Oxford Historical Monographs – serie

In medieval Italy the practice of revenge as criminal justice was still popular amongst members of all social classes, yet crime also was increasingly perceived as a public matter that needed to be dealt with by the government rather than private citizens. Confession and Criminal Justice in Late Medieval Italy sheds light on this contradiction through an in-depth comparison of lay and religious sources produced in Siena between 1260 and 1330 on criminal justice, conflict, and violence.Confession and Criminal Justice in Late Medieval Italy: argues that religious people were an effective pressure group with regards to criminal justice, thanks both to the literary works they produced and their direct intervention in political affairs, and that their contributions have not received the attention they deserve. It shows that the dichotomy between theories and practices of 'private' and of 'public' justice should be substituted by a framework in which three models, or discourses, of criminal justice are recognised as present in medieval Italian communes, with the addition of a specifically religious discourse based on penitential spirituality. Although the models of criminal justice were competing, they also influenced each other.

The Kenney family grew up in Saddleworth, outside Oldham, in the last decades of the nineteenth century. In 1905, three of the sisters met Christabel Pankhurst, a turning point which changed the rest of their lives. Annie Kenney became one of the leaders of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), Jessie was an organiser at the heart of the organisation, and Nell campaigned outside the capital. Caroline and Jane used their connections within the suffrage movement as the springboard for careers in innovative education on both sides of the Atlantic. While working-class women are increasingly acknowledged in histories of the WSPU, this study is the first to make them the primary focus, and, in doing so, it opens up a new conversation around sex, class, and politics, and how these categories interacted in this period. This is a study of the possibilities for, and experiences of, working-class women in the militant suffrage movement. It identifies why these women became politically active, their experiences as activists, and the benefits they gained from their political work. It stresses the need to see working-class women as significant actors and autonomous agents in the suffrage campaign. It shows why and how some women became politicised, why they prioritised the vote above all else, and how this campaign came to dominate their lives. It also places the suffrage campaign within the broader trajectory of their lives to stress how far the personal and political were intertwined for these women. Although this is a book about 'working-class suffragettes', Lyndsey Jenkins also reveals what it says about women as workers and teachers, religious believers and political thinkers, and friends and colleagues, as well as suffragettes. Above all, it is a study of sisterhood.

Shadow of a Taxman investigates how the unrecognised Irish Republic's money was solicited, collected, transmitted, and safeguarded, as well as who the financial backers were and what might have influenced their decision to contribute. The Republic's quest for funds took its emissaries as far afield as New York, Buenos Aires, Cape Town, and Melbourne, as well as virtually every parish in Ireland. By selling 'war bonds' to supporters, it raised £370,165 from 140,000 people in Ireland and nearly $6m from 300,000 people in the United States. These bonds promised a return to subscribers when British forces had left Ireland and an independent Irish Republic was internationally recognised.Exploiting newly uncovered documents, Shadow of a Taxman reveals the identities of these subscribers. Cross-referencing with census returns, intelligence reports, memoirs, and IRA membership rolls, it provides the first demographic analysis of non-combatant supporters of Irish independence on the eve of its realisation. It also shows how access to funds shaped the course of the Irish War of Independence and, ultimately, Irish republicans' negotiating position with the British government in 1921.

Designs on Democracy examines a pivotal period in the formation of the modern profession of architecture in Britain. It shows how architects sought to meet the newly articulated demands of a mass democracy in the wake of the First World War. It does so by providing a vivid picture of architectural culture in interwar London, the Imperial metropolis, drawing on histories of design, practice, professionalism, and representation. Most accounts of this period tend to deal exclusively with the emergence of Modernism; this study takes a different approach, encompassing a much broader perspective on the liberal professional consensus that held sway, including architecture's mainstream and its so-called avant-garde. Readers will encounter a number of unexpected narratives, episodes, and projects: from the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley to the rebuilding of Waterloo Bridge; from the impact of the Great Slump to the passing of the first Architects Registration Act (1931); from Trystan Edwards's radical housing campaigns to the Londoners' League's unorthodox preservationism. Pulling in a range of evidence and sources - periodicals, exhibitions, photographs, and films, alongside architecture - it evokes architectural culture by listening carefully to the tenor of its discourse. Architecture's public realm is thus analysed through sometimes surprising phrases: 'manners' to understand ideals of public propriety, 'vigilance' to explore public proprietorship, 'slump' to contextualise the emergence of public relations, 'machine-craft' to understand the forging of public institutions. The volume spans the excitable discussions about the reconstruction of the profession for a democratic age after WWI, to reconstruction and planning following WWII, providing an ambitious revision of how we can understand twentieth century architecture in Britain.

