Thomas Cromwell's association with various writers has long been noted, but how these authors' writings might reflect his personal religious beliefs has not been closely studied. An examination of one such author, William Marshall, and of his work, reveals not only that Cromwell was likely a Lutheran, but that he used the press to promote doctrinal Protestantism in England. Through Marshall, Cromwell sponsored English translations of doctrinally radical texts by Martin Luther, Joachim von Watt, and Martin Bucer. And when these books got Marshall into trouble, Cromwell protected him. The picture that emerges substantiates John Foxe's description of Cromwell as a ‘valiant soldier and captain of Christ’, but also the charge made in his bill of attainder, that he had circulated heretical books.

Perceptions of the role of the book in the Reformation are shaped by our knowledge of the German print world during the first decades of Protestant expansion. All indications point to evangelical domination of the press in the years when Luther first became a public figure, when the printed book undoubtedly played a crucial role in the dissemination of the evangelical message, and printing enjoyed a period of exuberant growth. But it is by no means certain that assumptions derived from this German model hold good for other parts of Europe. This article re-examines the German paradigm of book and Reformation in the light of two recent bibliographical projects. The first, a trial survey of publishing outputs throughout Europe, demonstrates that the different regional print cultures that made up the European book world were organized in radically contrasting ways. These structural differences were highly significant from the point of view of assisting or impeding the output of controversial literature. The lessons from this survey are then applied to an individual case study, France, which, it emerges, deviated from the German model in almost every particular. Together these two sets of data force us to call into question the natural affinity between print and Protestantism suggested by the German paradigm.

This article discusses the meaning of material culture in early modern Italian convents. Although nuns were required to give up private property rights and embrace religious poverty, many of them brought into the convent a vast range of material objects and goods for their personal use. These goods could also be given away, exchanged, or lent to others within the monastic community and even outside it. By exploring the circulation of objects, money, and goods, we get an interesting picture of how female monastic institutions worked internally and interacted with the city. We also gain a better understanding of the role of objects in articulating religious discipline and regulating the networks of interpersonal relations within cloistered communities.

When news arrived in summer 1580 that James Eustace, third viscount Baltinglass, had entered into rebellion with Gaelic elements in Leinster, Tudor officials in Ireland could barely contain their mystification. How, they wondered, had this important Tudor noble, whose family had for centuries served as a bulwark against the menace of marauding Gaelic clans, become ‘so forgetful of himself’? In seeking to explain the rebellion historians too have sought to understand Eustace's motivation, and in so doing have come to emphasize his integral position in conceiving and leading the revolt. Yet this approach has obscured the rebellion's Gaelic dimension. The rebellion would not have been possible without the support of the O'Byrnes and O'Tooles who sought to uproot the English county administration then being erected in place of their quasi-independent lordships. Fiach MacHugh O'Byrne emerged from this interest to become the rebellion's true strength and in August 1580 dealt a shattering defeat to the English army in Ireland.

This article offers a history of British seventeenth-century coffeehouse licensing which integrates an understanding of the micro-politics of coffeehouse regulation at the local level with an analysis of the high political debates about coffeehouses at the national level. The first section details the norms and practices of coffeehouse licensing and regulation by local magistrates at the county, city, and parish levels of government. The second section provides a detailed narrative of attempts by agents of the Restoration monarchy to regulate or indeed suppress the coffeehouses at the national level. The political survival of the new institution is attributed to the ways in which public house licensing both regulated and also legitimated the coffeehouse. The rise of the coffeehouse should not be understood as a simple triumph of a modern public sphere over absolutist state authority; it offers instead an example of the ways in which the early modern norms and practices of licensed privilege could frustrate the policy goals of the Restored monarchy.

In the 1621 parliament members of the House of Commons clashed with the king over the issue of clergy as JPs: there were suggestions that no clergyman should sit as a JP, or that only bishops and deans should be appointed. Why were there complaints at that time, and were they justified? Was the nomination of clergy as justices an element in ‘the rise of clericalism’? This analysis of clergy JPs between 1590 and 1640 shows that they had been increasing slowly in number from 1590, and more rapidly towards 1617 under Lord Chancellor Ellesmere. But the major expansion in their ranks came under his successors Francis Bacon 1617 to 1621, and especially Bishop John Williams 1621 to 1625. However, there was no systematic central policy behind appointments, and local interests and the normal processes of patronage were important. Perhaps precedence among the justices and the exercise of secular authority by clerical JPs were sometimes troublesome issues. But, despite continuing complaints from MPs, the proportion of clergy to lay JPs was always small – at its highest in 1626, with 7·6 per cent. Thereafter Lord Keeper Thomas Coventry allowed the clerical presence to decline, both absolutely and proportionately. If there was a ‘rise of the clergy’ after 1625, clergy JPs were not part of it.

