A radical new approach to the political speeches delivered during this period.

The voices of non-conformity are brought to the fore in this new exploration of late seventeenth-century politics, religion and literature.

A comparative and trans-national study of urban culture in Britain and the United States from the late nineteenth to the twentieth century

A study of the performance of queenship by two Tudor monarchs, showing the strategies they used to assert their power.

In nineteenth-century Britain, public debates about the nation's moral health and about men's and women's responsibility for it were shaped decisively by a tradition of female moralists. This book looks at the cultural criticism of eight of the most significant of these writers: Anna Jameson, Hannah Lawrance, Margaret Oliphant, Marian Evans ('George Eliot'), Eliza Lynn Linton, Beatrice Hastings, Rebecca West and Virginia Woolf, providing a detailed and compelling account of how their writing on history, literature and visual art changed contemporaries' understanding of the lessons to be drawnfrom each field at the same time as they contested and redefined contemporary understandings of masculinity and femininity. It recovers these moralists' understanding of themselves as part of a tradition of women of letters stretching from eighteenth-century bluestockings to their own time, and the growing consensus across the political range of periodicals that women's intellectual potential wasequal to men's, and not determined by their sex.

Benjamin Dabby is an independent historian.

The electoral reforms of 1883-5 created a mass electorate and transformed English political culture. A new breed of professional organisers emerged in the constituencies in the form of full-time partyagents, who handled registration, electioneering and the day-to-day political, social and educational work of local parties; they performed a vital role as intermediaries between politics at Westminster and at grass-roots level, bridging the gap between "high" and "low" politics.
This book examines the agents not only as political figures, but also as men (and occasionally women) determinedto establish their status as professionals. It addresses key questions about the nationalisation of electoral politics in this period, demonstrating the importance of understanding the interactions between the centre and the constituencies, and showing that while the agents' professional networks contributed to a growing uniformity in certain aspects of party organisation, local forces continued to play a vital role in British political life. It also provides a fresh perspective on the evolution of the modern British political system, shedding new light on debates about how effectively the Liberal and Conservative parties adapted to the challenges of mass politics after 1885.

Dr Kathryn Rix is Assistant Editor of the House of Commons, 1832-1945 project at the History of Parliament.

Between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, Rouen was one of the greatest cities in western Europe. The effective capital of the 'Angevin Empire' between 1154 and 1204 and thereafter a leading cityin the realm of the Capetian and Valois kings of France, it experienced substantial growth, the emergence of communal government and the ravages of plague and the Hundred Years' War.
This book examines the impact of leprosy upon Rouen during this period, and the key role played by charity in the society and religious culture of the city and its hinterland. Based upon extensive archival research, and focusing in particular on Rouen's leper houses, it offers a new understanding of responses to disease and disability in medieval Europe. It charts how attitudes towards lepers, and perceptions of their disease, changed over time, explores the relationship between leprosy, charity and practices of piety, and considers how leprosy featured in growing concerns about public health. It also sheds important new light on the roles and experiences of women, as both charitable patrons and leprosy sufferers, and on medical practice and practitioners in medieval France.

Elma Brenner is Specialist in Medieval and Early Modern Medicine at the Wellcome Library, London.

The royal touch was the religious healing ceremony at which the monarch stroked the sores on the face and necks of people who had scrofula in order to heal them in imitation of Christ. The rite was practised by all the Tudor and Stuart sovereigns apart from William III, reaching its zenith during the Restoration when some 100,000 people were touched by Charles II and James II.
This ground-breaking book, the first devoted to the royal touch for almost a century, integrates political, religious, medical and intellectual history. The custom is analysed from above and below: the royal touch projected monarchical authority, but at the same time the great demand for it created numerous problems for those organising the ceremony. The healing rite is situated in the context of a number ofearly modern debates, including the cessation of miracles and the nature of the body politic. The book also assesses contemporary attitudes towards the royal touch, from belief through ambivalence toscepticism. Drawing on a wide range of primary sources including images, coins, medals, and playing cards, as well as manuscripts and printed texts, it provides an important new perspective on the evolving relationship between politics, medicine and sin in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England.