Offering a global history of India's refugee regime, Making Refugees in India explores how one of the first postcolonial states during the mid-twentieth century wave of decolonisation rewrote global practices surrounding refugees - signified by India's refusal to sign the 1951 UN Refugee Convention. In broadening the scope of this decision well beyond the Partition of India, starting with the so called 'Wilsonian moment' and extending to the 1970s, the refugee is placed within the postcolonial effort to address the inequalities of the subject-citizenship of the British empire through the fullest realisation of self-determination. India's 'strategically ambiguous' approach to refugees is thus far from ad hoc, revealing a startling consistency when viewed in conversation of postcolonial state building and anti-imperial worldmaking to address inequity across the former colonies. The anti-colonial cry for self-determination as the source of all rights, it is revealed in this work, was in tension with the universal human rights that focused on the individual, and the figure of the refugee felt this irreconcilable difference most intensely. To elucidate this, this work explores contrasts in Indians' and Europeans' rights in the British empire and in World War Two, refugee rehabilitation during Partition, the arrival of the Tibetan refugees, and the East Pakistani refugee crisis. Ria Kapoor finds that the refugee was constitutive of postcolonial Indian citizenship, and that assistance permitted to refugees - a share of the rights guaranteed by self-determination - depended on their potential to threaten or support national sovereignty that allowed Indian experiences to be included in the shaping of universal principles.

How do the things which connect us also serve to divide us? Electric News in Colonial Algeria traces how news circulated in a particularly divided society: Algeria under French rule in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It tells a different history of globalization, one which puts the experience of everyday people at the centre. The years between 1881 and 1940 were those of maximum colonial power in North Africa; a period of intense technological revolution, global high imperialism, and the expansion of settler colonialism. Algerians became connected to international networks of news, and local people followed distant events with great interest. But once news reached Algeria, accounts of recent events often provoked conflict as they moved between different social groups. In a society split between its native majority and a substantial settler minority, distant wars led to riots. Circulation and polarisation were two sides of the same coin.Examining a range of sources in multiple languages across colonial society, Electric News in Colonial Algeria offers a new understanding of the spread of news. News was a whole ecosystem in which new technologies such as the printing press, telegraph, cinema, and radio interacted with older media like songs, rumours, letters, and manuscripts. The French government watched anxiously over these developments, monitoring Algerians' reactions to news through an extensive network of surveillance that often ended up spreading news rather than controlling its flow. By tracking what different people thought of as news, this history helps us reconsider the relationship between time, media, and historical change.

Text and Textuality in Early Medieval Iberia is a study of the functions and conceptions of writing and reading, documentation and archives, and the role of literate authorities in the Christian kingdoms of the northern Iberian Peninsula between the Muslim conquest of 711 and the fall of the Islamic caliphate at Córdoba in 1031. Based on the first complete survey of the over 4,000 surviving Latin charters from the period, it is an essay in the archaeology and biography of text: part one concerns materiality, tracing the lifecycle of charters from initiation and composition to preservation and reuse, while part two addresses connectivity, delineating a network of texts through painstaking identification of more than 2,000 citations of other charters, secular and canon law, the Bible, liturgy, and monastic rules. Few may have been able to read or write, yet the extent of textuality was broad and deep, in the authority conferred upon text and the arrangements made to use it. Via charter and scribe, society and social arrangements came increasingly to be influenced by norms originating from a network of texts. By profiling the intersection and interaction of text with society and culture, Graham Barrett reconstructs textuality, how the authority of the written and the structures to access it framed and constrained actions and cultural norms, and proposes a new model of early medieval reading. As they cited other texts, charters circulated fragments of those texts; we must rethink the relationship of sources and audiences to reflect fragmentary transmission, in a textuality of imperfect knowledge.