This article examines the role of graphic satire as a tool of agitation and criticism during the early 1640s, taking as its case study the treatment of the archbishop of Canterbury and his episcopal associates at the hands of engravers, etchers, and pamphlet illustrators. Previous research into the political ephemera of early modern England has been inclined to sideline its pictorial aspects in favour of predominantly textual material, employing engravings and woodcuts in a merely illustrative capacity. Similarly, studies into the contemporary relationship between art, politics, and power have marginalized certain forms of visual media, in particular the engravings and woodcuts which commonly constitute graphic satire, focusing instead on elite displays of authority and promoting the concept of a distinct dichotomy between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture and their consumers. It is argued here that the pictorial, and in particular graphic, arts formed an integral part of a wider culture of propaganda and critique during this period, incorporating drama, satire, reportage, and verse, manipulating and appropriating ideas and imagery familiar to a diverse audience. It is further proposed that such a culture was both in its own time and at present only fully understood and appreciated when consumed and considered in these interdisciplinary terms.

This article examines the relationship between religious debate and constitutional conflict in the 1590s, focusing on the status of ecclesiastical law and the right of the church courts to impose ex officio oaths upon English subjects. It argues that Richard Cosin, a client of Archbishop Whitgift and the leading apologist for the government's use of ex officio oaths, used the issue to make a series of aggressive and controversial assertions of state power. These theoretical claims did not involve sovereignty or the powers of the monarch – the issues usually addressed by historians of political thought – but rather the much more theologically charged question of the line between public authority and private conscience. As such, Cosin and his supporters transformed the raw materials of conformity and anti-puritanism into a view of the state and its coercive powers that seemed to threaten both the common law and the Elizabethan regime's own claims that it did not make ‘windows into men's souls’.

This article explores the extent of popular iconoclasm in England in the period immediately before the start of civil war and for a region – eastern England – thought to lie at the heart of these events. It explores systematically the evidence for the extent of destruction (and the problems in its recording and recovery), the nature of the targets attacked, and the identities of the iconoclasts. The article argues that this first phase of iconoclasm was directed largely against Laudian innovations. Claiming an agency to police sacred space, iconoclasts derived legitimation from the public condemnation of Laudianism in parliament, print, and pulpit. Narrowing the focus, the article moves on to explore the occurrence of iconoclasm through a series of case studies of the complex process of conflict and negotiation within the politics of the parish that preceded, accompanied, and sometimes pre-empted popular destruction. The evidence of iconoclasm is used to show how the implementation of the Laudian programme might politicize local churches as sites of conflict and the potential therefore inherent in its aggressive enforcement for a wider political conflict.

John Lilburne's extensive writings were a major part of the pamphlet output of the Leveller movement. The apparent traditionalism of his language has obscured the extent to which he developed a radical line of thought. For Lilburne, all Englishmen are ‘free-born’; his radicalism lies in his assertion that this free status is to be seen as political status. The phrase ‘free-born Englishman’ comes to be a signifier of a uniform and inclusive citizenship, and the word ‘subject’ drops out of Lilburne's vocabulary. He reinterprets the language of the English legal tradition – following the lead of Sir Edward Coke – to make a collection of ‘liberties’, ‘franchises’, and ‘privileges’ into a uniform set of citizen entitlements. His writing suggests varying and sometimes incompatible grounds for this citizen status: historical arguments, and arguments depending on different notions of positive law, are employed alongside appeals to divine or natural law. However, Lilburne's attachment to the English legal tradition persists, and is an effective vehicle for the politicized vision of the English nation which he wants to convey.

The recent advances in Locke scholarship have given us a vivid description of the context in which Locke drafted the Two treatises of government. Yet, inadvertently, the result has been a skewed perspective on his concerns. As the focus has been on the English crisis in 1679–83 as the specific context from which Locke's theories emanated, the contexts in which they were published have attracted less attention. Redressing the balance, this article brings out Locke's participation in Francophone discussion in the context of a European crisis. After the Revolution of 1688–9 Locke's ‘Second treatise’ was translated into French by David Mazel, a Huguenot cleric. The article shows that Mazel's translation, the Du gouvernement civil, provided the Francophone readership with an anti-absolutist critique of the French regime, and that it emanated from the circle of Locke's closest friends. It was through the intermediary of a handful of Francophone Protestants that the Continental audience became aware of Locke's arguments and that he became known, not only as a theoretical philosopher, but also as a political theorist – as the author of, not the Two treatises, but the Du gouvernement.