Anglican clergymen in Britain's Australian colonies in their earliest years faced very particular challenges. Lacking any relevant training, experience or pastoral theology, these pioneer religious professionals not only had to minister to a convict population unique in the empire, but had also to engage with indigenous peoples and a free-settler population struggling with an often inhospitable environment. Previous accounts have caricatured such clerics - several of whom doubled as magistrates - as the imperial authorities' lackeys: "moral policemen", "flogging parsons". While the clergy did indeed make important contributions to colonial and imperial projects, this book shows that they explicitly rejected the subordination of Church to state, vigorously asserting their independence in relation to both religious duties and humanitarian concern. The author also demonstrates the clergy's vital contribution to the evolution of the new colonies in their economic development, and in the emergence of civil society and distinctive intellectual and cultural institutions and traditions. The clerical contribution was shaped by their social origins, intellectual formation and professional networks in an expanding settler empire, explored systematically here for the first time. What emerges is a much more nuanced understanding of the place of the Anglican Church in thehistory of colonial Australia than has previously been presented, shedding important new light on the religious, social and political history of both Australia and the British World of which it formed a part. Dr MichaelGladwin is Lecturer in History, St Mark's National Theological Centre, School of Theology, Charles Sturt University, Canberra.

New investigation of John Wyclif's writings on the theory of the 'just war' shows him to be the first genuine pacifist of medieval Europe.

It was common knowledge in early modern England that sexual desire was malleable, and could be increased or decreased by a range of foods - including artichokes, oysters and parsnips. This book argues that these aphrodisiacs were used not simply for sexual pleasure, but, more importantly, to enhance fertility and reproductive success; and that at that time sexual desire and pleasure were felt to be far more intimately connected to conception and fertility than is the case today. It draws on a range of sources to show how, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, aphrodisiacs were recommended for the treatment of infertility, and how men and women utilised them to regulate their fertility. Via themes such as gender, witchcraft and domestic medical practice, it shows that aphrodisiacs were more than just sexual curiosities - they were medicines which operated in a number of different ways unfamiliar now, and their use illuminates popular understandings of sex and reproduction in this period.

This book takes a fresh look at Victorian England's "love of Italy", traditionally constructed as the reserve of the established classes, by revealing a forgotten connection between the radical, Victorian "non-elites" and the Risorgimento democrats. The republican exile Giuseppe Mazzini first introduced the idea of "Italy" to workers keen on self-improvement; his radical ideas circulated in reading rooms and co-operative societies, where republican Italy became a transnational dream. Indeed, when Italy was unified under a constitutional monarch in 1860, British Mazzinians were bitterly disappointed, and subsequently supported Italian republicans for decades; undeterred by Italy's fin de siècle crisis and the rise of fascism, they championed Italian anti-fascists who associated themselves with Mazzini's principles of global democracy. Drawing on a wide range of material, the book provides fresh insights both into the history of Victorian radicalism in Britain, and to the history of the Risorgimento.

At the beginning of the Victorian era, London Zoo thrived as the premier resort of the metropolis. It attracted myriads of people from different walks of life, from urban promenaders to gentleman menagerists, from Indian shipbuilders to Persian princes, and included such leading figures of the day as Charles Darwin. This examination of the Zoo places it within the broader context of nineteenth-century Britain, looking at the politics of culture in the new public domain of museums and galleries, the professionalisation and popularisation of science in a new, consumer society, and how the growing urban population regarded the animals on display. Dr Takashi Ito teaches at Kanazawa Gakuin University, Japan.

After an evening spent drinking with Irish conspirators, an inebriated Owen Connelly confessed to the main colonial administrators in Ireland that a plot was afoot to root out and destroy Ireland's English and Protestant population. Within days English colonists in Ireland believed that a widespread massacre of Protestant settlers was taking place. Desperate for aid, they began to canvass their colleagues in England for help, claiming that they were surrounded by an evil popish menace bent on destroying their community. Soon sworn statements, later called the 1641 depositions, confirmed their fears (despite little by way of eye-witness testimony). In later years, Protestant commentators could point to the 1641 rebellion as proof of Catholic barbarity and perfidy. However, as the author demonstrates, despite some of the outrageous claims made in the depositions, the myth of 1641 became more important than the reality. The aim of this book is to investigate how the rebellion broke out and whether there was a meaning in the violence which ensued. It also seeks to understand how the English administration in Ireland portrayed these events to the wider world, and to examine whether and how far their claims were justified. Did they deliberately construct a narrative of death and destruction that belied what really happened? An obvious, if overlooked, context is that of the Atlantic world; and particular questions asked are whether the English colonists drew upon similar cultural frameworks to describe atrocities in the Americas; how this shaped the portrayal of the 1641 rebellion in contemporary pamphlets; and the effect that this had on the wider Wars of the Three Kingdoms between England, Ireland and Scotland. Dr Eamon Darcy is a research assistant in the School of Histories and Humanities at Trinity College, Dublin.