This is a study of the rise of English Arminianism and the growing religious division in the Church of England during the decades before the Civil War of the 1640s. The widely accepted view has been that the rise of puritanism was a major cause of the war; Nicholas Tyacke argues that it was Arminianism - suspect not only because it sought the overthrow of Calvinism but also because it was embraced by, and imposed by, an increasingly absolutist Charles I - which heightened the religious and political tensions of the period. Almost all English Protestants were members of the established church. Consequently, what was a theological dispute about rival views of the Christian faith assumed wider significance as a struggle for control of that church. When Arminianism triumphed, Puritan opposition to the established church was rekindled. Politically, Charles and his advisers also feared the consequences of Calvinist predestinarian teaching as being incompatible with `civil government in the commonwealth'.For this paperback edition, Dr Tyacke has written a new Foreword taking into account recent scholarly debate on the subject.

This is a study of the organized anti-Catholic movement in nineteenth-century Britain. The passing of the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 was in some respects a triumph for religious toleration, but it was followed by a substantial Protestant backlash. This was further stimulated by the theological and evangelistic concerns of evangelicals, the growth of Catholicism in Britain, and the political actions of Irish and British Tories.In this meticulously researched book, John Wolffe examines the anti-Catholic societies which played an important part in the shaping of public opinion, and which exercised significant leverage on politics, notably in 1834-5 and between 1845 and 1855. He explores the cultural and social dimensions of anti-Catholicism, relating them to the values and impact of evangelicalism at a variety of social levels. The Protestant Crusade in Great Britain makes an important contribution to our understanding of Victorian religion, particularly in respect of the interaction between England, Ireland, and Scotland. Dr Wolffe demonstrates that, while the Protestant crusade failed in terms of most of its specific objectives, its impact on the life of the nation was nevertheless far-reaching.

The great depression of the inter-war years was the most profound shock ever to strike the world economy, and is widely held to have led directly to the collapse of parliamentary democracy in many countries. This scholarly study of Greece in the period between the two world wars, however, demonstrates that there was no simple correlation between economic and political crisis.How was an underdeveloped country such as Greece able to recover so fast from this unprecedented economic crisis? Mark Mazower examines the complex processes involved, basing his analysis on detailed statistical research. Recovery, like crisis, threatened prevailing notions of the relationship between state and society, and undermined traditional ruling elites. Dr Mazower's challenging study makes an important contribution not only to the historiography of modern Greece, but also to our understanding of the interrelationship between politics, economics, and the democratic process.

This is a study of the political and social structure of late medieval England. Dr Payling examines the wealth and political influence of a dozen Nottinghamshire families who dominated their county during the first half of the fifteenth century. His analysis shifts the historical emphasis from the barons at the head of their affinities to the greater gentry as members of well-defined shire establishments. This carefully researched study reassesses the nature of baronial-gentry relations, and establishes the true extent of the influence of the greater gentry. His book is both an important addition to local studies and a major contribution to the historiographical debate on the role of the gentry in late medieval England.

This is a scholarly study of the collision of Goths and Romans in the fourth and fifth centuries. Gothic tribes played a major role in the destruction of the western half of the Roman Empire between 350 and 500, establishing successor kingdoms in southern France and Spain (the Visigoths), and in Italy (the Ostrogoths).Our historical understanding of this `Migration Period' has been based upon the Gothic historian Jordanes, whose mid-sixth-century Getica suggests that the Visigoths and Ostrogoths entered the Empire already established as coherent groups and simply conquered new territories. Using the available contemporary sources, Peter Heather is able to show that, on the contrary, the Visigoths and Ostrogoths were new and unprecedentedly large social groupings at this time, and that many Gothic societies failed even to survive the upheavals of the Migration Period. Dr Heather's scholarly study explores the development of Visigothic and Ostrogothic societies, their rise to power, and the complicated interactions with the Romans which helped bring about the fall of the Roman Empire.

