Search

Great polarity of opinion existed toward religious and secular authorities among English Catholics in the later sixteenth century. Anthony Copley presents a well-documented, yet hitherto understudied example of how Catholic loyalties could operate. Importantly, Copley's loyalty, influenced by the Wars of Religion, proved cosmopolitan rather than insular. This article examines how in his life, poetry, and polemical writing during the Archpriest Controversy of the 1590s, Copley promoted a brand of loyalist politics informed by continental affairs and ideas. He attempted to convince Catholics of the urgent need to follow a sincere form of religion, rejecting religious extremism. As his role in the failed 1604 Bye Plot against James I demonstrated, Copley also argued for Catholic participation in the state. Copley provides an example of a lay Catholic devoted to both his religion and nation, but who promoted a loyalty that advocated action for Catholics within the state, not retirement and docility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores religious adolescents' reported experiences of secondary schools. Fifty-four qualitative interviews were conducted in places of worship in three cities in England with Christians (n=46), Jews (n=38) and Muslims (n=15). Secondary schools of a religious and non-religious character were reported as not providing a suitable environment for religious observances, nor as a place to act and behave according to participants' religious principles. Religious adolescents reported prejudice and criticism of their beliefs or religious affiliations from their peers and sometimes from teachers. They also perceived their religious traditions to be distorted, inaccurately or unfairly represented in some lessons. The focus of this paper is the identity choices religious adolescents reported in response to these challenges. Three groups of identity choices are theorised and explored: religious identity seeking, religious identity declaration and religious identity masking. The findings are discussed in view of religious identity construction theory, good practice for teachers and also the potential concerns of faith communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the significance of weeping in the lives of late medieval English bishops ( c.1100− c.1400). It considers the lachrymose devotions of saintly bishops alongside tears of grief, friendship and self-pity, and asks how such displays of emotion were understood by contemporary onlookers. It is argued that a bishop's tears were key to perceptions of his masculinity, sexuality and physical body, which in turn had significant implications for his reputation both as a prelate and as a potential saint. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Newcastle upon Tyne as a case study for the concept of a ‘long eighteenth century’. It is argued that from the late seventeenth century until the 1830s the town, despite some social tensions, demonstrated considerable continuity in terms of its political, social, and economic structure. This gave Newcastle stability and cohesion, but allowed limited economic development and increased prosperity. It became a thriving cultural centre and a ‘polite society’ emerged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the intellectual background to debates in the town planning movement in early twentieth-century Britain. The movement drew heavily on two traditions, that of the anarchists, who provided much of the theory, and that of the philanthropists. The reception of the Classical city influenced these debates through the provision of key paradigms. These paradigms were predominantly sociological rather than architectural and related to the 'ideal' societies to be generated by the new cities. The article argues that urban planning followed a path parallel to British sociology in adopting Classical ideas and forming itself around particular Classicising imaginings of society. Whereas the anarchist tradition exploited the Classical cautiously, differentiating the cities of Rome from the Classical poleis of Greece and finding in those Greek traditions the possibility of radical associative democracy, town planners in the British tradition came to engage with the Classical in a very different way. Through figures such as Patrick Geddes, the influence of Classicism served to divest British urban planning of its political radicalism and the Classical polis was used to offer a utopianism which was hierarchical and conservative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bacon belonged to a cultural milieu that, between the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, proved to be especially receptive to influences coming from such continental authors as Machiavelli, Bodin, Duplessis-Mornay, Hotman, and, through Lipsius, a particular brand of Stoicism tinged with Tacitean motifs. Within the broader question of Tacitus' influence on Tudor and Stuart culture, this article focuses on the issue of how Bacon's characteristic insistence on the powers of the imagination (fingere) and of belief (credere) in shaping human history may have influenced his view that human beings suffer from an innate tendency to self-delusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In February 1897, villagers in the small Kentish town of Eynsford celebrated their first Arbor Day by planting a row of trees in acrostic form to spell out the proverb MY SON, BE WISE. By 1910 Arbor Day had featured in the discussions of a Parliamentary Select Committee and the House of Commons, and was enjoying national press coverage as the event spread under the auspices of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the Garden City Movement. Proponents positioned the ceremony as a prism through which to address the