This article argues that historians have misread Sir Thomas Smith's famous work as a narrowly factual description of English society and institutions, and Smith himself as a proto-rationalist thinker. Instead, De republica anglorum represents Smith's attempt as a citizen of the elect nation to theorize the ‘mixed monarchy’ inaugurated with Elizabeth's accession. It should thus be read as an important contribution to English Protestant apologetic of the 1560s, in conjunction with the work of men who more obviously engaged in that discourse: John Foxe, Laurence Humphrey, and John Aylmer. The article makes this case by reconstituting three cultural contexts which I argue need to be taken into account when analysing Smith's text. The first establishes Smith's ideological concerns and convictions in Edward VI's reign and in the early years of Elizabeth's. The second focuses on the immediate circumstances in which Smith wrote De republica anglorum: a polemical exchange between the Englishman Walter Haddon and the Portuguese Osorio da Fonseca concerning religious reformation and kingship. I then analyse De republica anglorum with reference to the key terms and issues identified in these contexts. The conclusion locates Smith's text in relation to one further context: Claude de Seyssel's The monarchy of France and its use by French Huguenot theorists in the 1560s. That nexus enabled Smith satisfactorily to address the central problem with which he and fellow apologists grappled throughout Elizabeth's reign: ungodly kingship in the guise of female rule.

Since the late 1960s, the English Reformation has often been represented as a process of change forced upon an unwilling people by an educated social elite. The religious system of the elite, by this view, is seen as inimical to a broad range of popular practices and beliefs, with puritan ideology giving extreme expression to socially repressive tendencies. Although recent scholarship has sought to modify this view, the relationship of popular and elite culture in London is still often perceived as confrontational. The present article seeks to examine patterns of religious behaviour among the social elite in London during the later sixteenth century, arguing that continuity in certain traditional forms of piety, such as charitable benefaction and funerary practice, expresses a complex of fundamental attitudes and beliefs which operated across the social spectrum. These practices, when enacted, defined and legitimated the parish as a religious community. They also served to reattach a shared belief system to a historically changing religious context, a process of renegotiation in which the whole civic population participated.

The examination of Pufendorf's Monzambano shows that he was strongly interested in the question of sovereignty, and that the complex reality of the Holy Roman Empire demanded a completely new approach to the question of where sovereignty within the Empire lay. Pufendorf developed his account of the Empire as an irregular political system by using essential aspects of Hobbes's theory and thus departed from all previous writers on the forma imperii. But Pufendorf's writing on the Empire has not only to be linked with political and philosophical discussion about sovereignty within the Empire but also with his own main writings where he developed a more detailed theory regarding the issue of sovereignty in general. The peace of Westphalia was not only an international settlement but it also shaped the constitution of the Empire to a considerable degree, and this is of crucial significance for the history of political thought during the seventeenth century.

This article argues for a more holistic approach to understanding the Old Poor Law. Using three detailed case studies from southern England, it focuses on the dynamics of differing social groups within the parish. It also looks at the role of the law, looking beyond the statutes to the parts played by King's Bench, Quarter Sessions and individual justices and petty sessions in creating a diversity of experiences for the poor. However, it also stresses the differential access to charitable funds, common rights, and poor relief in individual communities, and the ways in which parish elites attempted to put the total available resources to what they saw as the best uses. From 1650 to 1780 these combined resources allowed a generally humane approach to the treatment of poverty and misfortune, and maintained the independence of the cottager and labourer in southern England. Only after 1780 when population rose sharply and rural employment shrank did the flexibility of combined charitable and rate-based relief founder and more drastic devices were employed to cope with basic needs. In this process the independence of the labourer and cottager was undermined, charitable sources were marginalized, and the seeds were sown for the acceptance of the New Poor Law.

The discourse of America's founding generation, it is now widely recognized, was rich and variegated in its composition, drawing upon the commonwealth tradition, the English common law, Montesquieu, Locke, Scottish moral philosophy, and the classics. These sources yield significant clues as to how eighteenth-century Americans viewed religious liberty and church–state relations, subjects of the First Amendment to the Constitution. Supplementing the work of legal historians on the religious provisions of the early state constitutions, the study of political ideas suggests the parameters of the eighteenth-century debate over the effects which various types of religious belief and ecclesiastical establishment had upon manners and institutions. It also reveals the ideological underpinnings of the apparently inconsistent legal provisions for religion at the state level, and, far from settling the elusive question of ‘original intent’, highlights the nature of the divisions within the founding generation.

This article examines the isomorphic connections between the scientific and political ideas of William Lovett and the National Association for the Political and Social Improvement of the People. It demonstrates that, far from being a mere coincidental device, distinct from his politics, Lovett's scientific ideas helped shape the internal structure of his political radicalism. The same was also true of the National Association more generally. Concepts and assumptions derived from phrenology and physiology served the heuristic function of stimulating the construction of analogous systems which directed and conditioned the version of political radicalism which Lovett and the National Association propagated. This suggests that in the mid-nineteenth century the importance of the organic sciences was more politically subtle than previously thought and that a reconciliation of the ideas of George Combe with political radicalism was possible. This insight is compatible with recent historiographical trends, and opens up new vistas for the study of science in radicalism.

This study focuses upon a bout of racial killing that occurred on the South African Witwatersrand during a white miners' strike in 1922. By demonstrating that most of the racial victims of the strikers and their supporters were not African miners, or Africans working with the police to suppress the strike, it argues against any easy explanation of the racial killings in narrow terms of class conflict. A more complex account is then offered, one that relies upon close attention to the nature of the victims, the timing and location of the killings, as well as to the rumours that accompanied them. In essence, the article proposes that the murders are to be understood as part of a (subconsciously impelled) process by which many in the striking communities sought to reconstitute the white racial community then sundered by acute class antagonisms. This attempt was made as the strike rolled towards civil war, and on the basis of a putative ‘black peril’. Set in a comparative frame, the article closes by reflecting upon the importance in the murders of white workers' sense that their identity had been destabilized by changes in and outside the workplace.