This challenging study sets out to explore the nature and meaning of violence in fifteenth-century England. Philippa Maddern examines violence on each side of the law - both in crime and in law enforcement - in order to uncover the attitudes and beliefs of the inhabitants of medieval East Anglia. She investigates the way their moral code was reflected in the procedures and punishments of the courts, and assesses the success of the legal system in maintaining authority and order.Dr Maddern reveals the strong concern for order apparent in fifteenth-century society, and offers a subtle and intelligent analysis of the role of violence. Based on extensive archival research, her scholarly and original study makes an important contribution to our understanding of the medieval world-view.

Men Versus the State is a study both of the political philosophy of Herbert Spencer (considered by many to be the greatest philosopher of Victorian Britain) and of the ideas of the Individualists, a group of political thinkers inspired by him to uphold the policy of laissez-faire during the 1880s and 1890s. Despite their important contribution to nineteenth-century political debate, these thinkers have been neglected by historians, who have concentrated on the advocates of an enhanced role for government in economic and social affairs. The Individualists were forceful critics of this tendency to expand the frontiers of the State. This, the first comprehensive study of their ideas, sheds new light on the nature of late Victorian political argument. The book also provides an original perspective on Spencer's political philosophy, which provided Individualism with much of its intellectual justification. It will be of interest to anyone who wishes to set free-market conservatism in a historical context.

In the first scholarly examination of education in current affairs and citizenship within the British Army in the twentieth century, S.P. MacKenzie charts the development of army education from its beginnings in the First World War, to its heyday in the Second World War, and analyses its final demise in the early 1950s.Based on extensive research, the book analyses the thinking which lay behind the establishment of army education schemes, their function and their effects. In particular, it explores the controversial question of the part played in Labour's 1945 election victory by the rank and file of the British Army, often asserted to have absorbed the left-wing attitudes of the Army Bureau of Current Affairs and the Army Educational Corps. This is a comprehensive and rigorous study, which makes an important contribution to the history of the modern British Army.

This book sheds new light on the origins and nature of modern military thinking. The ideas of Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831) - which remain at the heart of strategic analysis today - have hitherto been examined largely in isolation from their cultural and philosophical roots in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Azar Gat now demonstrates the extent to which culture affects military theory.Dr Gat relates a series of military thinkers to their cultural background, demonstrating how the major currents of modern military thought have evolved from the world-view of the Enlightenment on the one hand and Romanticism on the other. Tracing the development of Clausewitz's ideas, he provides a provocative critique of Clausewitz's classic work, On War. In the process, he offers an illuminating insight into a great period of European culture and into warfare in the age of Napoleon.

Murders and Madness examines the French debate over crime and madness in the fin de siècle. Ruth Harris argues that psychiatric theories of human behaviour and new sociological interpretations of crime combined to undermine the traditional foundations of the penal system and helped to shape the new science of criminology. Traditional notions of free will and moral responsibility were eroded as new and often draconian strategies evolved from managerial practices developed mainly by medical men.This book offers a detailed examination of the radical politique criminelle they devised. Through a series of case studies, she looks specifically at discussions of feminine hysteria and women's sexuality; male alcoholism and racial degeneration; crimes of passion, crowd violence and revolutionary politics.

This is the first scholarly study of the Royal Navy during the reigns of Charles II and James II. Historians have long viewed the Restoration Navy through the eyes of Samuel Pepys, the greatest diarist and naval administrator of the age. Perceptive and intelligent as Pepys was, he presented only a one-sided view of the Navy, that of a bureaucrat attempting to reorganize it.J. D. Davies assesses this traditional picture of the Restoration Navy in the light of recent scholarship, using the evidence not only of Pepys but of his contemporaries. He examines the reactions of naval personnel to the demands imposed by Pepys, and analyses the structure of the service. He also explores the lives and attitudes of the men (the `tarpaulins') and their officers - the quests for promotion, enrichment, and glory; the very different problems posed by peace and war; the nature of life at sea; and the role of the Navy in national life. Gentlemen and Tarpaulins provides a fascinating glimpse into the history of the Royal Navy.