This article, through a detailed examination of the private papers of the English landed elite, argues for the important place of anger in early modern society. It investigates the verbal expression of rage, from irritation to fury, in men and women: why it was aroused, how it was articulated, its effects, and in what circumstances anger was regarded as a legitimate response. Anger was a forceful invitation to renegotiate unsatisfactory aspects of relationships. It spotlighted deficiencies in duty, unacceptable conduct, disrespect, broken promises, and frustrated expectations. The article also challenges the prevailing approach to the history of emotions and suggests that we move from a model of linear repression to one of situated experience. Rather than postulating the gradual suppression of unacceptable emotions, historians should examine the conventions governing the expression of emotions in context, as well as the many perspectives on what was acceptable behaviour and what was not. Focusing on the situated use of emotions brings to light the different emotional mentality of the seventeenth century which linked emotions in unfamiliar ways. It also enables to us to uncover the interaction of emotions and how individuals engaged in daily life with cultural scripts, as well as bringing us closer to unravelling the emotional system of early modern England.

In this article we unravel family religion as a crucial strand of evangelical piety in the late seventeenth century. We show how this programme was promoted in print and manuscript by a group of evangelical clergy from both sides of the conformist divide. Using the printed and manuscript memoirs of John Rastrick, a Lincolnshire clergyman, we explore the construction of clerical sociability through the printed text. In particular, we demonstrate that its heart was the communal reading of scripture and religious literature, confirming the household as the key locus for piety in this period. Whereas historians have traditionally been eager to categorize both clergy and laity in this period as either Anglican or nonconformist, we demonstrate that such a divide was often blurred in practice, in particular as represented through family religion. By focusing on issues such as sociability, the formation of identities, and reading practices, we also reconnect the second half of the century with its early Stuart past, suggesting that its influences and refractions fed into a continuity of evangelical identity, stretching from late sixteenth-century puritanism through the Civil War and Restoration to the onset of Evangelicalism in the eighteenth century. Though they were complex, these continuities help to show that a coherent style of evangelical piety was expressed across the ecclesiastical divide throughout the long seventeenth century.

The historiography of English republicanism is dominated by the concept of classical republicanism. Its greatest shortcoming has been neglect of that subject's religious dimension. The consequent need is not simply to recover the radical protestant republican religious agenda. It is to explain why, when classical republicanism came to England, it did so in the moral service of a religious revolution. One context for the answer lay in Christian humanism. Another was the reformation, both magisterial and radical. Both informed the practical identity of the republican experiment as an attempted reformation of manners. So did the rational Greek moral philosophy, as indebted to Plato as to Aristotle, common to certain humanist and Christian political languages. In addition many of the themes of republican writing reflect the struggle by a traditional society to respond to unsettling forces, not only of political and religious, but also social and economic, change. Drawing upon all of these contexts, republican writers attempted to oppose not only private interest politics, embodied by monarchy or tyranny, on behalf of the public interested virtues of a self-governing civic community. This was part of a more general critique of private interest society; a republican attempt, from pride, greed, poverty, and inequality, to go beyond the word ‘commonwealth’ and reconstitute what Milton called ‘the solid thing’.

In 1841, a select committee proposed that the houses of parliament at Westminster, which were being rebuilt in the aftermath of the fire of 1834, be decorated with fresco paintings and that Ludwig I of Bavaria's patronage of the arts be used for guidance. Both recommendations were surprising, for Britain had neither any tradition of public painting, nor any obvious ties with the south German state. This article explains why the committee was so sensible to Ludwig's example, and what it hoped to achieve by introducing fresco painting into Britain. The scheme was to serve not only as the means of establishing a national school of painting that could compete with the modern German school, but also as an integral part of a broader endeavour to construct a national culture in Britain that was both patriotic and socially inclusive. The national potential of this state-sponsored scheme of art promotion came to be undermined, however, by the emergence of both political and religious hostility to such German-style patronage in Britain. The article highlights not only the crucial role played by German art in the endeavour to construct a national culture in Britain, but also the continuing potency of religion as an element of British national identity during the first decade of Victoria's reign. It also draws attention to the fundamental role played by Prince Albert in his capacity as president of the fine arts commission, and the extent to which the debate surrounding the commission's proceedings provided the essential context for both the emergence and reception of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood in 1848–50.

