed a brief but influential vogue during the 1980s. It was one of a number of lesser solidarities, the parish, the hundred, the kindred, the affinity, which might each play a part of variable significance in the social, and occasionally the political, life of the later medieval gentry. This chapter defines what that part was and suggests how it may have changed over time. It can be assumed that there were three separate stages in the evolution of the county community. In the first stage, the shire gained both definition and authority by its acquisition of a range of new administrative powers and responsibilities. The second, the 'social' phase, saw changes that were principally demographic and driven by high levels of plague-related mortality. In the third, chiefly political, phase, county society responded to external pressures, principally the polarisation of national politics.