This article explores the intersection of book history and prosopography. It uses several case studies of copies of the medieval parliamentary statutes translated into English, together with later copies of English statutes translated into French, to argue for both thick prosopographical study of individual volumes and large, statistically based studies of books drawn from the largest possible data sets. Together, these methods amount to a new “prosopograhy of the book.” The case studies analyzed here reveal a complicated politicized relationship not only between script and print but also between French and English in the early Tudor era.

This article explores the ideas of “Walking” John Stewart (1747–1822), a little-known adventurer and philosopher active in debates over social reformation during the French Revolutionary period. Renowned as a peripatetic who walked from India to Britain, Stewart befriended Thomas Paine and others during the early years of the Revolution. His main aim was to persuade them of the value of his philosophy, which was derived from French materialism as well as Hindu and Buddhist sources. But Stewart also came under the influence of the Shakers, Dunkers, Moravians, and other North American sectarian communities. As early as 1791 he commended small-scale “cohabitations” of no more than 100 men and 100 women as the ideal form of association. Here, and in his radical approaches to marriage and sexual relationships, he strikingly anticipated the ideas of Robert Owen and the early socialists.

This article explores the life and commemoration of Buck Alec Robinson. A feared loyalist killer in 1920s Belfast, in more recent times he has featured as a lion-keeping “character” on wall murals and in tourist guide books. Robinson is employed as a case study to investigate two separate but, in this case, interlinked historiographical debates. The first involves Norbert Elias's analysis of the decline of violence. The second relates to discussion of the analysis of social memory in working-class communities, with violence being placed therein. The article supports historical assessments suggesting that the “civilizing offensive” had an uneven impact. That point is usually made in the context of working-class men. This article extends it to political elites in Belfast and probes their flirtations with violent hard men. The case is made that it is a mistake to assume the “civilizing” dynamic is to be understood as a teleological or top-down process.

This article takes a new look at British radicalism in the 1790s and explores it within broad geographical and cultural frameworks and through the early career of Henry Redhead Yorke, a West Indian Creole who became a radical in England but frequently recanted his politics. It views radicalism within the Atlantic World and provides a broader interpretation of the excluded majority than as an English working class. It examines the radical “citizens of the world” and sheds new light on the apparent conflict within English radicalism between universalist and constitutionalist ideologies. Politicization and identity are the key themes here examined within micro- and macro-histories.