Ever since Lucien Febvre, in his classic essay on the origins of the French Reformation, characterized the sixteenth century as ‘ a long period of magnificent religious anarchy’, the nature of this ‘anarchy’ has remained somewhat puzzling. The question posed by Febvre - if Calvinist churches were only organized in the late 1550s, who were the protestants before this date?-retains all its interest while inevitably raising other problems. Can one make sense of this anarchy? When, if at any time in the sixteenth century, did it come to an end? Professor Mandrou has recently situated the period of anarchy between the first French manifestations of the Lutheran revolt in the early 1520s and the affair of the placards in 1534, with Calvinism bringing order to the general confusion between 1536 and 1540. But it is now established that Antoine Marcourt's placards, though important in the popular and official reactions they provoked, did not reveal protestant organization or doctrinal unity. Nor was Calvinism in a position to impose such uniformity until a much later date if at all. The rigours of Calvinist theology may have represented the logical culmination for the spiritual odyssey of a Farel or a de Bèze, but this was not necessarily so for the lower clergymen, artisans and even peasants who were attracted by one aspect or another of reformed ideas. Febvre pointed out the confusion of contemporaries, most of whom had no idea precisely what the different varieties of protestantism were: a confusion perhaps best shown in Florimond de Raemond's characterization of Lefèvre d'Étaples, Farel and Roussel as ‘Lutheran Zwinglians’. If the evangelical humanist intellectuals of the Meaux group caused such incomprehension, then how much more bewildering must have been the unsystematic beliefs and sceptical criticisms of the menu peuple, especially before the literate among them had the opportunity to read the French edition of Calvin's Institutes in 1542.

According to a familiar interpretation, London was parliamentarian in the English Revolution, and was instrumental in the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of the English republic which endured for eleven years. London was the arsenal, the treasure–house and the recruiting ground for the revolutionary cause; it was the Paris of the English Revolution. In this article I shall argue that from early 1646 – a year after the formation of the New Model Army – London was deeply divided between those who wanted the terms agreed by the Houses to be imposed on Charles rather than negotiated with him, and those who wanted a speedy end to the war, a mutually agreed peace, the disbandment of the army and the imposition of religious uniformity. By 1647 the rulers of London were dominated by an implacable hatred of the revolutionary army, and bent their efforts to restoring Charles to his throne. In this policy they enjoyed the warm support of a majority of the City's population, who repeatedly demonstrated their anti-revolutionary convictions. in both word and deed. The army's political support in London was drawn mainly from the artisan and tradesman classes (many of them non-citizens), and from the suburbs. To a large extent it was the assiduous efforts of one man – Philip Skippon, major-general of the New Model infantry – which kept London in the parliamentary camp during the second civil war.

Perhaps some justification is needed for yet another study on the literary background of the Easter 1916 Rising. Certainly the ‘high’ literature, represented by such writers as Yeats, AE, Synge and the three insurrection poet-fighters (Pearse, MacDonagh and Plunkett) has already been extensively analysed by a number of scholars. However, it is usually forgotten that numerous ‘popular’ authors were also writing in the forty years before 1916; authors who might be expected, if only by virtue of their numbers, to command a considerable readership. Names such as Joseph Campbell, Ethna Carberry, Nora Hopper, Seumas MacManus, Alice Milligan and Seumas O’Sullivan are unknown today except in occasional references by literary critics, yet these writers produced a great deal of verse on national topics, and were close to the general public and its preoccupations. Their work deserves the attention of historians; for only by identifying common ground between the ‘high’ and the ‘low’ literature can one explore with any confidence the complex relationship between that literature as a whole and Irish society during this period. This I hope to do in the following pages.

Of all the professions none has proved more resistant to the inclusion of women than the Christian ministry; no branch of the church stemming from the Reformation has been firmer in asserting the ‘disability of sex’ for ordained ministers than has the Church of England. The contemporary struggle to open the priesthood to women is the latest phase in a long movement of church feminism which permeated the Church of England from the very last years of Victoria's reign, a movement which, by 1930, had succeeded in considerably increasing women's influence and even ministry in the English Establishment although it had failed in its more radical aims. As they battled for the right to vote for (and sit on) elective church councils, as they sought equality of ministry with male laity, as they searched for vocationally fulfilling modes of pastoral care and evangelism which respected the ban against ordination, and as they assaulted that ban itself, able and ambitious church feminists have been continually frustrated by sexist prejudice, clerical exclusiveness, and entrenched religious tradition.

The conflict between secrecy and publicity is one of the most delicate issues in foreign policy. Not long ago, absolute monarchs were able to conduct diplomacy that was really secret and could make war and peace - not to mention less cardinal decisions-without explanation. However, in the age of mass armies and of total wars, public opinion has to be mobilized and the issues of foreign policy need to be elaborated, justified and defended, even by non-democratic governments. On the other hand, professional diplomats continue to claim that secrecy is often a crucial prerequisite for successful foreign policy. Modern international relations have thus posed a seemingly insoluble dilemma that will probably haunt governments in the future: negotiations can be flexible and successful only if they are kept secret, but they will be barren without popular consent.

