This article examines the forces that shaped the responses of the urban commons to the Reformation in Augsburg. Developing work by Blickle and others, it considers the extent to which traditional communal ideals were reflected in measures to construct a system of ‘sacral corporatism’. An examination of the attitudes of guildsmen towards communal values and institutions shows variation in their views, even on such basic points as the identification and imposition of the ‘common good’. Case studies show how predominantly poor weavers were attracted to the call to enforce communal principles as a means of defending their status and incomes. To this end they welcomed evangelical teaching, for it provided scriptural and ethical endorsements of corporate action. In contrast, members of the butchers' guild, who were involved in a capital intensive occupation, resisted communal restraints on their freedom to trade and make profits. The butchers' opposition to the Reformation rested more on their rejection of ‘sacral corporatism’, as advocated by reformers in Augsburg, than on support for Catholicism. Augsburg shows the significance of communal values in the urban Reformation, but it demonstrates that these were neither static nor uniformly accepted. On the contrary they were themselves the subject of dispute.

This essay maintains that John Foxe has been under-utilized as a source of early modern English social history. Accordingly, the mid-Tudor portions of the Acts and monuments of Foxe are examined with reference to such topics as the size of early modern families, the roles of spouses within marriage, the status of romantic love and marriage, and the treatment of children. In addition to these familiar categories, however, the essay also asks whether the protestant community of the Marian era was forming a coherent vision of the family as part of its strategy of survival, and whether the catholic authorities were aware of this and attempted to thwart its development. The possibility of a connection between the protestant emphasis on rediscovering the heart of the Christian gospel and a renewed emphasis on the biblical vision of family is raised, together with a discussion of the English reformers' concern that families not serve as hindrances in the advancement of the kingdom of God at that critical juncture in the life of the nation.

This article questions the assumption that the earl of Cork was at the forefront of the attack on the earl of Strafford in England. It is argued that, before the opening of the Long Parliament, Cork had much to gain by securing Strafford's favour because of his continuing need to secure his Irish estates and his increasing social ambitions within the English court. The earl's decision to stand as witness against the lord lieutenant in 1641 was made with great reluctance, and the trial itself was fraught with unexpected dangers for Cork as well as Strafford. Throughout the crisis of 1638–41, the earl of Cork was motivated by political and financial concerns, not by a single-minded hatred of the earl of Strafford.

In the late eighteenth century, the British electorate began thinking about politics and statecraft in a new way. Britons challenged the natural rights of the nation's aristocracy to rule, and actively linked the personal behaviour of individual noblemen and women to real or imagined public consequences. Aristocratic gaming provided Britons with a rich vocabulary for voicing such concerns. The noble gamester, perceived as erratic, self-interested, and without honour, personified those aspects of private aristocratic vice most likely to undermine national well-being. The 1784 Westminster election specifies two aspects of this controversy. The political unworthiness of notorious gamester Charles James Fox (a front-runner in the election) was linked early on to his personal financial mismanagement, which intimated, in the public mind, his potential abuse of public funds. Fox further contaminated his suitability for public office by allowing the fifth duchess of Devonshire, herself a gamestress, to canvass for him. Her presence in Westminster not only dramatized Fox's gamester persona, but effeminized it. Pittite propaganda stressed Fox's culpability on both counts, and emphasized a new concern with private virtue as fundamental to the moral prerogative to rule.

Pietro Giannone was a revolutionary thinker who sought in the early decades of the eighteenth century to free Italy from the inveterate, legally entrenched feudal power of the church and then to free Christianity itself from the stifling and corrupting embrace of the political church. This essay tells the improbable story of how his writings were taken up and disseminated in Britain by the non-juring bishop and antiquary Richard Rawlinson, the learned but morally unsound Scottish journalist Archibald Bower, and an odd crew of Jacobites. It is shown that the translations of Giannone got into some very influential hands and represent part of an undervalued Jacobite contribution to the origins of the Scottish Enlightenment and to the thought of Edward Gibbon.

Condorcet has been seen since the 1790s as the embodiment of the cold, rational Enlightenment. The paper explores his writings on economic policy, voting, and public instruction, and suggests different views both of Condorcet and of the Enlightenment. Condorcet was concerned with individual diversity; he was opposed to proto-utilitarian theories; he considered individual independence, which he described as the characteristic liberty of the moderns, to be of central political importance; and he opposed the imposition of universal and eternal principles. His efforts to reconcile the universality of some values with the diversity of individual opinions are of continuing interest. He emphasizes the institutions of civilized or constitutional conflict, recognizes conflicts or inconsistencies within individuals, and sees moral sentiments as the foundation of universal values. His difficulties call into question some familiar distinctions, for example between French, German, and English/Scottish thought, and between the Enlightenment and the ‘counter-Enlightenment’. There is substantial continuity, it is suggested, between Condorcet's criticism of the economic ideas of the 1760s (of Tocqueville's ‘first’ French revolution) and the liberal thought of the early nineteenth century.

Historians concerned to demonstrate women's increasing relegation to a private, domestic sphere in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have emphasized the extent to which married women's opportunities were restricted by the common law practice of coverture, which deprived wives of the ability to enter into economic contracts in their own right. Yet social and cultural historians have argued that women played an essential role as purchasers in promoting the consumer revolution of these decades. This article explores the devices used by married women consumers to evade the strictures of coverture. Focusing on three overlapping practices – wives' willingness and ability to pledge their husbands' credit to purchase a wide range of ‘necessary’ goods, their use of this tactic to secure a degree of independence from unsuccessful marriages, and their active participation in the deliberations of a variety of small claims courts – it argues that the purchase of coverture in the sphere of consumption was partial and contested, rather than monolithic.

The fall of class in nineteenth-century British history has become a familiar tale. Its rise in the historiography of eighteenth-century Britain has been less noted. This essay explores the reasons for this divergence and emphasizes its methodological origins. It highlights the need for a comprehensive history of class society and identity to replace the confused and contradictory picture of particular classes and communities that is currently on offer. To understand better the constitution of class society, it urges historians to talk less of consciousness and more of identity and to recognize that class is an imagined community much like any other. It proceeds to use this understanding of class identity to assess the turn to political language amongst social historians interested in class. The paper offers a sustained examination of the recent work of Joyce and Wahrman in particular and argues that insufficient attention has been paid to the variety of usable political languages and to the particular discursive contexts in which they are employed. It is argued that to acknowledge that class is so constructed is not to deny its existence or its importance and that historians need to look beyond political discourse to explain how class became so central to the self and the social in the nineteenth century.