This book explores how the Victorians perceived and explained female crime, and how they responded to it - both in penal theory and prison practice. In Victorian England women made up a far larger proportion of those known to be involved in crime than they do today; the nature of female criminality attracted considerable attention and preoccupied those trying to provide for women within the penal system.Lucia Zedner's rigorously researched study examines the extent to which gender-based ideologies influenced attitudes to female criminality. She charts the shift from the moral analyses dominant in the mid-nineteenth century to the interpretation of criminality as biological or psychological disorder prevalent later. Using a wide variety of sources - including prison regulations, diaries, letters, punishment books, grievances and appeals, Dr Zedner explores both penological theory and the realities of prison life. This is a rich and scholarly study, which reveals much about the relationship between responses to female criminality and prevailing social values and concerns.

This first biography of Richard, third Duke of York, examines the political opposition of a great lord to Henry VI's regime. Active in the government of Lancastrian Normandy, he served twice as lieutenant of Ireland where, on his second visit, he did much to consolidate the trend towards Irish autonomy. The major interest of his career, however, lies in the increasing isolation of a once loyal subject. Suspect in the late 1440s, and even more so after the great revolt of 1450, he was driven into opposition during the following decade despite serving for two effective periods - here evaluated for the first time - as Protector of England. In 1455 violence replaced politics at St Albans, and England collapsed into the Wars of the Roses. Five years later, following his unsuccessful claim to the throne - an event for which fresh evidence is presented - he resorted once again to violence, dying in battle and leaving to his son Edward the claim which brought the first Yorkist to the throne.

The End of an Élite is the first scholarly study in English of the bishops of the French church at the outbreak of the French Revolution. The 130 members of the episcopate formed an élite within an élite, the First Estate of France.Nigel Aston explores the role of the episcopate in national and provincial politics in the last years of the ancien régime. He traces the policies and patronage of episcopal ministers such as Lomiénie de Brienne and J.-M. Champion de Cicé, who were as much politicians as pastors, and examines their relationships with their fellow bishops. Dr Aston emphasizes the leading role of the bishops in the Assemblies of Notables and offers a fresh interpretation of clerical elections to the Estates-General of 1789.This is an intensively researched and immensely readable account, which will be invaluable to all historians of late eighteenth-century France.

Labour's War is the first scholarly history of the Labour Party during the Second World War, and offers a fresh look at British politics during the war years. Stephen Brooke examines the effect of war upon the party's ideology and policy, the experience in government of Labour leaders such as Clement Attlee and Hugh Dalton, and the tensions produced within the party by the circumstances of war. Dr Brooke's extensively researched and original study calls into question the long-standing belief in an atmosphere of consensus among the political parties. His analysis uncovers the sharp ideological differences which persisted throughout the war years and after. He also demonstrates the impact of the war on the development of Labour's socialism. The Labour victory in the 1945 election remains one of the most significant turning-points in modern British history, setting Britain on a new course, towards the welfare state and the managed economy. The book is an important contribution to our understanding of how this came about.

This is the first scholarly history of the rise of the Townshends, who were to become the most famous landowning family in Norfolk. C. E. Moreton exploits to the full the rich family archives in order to tell the story of individuals such as Roger Townshend I, a prominent lawyer of the late fifteenth century, and his son, also Roger, a leading country gentleman. Dr Moreton traces the growth in the Townshends' wealth and power in the late Middle Ages, and sets them in their context as a major gentry family. Their lawsuits, their estates policy, and their sheep-farming activities reveal much about the nature of the gentry's relationship to land and its role in local society in late medieval and early Tudor England.

