This article contends that the confrontation between Sir Francis Hastings and the new king of England, in the winter of 1604–5, was of far more lasting significance in determining King James's religious policy than the Hampton Court Conference, which had left many grievances of the most dogmatic and zealous Calvinists largely unresolved. The showdown was prompted by James's apparent leniency towards Catholicism and his role in the peace process with Spain. James emerged from the encounter as a king of real political ability who turned the episode to his advantage; using the opportunity to ‘tackle’ the Catholic threat and ‘subdue’ the nonconforming puritan ministers whilst also endeavouring to energize local government. Thereafter, he was able to defuse religious friction for much of the rest of his reign.

The comprehensive neglect of English church buildings in the century after the Reformation until the advent of Archbishop Laud has long stood as one of the standard readings of English church history. This article argues that attitudes towards the building and repair of churches in the pre-Laudian period were far more complex than has previously been recognized. It documents a sustained revival of church building and beautification in London that took place well before Laud's emergence, and which is inexplicable without reference to a whole range of practical and social, as well as religious, forces. This evidence, however, should not lead us to downplay the novelty and distinctiveness of the Laudian building programme. Rather, it is suggested here that Laudian polemic advanced a specific view of puritanism as incorporating a profane neglect and contempt of both church services and of the building which housed them. It is this vision of puritan neglect that not only provided a justification for Laudian changes to church practices and interiors in the 1630s, but which has also deflected the attention of later historians away from programmes of church repair in the reign of James I.

In recent years historians have grown sceptical about attempts to trace connections between puritanism and liberty. Puritans, we are told, sought a godly society, not a pluralistic one. The new emphasis has been salutary, but it obscures the fact that a minority of zealous Protestants argued forcefully for the toleration of heresy, blasphemy, Catholicism, non-Christian religions, and even atheism. During the English revolution, a substantial number of Baptists, radical Independents, and Levellers insisted that the New Testament paradigm required the church to be a purely voluntary, non-coercive community in the midst of a pluralistic society governed by a ‘merely civil’ state. Although their position was not without its ambiguities, it constituted a startling break with the Constantinian assumptions of magisterial Protestantism.

This article presents a reinterpretation of James Harrington's writings. It takes issue with J. G. A. Pocock's reading, which treats him as importing into England a Machiavellian ‘language of political thought’. This reading is the basis of Pocock's stress on the republicanism of eighteenth-century opposition values. Harrington's writings were in fact a most implausible channel for such ideas. His outlook owed much to Stoicism. Unlike the Florentine, he admired the contemplative life; was sympathetic to commerce; and was relaxed about the threat of ‘corruption’ (a concept that he did not understand). These views can be associated with his apparent aims: the preservation of a national church with a salaried but politically impotent clergy; and the restoration of the royalist gentry to a leading role in English politics. Pocock's hypothesis is shown to be conditioned by his method; its weaknesses reflect some difficulties inherent in the notion of ‘languages of thought’.

This article seeks to re-balance the canon of anti-corn law leadership by examining the ideas and activities of Thomas Perronet Thompson. A relatively neglected figure in modern accounts of the Anti-Corn Law League and repeal in 1846, Thompson was acknowledged in his own lifetime as an outstanding campaigner whose role in the work of the League and in the mobilization of opinion was exceptional. This article investigates Thompson's free trade principles, and uses his pamphlets, articles, correspondence, speeches, and organizational efforts to create a vivid impression of repeal agitation in the 1830s and 1840s. Personal relationships between anti-corn law leaders are examined, as are the links between their movement and such other phenomena as Chartism and the campaign for factory reform. The article stresses the central importance of Thompson in the achievement of repeal and, by using his contribution as a point of entry, seeks to promote a deeper understanding of the anti-corn law creed and its modes of organization, campaigning, publicity, and propaganda.