In 1970 Esmonde Robertson rightly took Geoffrey Warner to task for having failed, in his biography of Pierre Laval, to outline the background to the Rome Agreements of January 1935 between France and Italy which preceded the Italian conquest of Ethiopia. Basing his argument upon published French and Italian sources, Robertson showed that the statement of French disinterest in Ethiopia made to Mussolini by Laval in 1935 had antecedents which stretched back as far as 1932. In a more recent work Robertson has added to the picture of Franco-Italian relations in the early 1930s from unpublished sources, perhaps most notably in demonstrating that as early as July 1931 Pierre Laval raised the matter of an Italian occupation of Ethiopia in a favourable sense with the then Italian foreign minister, Count Dino Grandi. Robertson's lead in establishing the importance of these developments has been followed by Lowe and Marzari in their study of Italian foreign policy in the period 1870–1940, although another scholar in a recent survey of Mussolini's aspirations makes no mention of them at all.

The effects of the Second World War on British colonial Africa were far-reaching and unexpected. Colonial governments, hitherto concerned with establishing and preserving law and order, with administration, the collection of taxation, and with slow economic development, had perforce to divert their energies into more varied and unorthodox channels. Troops were recruited from the colonies and in addition local Home Guards were formed. African colonies acquired a new strategic importance and became the scene for new intelligence and counter-espionage activities: this was especially so after the French government signed the armistice with Germany on 22 June 1940. On the following day the British government promised that if French overseas territories continued the war against the Nazis Britain would guarantee their integrity and economic stability, as well as providing funds to pay the salaries and pensions of French colonial officials. The governor of Nigeria, Sir Bernard Bourdillon, did much to encourage the rallitmcnt of neighbouring Vichy colonies to the Free French cause of General de Gaulle. It was part of French propaganda to exaggerate British involvement in the French colonies and to paint de Gaulle as simply a tool of British imperialism; and it was part of Britain's propaganda to minimize her own role and to stress that the British were simply supporting the initiatives of the Free French. As a result we have not yet been presented with a balanced and scholarly assessment of the contribution which the British in Nigeria made to the ralliement of French Equatorial Africa and the Cameroons in August 1940.

It is really deplorable that until quite recently there still existed in Western academic circles a number of serious misunderstandings about Chinese historiography, particularly the Chinese theory and practice of historical method and critical techniques. Many well-known academic figures still do not know, or refuse to face the fact, that the Chinese tradition of pursuing an objective knowledge of history can be dated back as far as the first century and that the quality of critical scholarship had reached a level equal, either in terms of textual criticism or higher criticism, to any found in the West up to the beginning of the nineteenth. To cite a few examples of Western ignorance. An American sinologist specializing in Chinese traditional historiography firmly asserts that ‘the Chinese are not a whit behind Western scholarship in the exacting domain of textual or preparatory criticism’, but ‘in the field of historical criticism... Chinese historians of the old school did not evolve those principles which are now regarded in East and West alike as an indispensable part of scientific historical method’, although ‘since the seventh century, a few bold, independent spirits have evolved the elements of historical criticism’.1 Another sinologist holds nearly the same position by stating that ‘what was missing’ in traditional Chinese historiography until the sixteenth century was a ‘systematic method’ of criticism, while recognizing that ‘there was an almost continuous line of doubters’ from the early eighth century onwards, and that under the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) attempts were ‘made to bring all the doubts together into one publication’and so to lay‘ the basis for organized study’, an active role being played by ‘ancillary studies of all’ including philology in the development of the Chinese textual criticism of history.2 The most bigoted and dogmatic verdict passed on Chinese historiography which I have ever read in the Western literature is Professor J. H. Plumb's assertion that Chinese historians ‘never attempted, let alone succeeded, in treating history as objective understanding’, and that ‘Chinese scholars were using historical materials for the same purposes in the early twentieth century as in the T'ang and Han dynasties’. Professor Plumb's bias is further reflected in the affirmation, which was added after his reading of Professor E. G. Pulleyblank's remarkable essay Chinese historical criticism: Liu Chih-chi and Ssu-ma Kuang,3 that ‘I would maintain that the Chinese were concerned solely with creating an educative past - subtle, highly detailed, accurate in commission, but not history’4.

In the last fifteen years military history in Britain has gained considerably in respectability, both in the country at large and in academic circles specifically. But it still has problems of identity. On the one hand, military history can at last find itself judged as part of ‘total history’. But, on the other, its origins as the staple fodder of nineteenth-century military academies have bequeathed it a strong didactic flavour which has proved hard to shed. Military history and strategic theory do not yet stand in the same relationship to each other as, say, political history and political theory. Perhaps because in Britain there is still too little independent informed analysis of defence, military history can be employed in a dual role. The ‘lessons of history’ are stronger here than in any other area. However impeccable the motives of military historians, their work is too often used as a prescription for the future rather than as a study of the past.