The signing of the Lateran Pacts between Mussolini and Pius XI not only changed the status of the Vatican, it also transformed its financial position overnight. After decades of financial difficulty, the Vatican acquired a substantial capital endowment, the investment of which the pope entrusted to Bernardino Nogara. But as the diary of Nogara reveals, as a result of the pope's ambitious spending plans, the lack of a proper system of financial control in the Vatican, and, above all, the impact of the Wall Street crash, within less than two years the Vatican was losing money hand over fist. This article explains how Nogara reconstructed the finances of the Vatican in the wake of this disaster, and explores the links between the Vatican's first experience of playing the international capital markets and the pope's notions of social and economic ethics.

In 1996 Miles Taylor published an historiographical review of Chartism in which he argued that our understanding of the movement has stagnated since the publication of important research by Gareth Stedman Jones and Dorothy Thompson in 1983–4. Taylor suggests that the new cultural history of politics (or the ‘linguistic turn’) is to blame for this ‘impasse’, and argues that scholars should consolidate the work of Stedman Jones and Thompson. I argue that Chartist historians should continue to engage with contemporary approaches. The new political history sheds light on some persistent problems of interpretation which Taylor passes over. It also raises the possibility of extending the study of Chartism into the colonial realm, an area historians have not yet seriously broached. In conclusion, a sketch is given of the significance of Chartist political culture in one episode of protest in the Australian colony of Victoria in 1853.

This review surveys the study of early modern sermons by historians and literary critics in recent years. It argues that sermons are becoming more important to research in the period, particularly given the revisionist historians' emphasis on religious politics and the shift to historicism in literary studies. None the less, sermons are rarely scrutinized by either group of scholars in a way that utilizes both their rhetorical artfulness and their political engagement: they are not studied as both texts and events. This is partly a result of the different perspectives from which they have been examined by previous generations of scholars. Although two recent monographs, Peter McCullough's Sermons at court and Lori Anne Ferrell's Government by polemic, demonstrate ways in which this might be corrected, it must still be acknowledged that much work remains to be done.

Historians of early modern science face a serious problem, in that there was no science in early modern society. There were, however, other enterprises in the early modern period devoted to the understanding and manipulation of the physical world. This review identifies important trends in historians' attempts to comprehend those enterprises. In particular, it identifies four leading currents. The first is the move to characterize these different enterprises themselves, and in particular to understand natural philosophy and the mathematical sciences as distinct practical endeavours. The second is the attention now being paid to the social identity of the investigator of nature. The third is the attempt to understand the history of science as a history of practical enterprises rather than propositions or theories. The fourth, finally, is the understanding of natural knowledge in terms of systems of trust, and in particular in terms of the credit vested in rival claimants. In a combination of these, the review suggests, lies a future for a discipline that has otherwise lost its subject.

Contested boundaries: itinerancy and the shaping of the colonial American religious world. By Timothy D. Hall. Durham: Duke University Press, 1994. Pp. x+196. ISBN 0-8223-1522-X. £10.97.

Original meanings: politics and ideas in the making of the Constitution. By Jack N. Rakove. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996. Pp. xvi.+439. ISBN 0-394-57858-9 £19.26.

Parades and the politics of the street: festive culture in the early American republic. By Simon P. Newman. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. Pp. xiv+271. ISBN 0-8122-3399-9. £24.42.

Transatlantic radicals and the early American republic. By Michael Durey. Kansas: University of Kansas, 1997. Pp. xi+425. ISBN 0-7006-0823-0 £25.71.

Restaurationssystem und Reformpolitik: Süddeutschland und Preußen im Vergleich. Edited by Hans-Peter Ullmann and Clemens Zimmermann. Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1996. Pp. 272. ISBN: 3-486-168-5. DM 98.

Von Wien nach Königgrätz: die Sicherheitspolitik des Deutschen Bundes im europäischen Gleichgewicht, 1815–1816. By Jürgen Angelow. Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1996. Pp. 418. ISBN 3-486-56143-X. DM 88.

Stadt und Bürgertum in Frankfurt am Main. Ein besonderer Weg von der ständischen zur modernen Bürgergesellschaft, 1760–1914. By Ralf Roth. Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1996. Pp. 804. ISBN 3-486-56188-X. DM 128.

The end of the Spanish empire, 1898–1923. By Sebastian Balfour. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Pp. xi+269. ISBN 0-19-820507-4. £35.00.

From mobilization to civil war: the politics of polarization in the Spanish city of Gijón, 1900–1937. By Pamela Beth Radcliff. Cambridge: University Press, 1997. Pp. xviii+354. ISBN 0-521-562139. £40.00.

Czechoslovakia between Stalin and Hitler: the diplomacy of Edvard Beneš in the 1930s. By I. Lukes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Pp. xii+318. ISBN 0-1951-0267-3. £22.50.

Carpatho–Ukraine in the twentieth century: a political and legal history. By V. Shandor. Cambridge, MA: distributed by Harvard University Press for the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University, 1998. Pp. xvii+321. ISBN 0-9164A-5886-5. £21.95.

Czechoslovak national interests, Part I: A historical survey of Czechoslovak national interests, Part II: Reflections on the demise of Czechoslovak communism. By Oskar Krejčí. Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, distributed by Columbia University Press, New York, 1996. Pp. 193, 167. ISBN 0-8803-3343-X. £31.00