The National Library of Spain (Biblioteca Nacional de España, BNE) is the head of the Spanish library system. It holds all books published in Spain, and also several collections of different types, including the Music and Audiovisuals Department's sound recordings and sheet music. Its Department of Bibliographic Control of Periodicals catalogues both newspapers and magazines. In addition, the BNE offers a number of online services including the Hispanic Digital Library (Biblioteca Digital Hispánica, BDH) and the Digital Newspaper Library (Hemeroteca Digital, HemD). The BDH, was created in 2008 and currently provides free and open access to more than 220,000 digitized documents, including recordings and scores.1 In contrast, HemD, which is part of the BDH, focuses on the public dissemination of the digital collection of Spanish historical presses.2 It currently offers around 2,500 titles and more than 70,000,000 pages.3 Newspapers and magazines are available in PDF format and searches are facilitated by OCR (Optical Character Recognition).

Following several attempts to fashion a broad-based national church from the Church of England by reforming the Act of Uniformity (1662), the failed Comprehension Bill that accompanied the Toleration Act (1689) was the final such proposal tabled in Parliament. Although historians have examined moments when comprehension reappeared in eighteenth-century confessional discourse, less attention has been paid to connecting these moments within England's long Reformation and to explaining why the prospects for comprehension remained so dim. Its supporters claimed the Elizabethan via media in church and state to fashion a national church within a godly commonwealth by uniting Anglicans with “moderate” Dissenters. However, the High Church campaign against the practice of occasional conformity meant that comprehension ceased to be a viable political proposition by the time of the Tory landslide of 1710 and the passage of the Occasional Conformity Act (1711). The development of the culture of “free enquiry” among Dissenters further widened the gulf between them and the establishment, reinforcing the aspiration of the established church's Whig leaders for harmonious coexistence rather than unity. Despite its failure as a political proposition, Whig churchmen and moderate Dissenters continued to idealize comprehension due to their (albeit loosening) Hookerian commitment to unity in church and state.

Historians use a wide range of terms to talk about premodern partner choice conflicts, ranging from rape to ravishment and elopement. This variety largely stems from the ambiguity and multivalence of some terms frequently used in medieval England, like the intensely scrutinized term raptus. Through a study of the language used in late medieval legal texts and judicial records from the Low Countries, this article shows that medieval Flemish had a specific term to describe an offense not captured by any other term available, namely schaec. Authorities clearly distinguished between schaec, that is the seizure of women for marriage, and rape, the seizure of women for sex. Yet, the Low Countries’ multilingual legal culture as well as the ambiguity that was inherent to many abductions with marital intent, continued to make it difficult for judges to label the cases they encountered as rape or schaec.

This article examines state-society encounters in imperial Ethiopia through histories of exploitation and compromise. Focusing on the western province of Qellem, the article investigates Ethiopia's engagement with local rights claims over time, illustrating how the state was imagined, negotiated, and partially legitimated. The inherent incoherence within imperial state structures is traced back to the survival of nodes of indigenous power within territories conquered in the late nineteenth century. Peasant representatives, local elites, and Amhara governors and soldier-colonists engaged with the state to turn it to their benefit, or limit its excesses. Episodes of rebellion, withdrawal, and court arbitration punctuated a cycle of negotiation within which the role of the intermediary was key. Qellem experienced a state-making exercise that was contemporaneous with, and comparable to, the formation of European colonial states elsewhere on the continent. As such, this article provides a radical challenge to dominant historiographical perspectives on imperial Ethiopia.

This article studies the Ikoyi reservation in Lagos, Nigeria to assess changing relationships between the colonial state, urban space, and race between 1935 and 1955. Colonial authorities established reservations as special zones to house colonial officials and other white Westerners. The article shows that the Ikoyi reservation was a significant location where a wide range of actors contested relationships between statehood and race. These renegotiations contributed to making a late colonial state, a terminal form of colonial state in which explicitly racialised discourses of statehood and urban space were challenged while implicitly racialised standards and practices often persisted. Through a focus on Ikoyi, the article highlights the important relationships between segregationist projects and late colonial statehood.