Category: Past & Present

Political society and the growth of government in late medieval England Gerald Harriss In the development of the English state the late Middle Ages have seldom been thought to have particular significance. For the most Part it has been seen as a period of retreat and stagnation after the achievements of the Angevins and first […]

Bible reading, “Bibles” and the Bible for children in early modern Germany Ruth B. Bottigheimer INTRODUCTION For well over one hundred and fifty years German Protestant historians defined early modern Protestants as people of the Word. By this they meant that their forebears — unlike Catholics — had read Luther’s translation of the Bible. In […]

Making the empire British: Scotland in the Atlantic world, 1542-1707 David Armitage By the second quarter of the eighteenth century, the anglophone inhabitants of the Atlantic world began for the first time habitually to describe their community as collectively British and structurally an empire. This `British empire’ included the United Kingdom of Great Britain (created […]

The passion of Perpetua – Christian woman martyred in Carthage in A.D. 203 Brent D. Shaw Men surrender them their souls, women their bodies . . . and for the same reason for which the spectators glorify them, they also degrade and belittle them … What perversity. They love whom they punish. They depreciate whom […]

Peasants and the manor court: gossip and litigation in a Suffolk village at the close of the thirteenth century R. Schofield I INTRODUCTION In a court held on 5 April 1296, on the Bury St Edmunds manor of Hinderclay in north Suffolk, Nicholas le Wodeward was brought to respond to Robert the son of Adam […]

Industrialization and the small farm: family and household economy in nineteenth-century Lancashire Michael Winstanley In 1905 the members of the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries’ Departmental Committee on Small Holdings questioned R. H. Rew, their first expert witness, about the preponderance of small-holdings in Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire. His answers were decidedly […]

Time, slavery and plantation capitalism in the ante-bellum American south Mark M. Smith INTRODUCTION In so far as they have considered the matter at all, historians of the American slave South have usually characterized southerners’ attitudes towards time as premodern. By most accounts, antebellum southerners, black and white, considered nature’s rhythms, not the clock, the […]

Conscience or coercion? Clerical influence at the general election of 1868 in Wales Matthew Cragoe For many people in mid-nineteenth-century Britain, religious principle was the chief determinant of voting behaviour, and politics was perceived to be “an activity of significance mainly because religious issues were so prominent”.(1) The importance of religious questions at election time […]

Liberty caps and liberty trees J. David Harden Among the first voices raised during the inaugural meeting of the French National Convention on 21 September 1792 were those expressing the need to eliminate the symbols of monarchy from the popular imagination. While discussions concerning the fate of the king himself would wait for almost four […]

Working-Class Women And The Contest For Consumer Control In Victorian County Courts – ) Margot Finn Recent historical writing on British economic culture has been marked by a trend away from production-orientated and toward consumption-orientated analysis. Motivated in part by the waning of Britain’s industrial base, this evolving trend reflects historians’ broader disillusion with the […]