pressing social and economic concerns of rural depopulation, unemployment and deforestation, and by promoting the event as part of the educational experience of children, offered it up as a contribution towards the amelioration of these ills. Although the establishment of the Forestry Commission in 1919 ushered in the increasingly inflexible belief that the state rather than individuals was the only competent custodian of English woodland, Arbor Day can tell us much about how humankind's affective response to nature was conditioned, shored up and survived this increasingly scientific approach from the late nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article considers the ways in which the lives of male monastic saints circulating in late medieval England (and the cults of male saints more widely) were underpinned by certain ideas and ideals of masculinity and the functions which these performed. It argues for the significance of male saints serving as devotional models for the lay audience of these texts (both men and women). The two main sources are William Caxton's Golden Legend (published in 1483) and his Vitas Patrum (published after his death by Wynkyn de Worde in 1495). It therefore seeks to make a contribution to our understanding of the ways in which piety was used to assess masculinity, but also the extent to which piety as a social identity (both public and private in nature) was informed by notions of manliness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Histories of the English Christmas tend to downplay the role of religion in the development of the modern festival. This article examines the place of religion in the popular celebration of Christmas, as well as the provision of worship offered by the Protestant Churches during the festive season. It argues that although some churchmen viewed Christmas pessimistically as part of a broader battle between sacred and secular, the Churches played an important role in the expansion of the urban public culture of Christmas in the late nineteenth century, whilst the doctrine of the incarnation provided a religious framework for the celebration of childhood and domesticity that the festival had come to embody. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article reports on some of the research findings of a major, multi-site case study of character formation in young people in England. Religion was not the focus of this research, but emerged as significant in each case study. In particular, the religious and spiritual beliefs and practices of young people were positively connected with their level of community involvement. The research provides evidence that indicates an association between young religious believers and those who are constructively engaged in both their communities as well as being politically minded. The main methods of data collection for this article included semi-structured discussions/interviews together with semi-structured individual and questionnaire surveys. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In addition to the well-known foreign missionary activities of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century churchmen, this same period saw campaigns of active proselytization within Britain. Whether couched in terms referring to 'religious revival' or 'home mission' it had the same aim as foreign mission activity, namely to effect religious change. This paper explores the way in which the religious changes associated with these campaigns affected the landscape of the lead-mining districts of the North Pennines in northern England. A repeating cycle of preaching first outdoors, then indoors and then in purpose-built structures can be recognized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The overseas body provided an interesting and useful site of cultural understanding in early modern England. The marked body in particular was used by observers to address important questions concerning correct bodily deportment and its connection to civility, morality, and religiosity, resulting in an integration of the discourses of foreign and domestic somatic presentation. This study traces the changing English constructions of the marked body in the public discourse of the overseas world published between 1590 and 1660, a period that witnessed important changes in attitudes towards overseas corporeality. It challenges the common assumption that the marked body was an ephemeral and fleeting subject before Cook's Endeavour voyage, illustrating the textured and changing understanding that early modern English commentators displayed when confronted with corporeal alteration in the overseas world. In particular, it explores the reflexive contemplation overseas ornamentation engendered in England during the early years of English colonial endeavor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Irish-born characters and characters whose names indicate Irish descent recur in the television and film work of Liverpool writers Jimmy McGovern and Alan Bleasdale. Their frequently troublesome dramatic presence often marks them as alien or marginal but problematic elements within British society, or suggests a troubled past and characteristic psychic dysfunction. Bleasdale's have been depicted somewhat stereotypically as economically parasitic and anachronistically maintaining outmoded religious beliefs incompatible with the material interests of the working class. By contrast, McGovern has frequently used his 'Irish' characters to engage critically with his own 'Liverpool Irish' Catholicism and as the focal point for his distinctively moral vision of British society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers a range of contrasting narratives about the Irish in Britain that are sometimes overlapping and sometimes