The critic and philosopher Hippolyte Taine is presented here as one of the pioneers of the theory of the unconscious in European social thought: a source of the more explicit writings on unconscious motivation in the works of Nietzsche, Pareto, and others. Preceding forms of French liberalism – particularly those of Guizot and Cousin – had depended upon an underlying belief in a number of ideas – in God, in our ability to understand his will, and in reason. A representative regime would be able to mobilize rationality in society and give it effective sovereignty. Taine's life can be interpreted as one of increasing conservatism, but it was consistent in his rejection of such a conception of rationality; first through his technical philosophy, then through the discussion of psychological motivation in mass political movements set out in the Origines de la France contemporaine. It is argued that such a rejection of rationalism was a crucial first step in the elaboration of new forms of liberalism – technocratic, welfarist, and economically individualist. Taine's work represents the passage from one type of liberal theory to another at a crucial moment in French history, the consolidation of universal male suffrage as a foundation of the Third Republic.

This article explores the impact of the First World War on the social reform movement in France, emphasizing hospital policy and medical insurance. I argue that the war gave birth to a concerted reform movement which succeeded in bringing about fundamental changes to health care policy. During the inter-war years, the French embarked on a mission to replace the traditional hospital, the maison des pauvres, with modern facilities designed to cater to the middle class as well as to the poor. In 1928, a landmark law was passed which extended medical insurance to workers and the lower middle class. By 1940, over one half of the population was covered by medical insurance, and dozens of modern hospitals had been constructed. The impetuses to this national reform legislation were the numerous local experiments, whose stories I examine in some detail. Despite the image of Third Republic ‘decadence’, the success of health policy reform during the 1920s and 1930s shows that France was indeed capable of important domestic reforms. Under Vichy, these reforms were consolidated and after the Liberation, Vichy's efforts were saluted and affirmed by French politicians.

Although the 1922–43 Special Powers Acts (SPAs) played a central role in prompting the Northern Irish civil rights movement in the late 1960s, virtually no secondary literature exists on the operation of the statutes. This article examines the manner in which the unionist government employed the acts during the tenure of the northern parliament. It suggests that the 1922–43 SPAs became a central grievance of the minority community because of the manner in which regulations introduced under their auspices were exercised: the ministry of home affairs initially used the emergency statutes to return civil order to the province; however, as violence declined the government began to utilize regulations to prevent the expression of republican ideals. Any attempt to garner support for a united Ireland was perceived as an attack on the Northern Irish constitution. Concurrent with this shift was a change in justification for the 1922–43 SPAs: from being required in order to establish law and order in the face of rising violence, they were soon heralded by unionists as necessary to maintain the constitutional structure of the North. In preventing the public exposition of republicanism, expressions of nationalism were likewise limited. This impacted upon a large portion of the minority community, giving rise to claims that the statutes were being unfairly applied.

The tax strategy of the Labour governments of 1964–70 was intended to be both radical and reforming. That is, it had to fulfil the demands generated by the Labour movement as well as address issues of tax reform which were less closely tied to party politics. This article assesses Labour's ability to do this by paying particular attention to the contrasting budgets of 1965 and 1966. It examines the ideas of Nicholas Kaldor and the interests of the trade unions as two of the forces which shaped tax policy. While recognizing the difficulty of introducing new taxes, the article none the less sees much that was traditional in Labour's approach and offers a pessimistic view of the capacity of the party to change its outlook in the 1960s.

While non-German biographers of Bismarck have usually kept a healthy distance from their subject, German biographers have often allowed their political and religious views to influence their portraits. Most German historians of the ‘long nineteenth century’ were fascinated by, as Hegel would have called it, the genius of such a ‘world historical individual’. Their work greatly influenced the images of Bismarck during the time of the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. Their counterparts in the 1960s and 1970s, however focused critically on the ‘impersonal’ movements of the Bismarckian empire. These, Marxist influenced, analyses did not include any biographies. It was only in the 1980s that three biographers achieved a politically detached evaluation of the chancellor's personality. With the centenary of Bismarck's death in 1998, a return to the pre-1980s views can be noticed in biographies of the chancellor. They threaten to oversimplify Bismarck's personality and government technique again.

