From the beginning of the seventeenth century, Englishmen professed as Benedictine monks in mainland Europe began returning to their homeland. Until that point, the Catholic mission to England had been run by secular clergy and Jesuits, relationships between the two clerical parties growing increasingly troubled over how the Catholic Reformation should be implemented in England. The arrival of the Benedictines saw the offering of a “third way” to England's proscribed Catholics. Yet with the various missions dependent on lay Catholic resources and support both in England and in mainland Europe, it was necessary for the Benedictines to justify their presence in this often fraught environment. As such, they forcefully laid claim to contemporary English Benedictine martyrs against rival claims by other clerical groups. These battles for validation reached a new level of intensity following James I's serving of the Oath of Allegiance. This article explores how competing groups of English missionary clergy sought to justify their presence in England. Taking the case of two conflicting images of the executed George Gervase, it argues that the contest for martyrs sheds new light on the ways in which martyrdom was exploited by different groups; it also contributes to debates about the Oath of Allegiance, which was threatening to derail the wider Catholic Reformation across mainland Europe. By placing these clashes over English religious identity in both domestic and international contexts, the article makes evident that events on the peripheries of mainland Europe affected discussions at its center.

What better laboratory for an experiment in racial integration could there be than the nascent community of a new town? The architect Roy Gazzard posed this question in 1969, as he embarked on designing the new town of Killingworth in northern England. A self-proclaimed “social engineer,” Gazzard applied his experience as a town planner in colonial Uganda to shaping a new community in the postimperial metropole. Historians have long recognized the way that built forms were translated from metropole to colony, but the reverberations of colonial planning in the postwar European welfare states have received little attention. In this article I use intellectual biography to chart the trajectory of notions of community, spirituality, space, and place as they migrated from colonial Uganda to postimperial Britain. I focus on the career of Roy Gazzard, an outspoken social engineer and devout Christian, who hoped to use his colonial urban planning experience to counter what he saw as the increasingly secular and centrifugal forces in modern British society. An examination of letters, private paper, lectures, planning documents, and diagrams held in the newly opened archive of Gazzard's work illuminates the course of colonial expertise as it was refracted back into the postcolonial metropole.

John Locke's comparison of the mind to a blank piece of paper, the tabula rasa, was one of the most recognizable metaphors of the British Enlightenment. Though scholars embrace its impact on the arts, humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences, they seldom consider why the metaphor was so successful. Concentrating on the notebooks made and used by the schoolchildren of Enlightenment Scotland, this essay contends that the answer lies in the material and visual conditions that gave rise to the metaphor's usage. By the time students had finished school, they had learned to conceptualize the pages, the script, and the figures of their notebooks as indispensable learning tools that could be manipulated by scores of adaptable folding, writing, and drawing techniques. In this article, I reveal that historicizing the epistemology and manipulability of student manuscript culture makes it possible to see that the success of Locke's metaphor was founded on its appeal to everyday note-keeping activities performed by British schoolchildren.