contradictory. These narratives reflect the complexity of the Irish immigrant experience itself, from integration to alienation, and help to explain the persistence of cultural stereotypes. The contradictory nature of this experience also helps to understand the ways in which the Irish have contributed to wider popular culture in Britain, especially in the case of the second-generation Irish who came of age in the 1970s and 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Religion has been increasingly reintegrated into the study of later seventeenth-century English politics. Nevertheless, historians of the later Stuart period have not displayed the same gusto for case studies of individuals’ careers as their colleagues working on the pre-civil war era. This article looks at the important role of religion within the career of Laurence Hyde, earl of Rochester (1642-1711), a very significant but under-studied politician whose long career in public life stretched from the Restoration to the latter part of Anne’s reign. It is argued that a vital dimension of Hyde’s religious beliefs can be supplied by a detailed consideration of his family life. His father’s example, his sister’s conversion, a series of early deaths, and his relationships with his brother-in-law – James II – and nieces – Mary II and Anne – all combined to define Hyde’s public status. The interplay of these factors would lead to acute crisis in the winter of 1686/7, when his position as the protestant chief minister of a catholic king became untenable, and chronic discontent thereafter until his death in 1711. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent years have seen the growth of a new and newly self-conscious cultural historiography of the senses. This article extends and critiques this literature through a case study of the sensory work and worlds of Sir John Floyer, a physician active in Lichfield during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Floyer is best known for his work on pulse-taking, something which he described as contributing to the art of feeling. Less well known is his first book - a discussion of the tastes of the world and their therapeutic possibilities. The article explicates, contextualizes, and relates these two books and uses this analysis to suggest ways of refining and developing the wider historiography of the senses. It demonstrates how they reveal that what Floyer sensed was closely bound up with the changing ways in which he sensed, particularly when he began feeling the pulse in a 'Chinese' style. This, the article concludes, suggests that historians of the senses need fundamentally to reconsider the model of culture which underpins their work, focusing less on the ways in which people have interpreted or ordered sensory stimuli, and rather analysing the senses as forms of skill or dynamic ways of engaging with the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the importance of the epitaph in early modern England, Shakespeare is considered by most critics to have had little regard for the commemorative potential of the genre. But his English history plays take seriously the trope of the living acting as epitaphs for the dead: through embodied epitaphic performances in these plays, Shakespeare draws upon the cultural valences of the epitaph to disrupt and critique the very relation of continuity and obligation between present and past, living and dead, that epitaphs more conventionally propose. The embodied epitaphs of the history plays make a case for rupture rather than continuity, and challenge the notion that the present should imitate the past. Shakespeare uses these epitaphs to interrogate what it means, and costs, to remember the past by remaking the present in its image. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even though non-emergency private baptism became a debated issue in seventeenth-century England, the practice, as has been commonly believed, did not become a trend all over the country. By taking a close look at several seventeenth-century baptismal registers of churches in and outside London, this article shows that non-emergency private baptism was the choice taken mostly by well-to-do families living in London. As a contrast, rural parishes still adhered strictly to the Prayer Book, by administering private baptism only in emergency. Therefore, this article maintains that non-emergency private baptism was more of an exception than the common practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the impact of the Tudor religious reforms in the rural upland parish of Kirkby Malhamdale, Craven, in the Yorkshire Dales, from the late medieval period, when it was dominated by the economic power of the monasteries, during the Dissolution and subsequent changes, to 1603. Although early churchwardens' accounts have not survived for the parish, the analysis draws upon a variety of contemporary sources including wills, ecclesiastical documents, manor court rolls and other miscellaneous material, as well as the fabric and structure of the parish church itself. Aspects of worship and ritual in Kirkby Malham, the response to the reforms, and the extent to which conformity in the reformed Church of England was established in the parish by the end of the sixteenth century, are examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism is presented for the novel "Villette" by Charlotte Brontë. The heroine is an Englishwoman teaching English on the European Continent at a school based on Continental norms and the Roman Catholic church. She initially denounces the Continental way of life as duplicitous and enslaving against the English model of liberty, openness and fair play. Her ideas change. The article notes that national identifications themselves are products of imagination subject to change.