This article builds on the recent willingness among British, Canadian, and imperial historians to question older national histories, and to re-examine how the divergent societies, economies, and polities of the empire once interacted in a wider ‘British world’. It argues that the press acted as a key mechanism for the transmission of political ideas through the permeable internal boundaries of empire. This is demonstrated through analysis of contemporary debate over the Canadian–American reciprocity proposals of 1911. This controversy provided an opportunity for political groups in Britain and Canada to use the press to forge alliances with each other and work together on a specific issue. Two key forces made this possible. In Britain, constructive imperialists had since 1903 sought to rally Dominion support for tariff reform, initially with limited success. In Canada, neither western farmers nor eastern manufacturers seemed interested in imperial preference. It was the reciprocity proposals that changed the situation, providing the second driving force. Canadian manufacturing interests, seeking to prevent the lowering of tariff barriers against United States rivals, began to court British constructive imperialists. As a result political conflict was reshaped both in colony and metropole.

Historians writing on Victorian spiritualism have said little about the reported phenomena of the séance room, despite such events having been the primary reason given by spiritualists for their beliefs. Rather, such beliefs have been seen as a response to the so-called ‘crisis of faith’, and their expression as part of a broader scientific and cultural discourse. Yet the debate about séance phenomena was significantly problematic for the Victorians, in particular the reported phenomena associated with the best-known Victorian medium, Daniel Dunglas Home. In the attempt to provide a natural explanation for Home's phenomena, two groups of experts were appealed to – stage conjurors and scientists – yet it seems clear that the former were unable to explain the phenomena, while scientists who tested Home concluded his phenomena were real. The overwhelming rejection of supernatural agency, and the nature of the response from orthodox science, suggests that such reported phenomena were less the result of a crisis of faith than the cause of a crisis of evidence, the implications of which were deemed scientific rather than religious.

This article examines the development of the idea of the ‘superwoman’ among British Edwardian feminists and contextualizes it within the aristocratic political thought of the day. I examine the idea of the ‘genius’ and the ‘superman’ in order to shed light on why, for some Edwardian feminists, the ideal feminist agent was to be an elite, discerning, remote figure. I argue that Edwardian feminism witnessed an ‘introspective turn’, marked by an interest in character, will, and personality as the key components of emancipation. The focus of political change was firmly located within women themselves. This belief was widespread, even though only a minority chose the language of the ‘superwoman’ to elaborate it. References to the ‘superwoman’ indicates the impact of Nietzschean and egoist ideas upon the women's movement. The ‘superwoman’ was used to position feminism as a movement not just for political rights but for wider social regeneration, and represents a characteristically Edwardian belief in the power of the ‘exceptional individual’ to promote social change.

Through an analysis of the debate between Charles Davenant in England, and Arthur Dobbs, Thomas Prior, and Samuel Madden in Ireland, it establishes that the founders saw the society as a response to Ireland's dependent status in the emerging British empire. The Dublin Society distinguished itself from other improving societies in the British Isles because it explicitly represented a new principle of sociality. The article describes the cultural origins of that principle arguing that a diverse set of groups converged on the ideal of association as a new form of order. The article concludes with a consideration of Madden's understanding, derived from his commitment to improving associations, that Irish national life was best understood as the pursuit of happiness rather than justice or virtue.

In nineteenth-century France, science and religion have often been portrayed as irredeemably opposed to one another. This article seeks to revise this interpretation by showing how these apparently dissonant views intermingled in the study of hysteria. Through a survey of attitudes towards Catholicism and in their treatment of Catholic patients, the article shows how French psychiatrists and neurologists were deeply indebted to religious iconography and experience, despite their vehement anti-clericalism. Because of their hatred of the church, they focused on the treatment of female hysterics who manifested ‘religious’ symptoms – demonopathy, mystical states, and stigmata – in order to amass conclusive evidence of Catholic ‘superstition’. Their preoccupation with such patients meant, however, that they paradoxically re-embedded Catholicism into their scientific practice by incorporating religious motifs, bodily poses, and iconography into their diagnosis of hysteria. At the same time, their disdain for the Catholic religious imagination meant that they refused to explore the fantasies of their subjects. For physicians like Jean-Martin Charcot and the more subtle Pierre Janet – a contemporary and competitor of Sigmund Freud – fantasies of bodily suffering, unearthly physical perfection, and an array of Catholic maternal fantasies associated with images of Mary and Christ were all nothing more than delusions, not the stuff from which an appreciation or understanding of the ‘unconscious’ could emerge. The result was that French physicians offered no psychodynamic transformation or symbolic reinterpretation of their words or physical symptoms, a resistance that was one reason among many for their hostility to psychoanalysis.