The conflict on the Irish seaboard between the years 1641 and 1653 was not some peripheral theatre in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. As this first full-length study of the war at sea on the Irish coast from the outbreak of the Ulster rising in 1641 to the surrender of Inishbofin Island, the last major royalist maritime outpost, in April 1653, shows, it was instead the epicentre of naval conflict with important consequences for the nature and outcome of the land conflicts in Ireland and elsewhere. The book provides a clear and comprehensive narrative account of the war at sea, accompanied by careful contextualisation and a full analysis of its Irish, British and European dimensions. This includes the strategic importance of Irish ports, conflict between organised navies and formidable bands of privateers and pirates, the adoption of new naval technologies and tactics and the relationship between conflict on land and sea. Moving beyond traditional accounts of naval campaigns, it integrates warfare at sea into the wider dimension of political and economic developments in Ireland, England and Scotland. Extensive use is made of a wide range of archival material, in particular the High Court of Admiralty papers held in the National Archives at Kew. Dr Elaine Murphy is a Research Associate working on the ‘Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell’ project at the Department of History, University of Cambridge.

The ongoing debate about secularisation and religious change in twentieth-century Britain has paid little attention to the experience of those who swam against the cultural tide and continued to attend church. This study, based on extensive original archive and oral history research, redresses this imbalance with an exploration of church-based Christianity in post-war Birmingham, examining how churchgoers interpreted and responded to the changes that they saw in family, congregation, neighbourhood and wider society. One important theme is the significance of age and generational identity to patterns of religiosity amidst profound change in attitudes to youth, age and parenting and growing evidence of a widening 'generation gap' in Christian belief and practice. In addition to offering a new and distinctive perspective on the changing religious identity of late twentieth-century English society, the book also provides a rare case-study in the significance of age and generation in the social and cultural history of modern Britain. Ian Jones is the Director of the Saltley Trust (an educational charity), Birmingham.

An investigation into the influence of, and reaction to, the atheistic writings of the baron d'Holbach.

Mid-seventeenth century Ireland experienced a revolution in landholding. Coming in the aftermath of the devastating Cromwellian conquest, this seismic shift in the social and ethnic distribution of land and power from Irish Catholic to English Protestant hands would play a major role in shaping the history of the country. One of the most notorious elements of the Irish land settlement was the scheme of the transplantation to Connacht, which aimed to expel the Catholic population from three of the country's four provinces and replace them with a wave of Protestant settlers from England and further afield. Brought to the forefront of attention by nationalist scholars in the nineteenth century, the transplantation is one of the best-known but conversely least understood episodes in Irish history. Yet it has been relatively neglected by recent historians, a gap in the scholarship which this book remedies. It situates the origins of the transplantation in the heat of conquest, reconstructs its implementation in the turbulent 1650s and explores its far-reaching outcomes. It thus enables the significance of the transplantation, and its relevance to wider themes such as colonialism, state formation and ethnic cleansing, to be better understood. John Cunningham is IRCHSS Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Mobility Fellow in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Trinity College Dublin/Albert-Ludswigs-Universität Freiburg.

Social welfare, increasingly extensive during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was by the first third of the nineteenth under considerable, and growing, pressure, during a "crisis" period when levels of poverty soared. This book examines the poor and their families during these final decades of the old Poor Law. It takes as a case study the lived experience of poor families in two Bedfordshire communities, Campton and Shefford, and contrasts it with the perspectives of other participants in parish politics, from the magistracy to the vestry, and from overseers to village ratepayers. It explores the problem of rising unemployment, the provision of parish make-work schemes, charitable provision and the wider makeshift economy, together with the attitudes of the ratepayers. That gender and life-cycle were crucial features of poverty is demonstrated: the lone mother and her dependent children and the elderly dominated the relief rolls. Poor relief might have been relatively generous but it was not pervasive - child allowances, in particular, were restricted in duration and value - and it by no means approximated to the income of other labouring families. Poor families must either have had access to additional resources, or led meagre lives. Samantha Williams is a university lecturer in local and regional history at the Institute of Continuing Education, Cambridge, and a Bye-Fellow in History, Girton College, Cambridge.

Religious exile was both a familiar and a deeply discomforting phenomenon in Reformation Europe. In the turbulent context of the later sixteenth century, a group of English Catholic exiles in Paris became a source of serious concern to the Protestant government at home and a destabilising presence in their host environment; their residence in Paris coincided with and contributed to a crisis in authority for the French Crown, and the buildup to the Spanish enterprise of England.
This book uses a range of evidence from both sides of the Channel to investigate the polemical and practical impact of religious exile. It reconstructs the experience and priorities of the English Catholic laity and clergy in Paris, moving beyond contemporary stereotypes of the exiles, and the traditional historiographical view of English Catholicism as isolated and introverted. It emphasises the importance of placing English Catholic experience into a broader European context, shedding light on the significant place of France in their activity, thus offering a new angle entirely on the relationship between England and the continent in the early modern period.

Katy Gibbons is Senior Lecturerin History at the University of Portsmouth.