Gender relations in German history: power, agency, and experience from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Edited by Lynn Abrams and Elizabeth Harvey. London: UCL, 1996. Pp. x+262. ISBN 1-85728-485-2. £12.95.

Adultery and divorce in Calvin's Geneva. By Robert M. Kingdon. Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard UP, 1995. Pp. ix+214. ISBN 0-674-00520-1 (hb). £18.50.

Housecraft and statecraft: domestic service in Renaissance Venice, 1400–1600. By Dennis Romano. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Pp. xxvi+333. ISBN 0-8018-5288-9. £37.00.

The European nobility, 1400–1800. By Jonathan Dewald. New approaches to European history, ix. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xvii+209. ISBN 0-521-42528-x (pb). £12.95.

Garden and grove: the Italian Renaissance garden in the English imagination, 1600–1750. By John Dixon Hunt. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1996. Pp. xix+268. ISBN 0-8122-1604-0 (pb). £23.50.

Like an ancient woodsman or a guide through the Amazonian jungle, the ideal historian possesses at least two kinds of expertise: enough familiarity with the general terrain to plan successful expeditions and enough experience in the field to make inevitable adjustments to ‘the big picture’ when underway. Of course in the real world (of both geography and history) the tasks of exploration and cartography are often bifurcated, without necessarily disastrous results. The historian who is equally skilled at both close-up description and large-scale theorizing is consequently celebrated as a rare and valued anomaly. Meanwhile, for most of us stumbling scouts, the world beyond our familiar trails remains largely one of learned lore, with connections to our own limited forays often vague at best. Unless, of course, we are fortunate enough to come across something which provides an almost magical link between the narrow and the wide, the micro and the macro.

Power and politics in old régime France, 1720–1745. By Peter R. Campbell. London: Routledge, 1996. Pp. xii+420. ISBN 0-415-06333-7. £50.

Antoine Lavoisier: science, administration, revolution. By A. Donovan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xvi+351. ISBN 0-521-56218-x. £40. 0-521-56672-x. £14.95 (pb).

Officers, nobles and revolutionaries: essays on eighteenth-century France. By W. Doyle. London: Hambledon Press, 1995. Pp. xii+238. ISBN 1-85285-121-x. £35.

Venality: the sale of offices in eighteenth-century France. By W. Doyle. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Pp. xviii+343. ISBN 0-19-820536-8. £45.

The bakers of Paris and the bread question, 1700–1775. By S. L. Kaplan. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1996. Pp. xviii+261. ISBN 08223-1706-0. £47.50.

Montesquieu and the Parlement of Bordeaux. By R. Kingston. Geneva: Droz, 1996. Pp. 329. ISBN 2-600-00161-1. £30.

Class and state in ancien régime France: the road to modernity? By David Parker. London: Routledge, 1996. Pp. xvii+349. ISBN 0-415-13647-4. £40.

The books analysed in this review bear witness in different ways to a revival of historians' interest in the political history of ancien régime France which was highlighted by Peter Campbell in a recent review article in this journal. Campbell speculated that what Fernand Braudel all-so-dismissively called ‘event history’ (l'histoire événementielle) was making a comeback at the expense of Annaliste geo-historical analysis in the longue durée mode or mid-term conjunctural history rooted in social and economic change. A complementary way of looking at the phenomenon, which strikes the reader on engaging with the present crop of works, is to see current historiographical interests in political history as the revenge of Alfred Cobban, progenitor in the 1950s and 1960s of famous revisionist attacks on the socio-economic analyses of the Jacobino–Marxist school of French Revolutionary historiography adorned by Mathiez, Lefebvre, and Soboul. Cobban's broadsides were aimed not simply at some of the conceptual apparatus of the ‘Marxists’, but also sought to highlight empirical research as a corrosive solvent of what he viewed as the deterministic hyperbole of politically-influenced left-wing history.