This is a study of the books of Salisbury Cathedral and their scribes in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. These manuscripts form the largest collection to have survived from any English centre in the period following the Norman Conquest, and they bear witness to the energetic scribal and scholarly activities of a community of intelligent and able men.Teresa Webber traces the interests and activities of the canons of Salisbury Cathedral from the evidence of their books. She reveals to us a lively Anglo-Norman centre of scholarship and religious devotion. Her study combines detailed palaeographic research with a keen understanding of medieval cultural and intellectual life. It is a distinguished contribution to medieval studies.

Julian Davies's detailed analysis of the religious policy and ecclesiastical practice of the Church of England in the reign of Charles I offers a bold new interpretation of the Caroline Church, firmly based on the documentary evidence.Dr Davies examines the roles of Charles I and of Archbishop Laud, demonstrating both Laud's essential conservatism in religious matters and Charles's highly personal notion of sacral kingship which he was attempting to realize through his prerogative as Supreme Governor of the Church. As a vital arm in the political apparatus of the state and as the vehicle for Caroline ideology, the established church under Charles I became more highly politicized than ever before.Julian Davies reassesses the significance of doctrinal arminianism in the seventeenth-century church, taking issue with a number of scholars. He brings to the forefront of the debate constitutional issues which have recently been underplayed. His book makes an important contribution to a controversial area of historical study.

Before the advent of television, reading was among the most popular of leisure activities. `Light' fiction - romances, thrillers, westerns - was the sustenance of millions in wartime and in peace. This lively and scholarly study examines the size and complexion of the reading public and the development of an increasingly commercialized publishing industry in the early twentieth century.Joseph McAleer uses a wide variety of sources, including the Mass Observation Archive and previously confidential publishers' records, to explore the nature of popular fiction and its readers. He analyses the editorial policies which created the success of Mills & Boon and D. C. Thomson, and also charts the rise and fall of the Religious Tract Society as a popular publisher.

Black Country Élites is a study of the people who ran Victorian industrial towns; it also examines the institutions, policies, rituals, and networks these urban élites deployed to cope with urban growth, social unrest, and relative economic decline. Concentrating on a particularly grimy district of the industrial Midlands, the book demonstrates the surprisingly great resources, coherence, sophistication and impact of the area's mainly middle class leaders, who were well linked to regional and national power centres.Richard H. Trainor's extensively researched and richly documented analysis suggests the need to re-examine the influential view that Victorian Britain's social development was dominated by London and by land, the professions, and finance. Instead he indicates the complex give-and-take between the metropolis and its notables, on the one hand, and the industrial provinces and their leaders, on the other. The book is both a substantial addition to regional studies of Victorian Britain, and an important contribution to the history of nineteenth-century elites and of the urban middle class.

This is the first full scholarly study of the relationship between native secular law and the church in medieval Wales. The interaction was close, despite Archbishop Pecham's condemnation of native law as the work of the devil. Huw Pryce assesses the influence of the church on Welsh law, examining the participation of churchmen in the composition of lawbooks and the administration of legal processes and analysing ecclesiastical criticism of native customs, notably those concerning marriage. He considers the extent to which Welsh law defended the authority and possessions of the church, focusing in particular on the status of clerics and on rights of sanctuary and lordship. The book throws revealing new light on both the law and the church in Wales in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. As a study of the impact of ecclesiastical reform on a society perceived by some contemporaries as barbarian and immoral this scholarly and lucid account makes an important contribution to medieval history.

This is a meticulous and scholarly study of the polemical press of the 1740s, and the first substantial investigation of the politics of the Pelham regime for a generation. Robert Harris examines the vigorous and wide-ranging debate in tracts and periodicals about the principal issues of the day--the fall of Walpole, the influence of Hanover, the Forty-Five, and the War of the Austrian Succession. Dr Harris's detailed analysis of the confusing and fragmented politics of the 1740s sheds important light on patterns of change and continuity in the political culture of mid-eighteenth-century English politics. A Patriot Press makes an important contribution to our understanding of political ideology and party strife in the eighteenth century, as well as to our knowledge of the workings of the press.