This article discusses the Psammead Trilogy of E. Nesbit. It portrays the fantasy element enabling visualization of alternative realities, thus functioning as a critique of Edwardian concepts of gender and society. In all three novels the five children function without an adult leader. The character Anthea, the oldest girl, takes the leadership role. The article notes that this utopian version of society prioritizes care of children and symbolizes socialist protection of the powerless.

The article discusses the use of defamatory and libelous popular literature in early modern British literature. It describes the influence of libels on popular culture in 17th century England, the seditious libel sent to the Earl of Rutland and the ways in which libelous literature encouraged or caused social unrest, and the psycho-sexual gender identities and stereotypes expressed in libels. Other subjects under discussion include the poetical aspects of libelous literature, the social relationship between British aristocracy and poor people, and the socio-economic class distinctions in the county of Lincolnshire.

This paper's subject is the recurrent theme of sacramental hermeneutics in preaching at Paul's Cross, London, in the mid-Tudor period, focussing on John Jewel's famous 'Challenge Sermon' delivered soon after Elizabeth I's accession. Significantly, this sermon sets the terms of disputation between reformers and traditionalists about England's religious identity in the so-called 'Great Controversy' of the 1560s. While Jewel appealed to the Reformers' adherence to the authority of Scripture and the primitive Church, the bulk of the sermon concerns the hermeneutics of sacramental presence, namely, how to interpret rightly the relation between a sacramental sign (signum) and the mystical reality signified (res significata). As the 'Challenge Sermon' is largely an exploration of semiotic principles, we will examine Jewel's theory of signs, its antecedents and its consequences for the definition of England's subsequent religious identity. Considered are implications for 'moral ontology' in its shift away from the assumptions of sacramental culture towards what has been termed a 'culture of persuasion.' Jewel's argument offers a helpful vantage point for examining the issue of the 'Reformation and the disenchantment of the world' and for revisiting the assumptions of revisionist historiography. Finally, we suggest that Jewel's approach provides a means of interpreting the key role of Paul's Cross itself in the public life of the realm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on the aspects of America's attitude towards England during the 1840s and 1850s in connection with the book "English Traits," by Ralph Waldo Emerson. The issue of race is also given attention in the article with a focus on the Saxons and the Normans from the North and South. Slavery is also briefly discussed as well as the developments of English history within the transatlantic culture of the 1840s and 1850s.

Political arithmetic, generally understood as an early form of political economy, was originally designed by Sir William Petty in the 1670s less as a method of quantitative analysis than as a program of government through the direct manipulation of demographic processes. In the context of the English colonization of Ireland, its goal was “the transmutation of Irish into English”; under the Catholic James II it briefly became a program for the catholicization of the three Stuart kingdoms. Both projects undermined the national and religious categories associated with traditional exclusionist policy and fostered a radical inclusionism. Only after 1688 did Petty's successors decisively rearticulate political arithmetic as a putatively apolitical analytical tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite their significant presence throughout the modern era, Scottish emigrants to England have been neglected as a topic of research. At various times, Scottish in-migration to the north-east of England was greater than any other English region both numerically and proportionately. Its visibility was evident in terms of cultural expression through the myriad organisations established from the 1860s to the 1970s. Scots, and their descendants, made a vital contribution to the economic and political development of the region. This article examines the formation and operation of Scottish ethnic networks. It will explore the wider issue of the nature of Scottish migration to the north-east, the strength of ethnic affiliation within this group and the range of networks used to overcome dislocation or alienation. The central findings draw on a rich variety of sources including the records of local Burns Clubs, St Andrew's Societies and Pipe Bands, supplemented by local press material and oral testimony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the impact of the past on modernization in England. Prominence of English history in contemporary cultural discourse; Role of the past in national identity; Potential in sustaining a sense of continuity and change.

Provides information on Jacobitism and popular disturbances in Northern England from 1714 to1719. Interpretation of historians on the real meaning of Jacobitism; Arguments of these historians on the correlation of rioting with the actual participation in rebellion; Significance of riots in demonstrating the ability of the local forces of law and order in handling disturbances.

Discusses twentieth-century England's shifting attention from aristocratic to bourgeois dimension and historicizing the changing nature of anti-modern criticism. Effect of urbanization on England; Activities of ramblers' movements; Effect of American culture on England; Comments on folklorists on urbanization; Effect of 1930s political developments to cultural pessimism.

Investigates into how the economic and financial aspects of the working-class life were ordered and regulated by the civil law in Victorian England. Accounts on the transformation of the English civil law in the Victorian period; Division of classes; Class bias and prejudice; Money management of the working-class.

This article discusses the origins of the name of the Cheshire parish of Antrobus in northern England. The author believes that the origins of this town's name can be traced to the Gaelic term an trebthas, which translates to the farm or the dwelling. The likely origins of this place name in the migration of Norse Irish settlers to the region in the tenth century is considered. The evidence in favor of the theory of Norse Irish settlement is framed in terms of the apparent historical openness of this land to settlement in the tenth century.

A review of the articles “Zion's people: who were the English nonconformists?” in 3 parts, "Gender, age and ethnicity," "Occupations (Quakers, Baptists, Congregationalists)," and "Occupations (Methodists) and conclusions," by C. D. Field, which appeared in volume 40 of the periodical “Local Historian,” is presented.