When news arrived in summer 1580 that James Eustace, third viscount Baltinglass, had entered into rebellion with Gaelic elements in Leinster, Tudor officials in Ireland could barely contain their mystification. How, they wondered, had this important Tudor noble, whose family had for centuries served as a bulwark against the menace of marauding Gaelic clans, become ‘so forgetful of himself’? In seeking to explain the rebellion historians too have sought to understand Eustace's motivation, and in so doing have come to emphasize his integral position in conceiving and leading the revolt. Yet this approach has obscured the rebellion's Gaelic dimension. The rebellion would not have been possible without the support of the O'Byrnes and O'Tooles who sought to uproot the English county administration then being erected in place of their quasi-independent lordships. Fiach MacHugh O'Byrne emerged from this interest to become the rebellion's true strength and in August 1580 dealt a shattering defeat to the English army in Ireland.

In the 1621 parliament members of the House of Commons clashed with the king over the issue of clergy as JPs: there were suggestions that no clergyman should sit as a JP, or that only bishops and deans should be appointed. Why were there complaints at that time, and were they justified? Was the nomination of clergy as justices an element in ‘the rise of clericalism’? This analysis of clergy JPs between 1590 and 1640 shows that they had been increasing slowly in number from 1590, and more rapidly towards 1617 under Lord Chancellor Ellesmere. But the major expansion in their ranks came under his successors Francis Bacon 1617 to 1621, and especially Bishop John Williams 1621 to 1625. However, there was no systematic central policy behind appointments, and local interests and the normal processes of patronage were important. Perhaps precedence among the justices and the exercise of secular authority by clerical JPs were sometimes troublesome issues. But, despite continuing complaints from MPs, the proportion of clergy to lay JPs was always small – at its highest in 1626, with 7·6 per cent. Thereafter Lord Keeper Thomas Coventry allowed the clerical presence to decline, both absolutely and proportionately. If there was a ‘rise of the clergy’ after 1625, clergy JPs were not part of it.

This article explores the extent of popular iconoclasm in England in the period immediately before the start of civil war and for a region – eastern England – thought to lie at the heart of these events. It explores systematically the evidence for the extent of destruction (and the problems in its recording and recovery), the nature of the targets attacked, and the identities of the iconoclasts. The article argues that this first phase of iconoclasm was directed largely against Laudian innovations. Claiming an agency to police sacred space, iconoclasts derived legitimation from the public condemnation of Laudianism in parliament, print, and pulpit. Narrowing the focus, the article moves on to explore the occurrence of iconoclasm through a series of case studies of the complex process of conflict and negotiation within the politics of the parish that preceded, accompanied, and sometimes pre-empted popular destruction. The evidence of iconoclasm is used to show how the implementation of the Laudian programme might politicize local churches as sites of conflict and the potential therefore inherent in its aggressive enforcement for a wider political conflict.

In 1841, a select committee proposed that the houses of parliament at Westminster, which were being rebuilt in the aftermath of the fire of 1834, be decorated with fresco paintings and that Ludwig I of Bavaria's patronage of the arts be used for guidance. Both recommendations were surprising, for Britain had neither any tradition of public painting, nor any obvious ties with the south German state. This article explains why the committee was so sensible to Ludwig's example, and what it hoped to achieve by introducing fresco painting into Britain. The scheme was to serve not only as the means of establishing a national school of painting that could compete with the modern German school, but also as an integral part of a broader endeavour to construct a national culture in Britain that was both patriotic and socially inclusive. The national potential of this state-sponsored scheme of art promotion came to be undermined, however, by the emergence of both political and religious hostility to such German-style patronage in Britain. The article highlights not only the crucial role played by German art in the endeavour to construct a national culture in Britain, but also the continuing potency of religion as an element of British national identity during the first decade of Victoria's reign. It also draws attention to the fundamental role played by Prince Albert in his capacity as president of the fine arts commission, and the extent to which the debate surrounding the commission's proceedings provided the essential context for both the emergence and reception of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood in 1848–50.

In nineteenth-century France, science and religion have often been portrayed as irredeemably opposed to one another. This article seeks to revise this interpretation by showing how these apparently dissonant views intermingled in the study of hysteria. Through a survey of attitudes towards Catholicism and in their treatment of Catholic patients, the article shows how French psychiatrists and neurologists were deeply indebted to religious iconography and experience, despite their vehement anti-clericalism. Because of their hatred of the church, they focused on the treatment of female hysterics who manifested ‘religious’ symptoms – demonopathy, mystical states, and stigmata – in order to amass conclusive evidence of Catholic ‘superstition’. Their preoccupation with such patients meant, however, that they paradoxically re-embedded Catholicism into their scientific practice by incorporating religious motifs, bodily poses, and iconography into their diagnosis of hysteria. At the same time, their disdain for the Catholic religious imagination meant that they refused to explore the fantasies of their subjects. For physicians like Jean-Martin Charcot and the more subtle Pierre Janet – a contemporary and competitor of Sigmund Freud – fantasies of bodily suffering, unearthly physical perfection, and an array of Catholic maternal fantasies associated with images of Mary and Christ were all nothing more than delusions, not the stuff from which an appreciation or understanding of the ‘unconscious’ could emerge. The result was that French physicians offered no psychodynamic transformation or symbolic reinterpretation of their words or physical symptoms, a resistance that was one reason among many for their hostility to psychoanalysis.

This article examines Irish nationalist attitudes towards electoral reform between 1885 and 1918. It argues that before 1917 mainstream Irish nationalist opinion attached little importance to the franchise, being instead more concerned about the consequences for home rule if the number of Irish parliamentary seats was reduced through redistribution. However, the introduction of wartime legislation to reform the franchise and registration system repoliticized electoral reform in nationalist Ireland. While the Irish parliamentary party vociferously protested at the coalition government's belated attempt to redistribute Irish constituencies, its critics (a coalition of heterodox nationalists, socialists, and suffragettes) accused it of deliberately conspiring to exclude Ireland from the ‘fourth’ reform bill because the young men and women it would enfranchise intended to vote for Sinn Fein. This article argues that the concerns of the Irish party regarding redistribution were genuine and legitimate, while the conspiracy theory was essentially a propaganda device. None the less, the theory gained widespread attention because its underlying assumption about the voting behaviour of the new electorate was shared not only by its exponents, but by sections of the press, the British administration in Ireland, and the Irish party itself. Indeed, so convinced was the party that the cleavage in Ireland was as much generational as ideological that ultimately the franchise was a factor in its defeat at the 1918 general election.

This article explores the origins of the UN's commitment to human rights and links this to the wartime decision to abandon the interwar system of an international regime for the protection of minority rights. After 1918, the League of Nations developed a comprehensive machinery for guaranteeing the national minorities of eastern Europe. But by 1940 the League's policies were widely regarded as a failure and the coalition of forces which had supported them after the First World War had disintegrated. German abuse of the system after 1933, and the Third Reich's use of ethnic German groups as fifth columns to undermine the Versailles settlement were cited by east European politicians as sufficient justification for a new approach which would combine mass expulsion, on the one hand, with a new international doctrine of individual human rights on the other. The Great Powers supported this because they thereby escaped the specific commitments which the previous arrangements had imposed on them, and which Russian control over post-war eastern Europe rendered no longer practicable. But they also supported it because the new rights regime had no binding legal force. In respect, therefore, of the degree to which the principle of absolute state sovereignty was threatened by these arrangements, the rights regime of the new UN represented a considerable weakening of international will compared with the interwar League. But acquiescing in a weaker international organization was probably the price necessary for US and Soviet participation.

Attention is drawn to five parallel passages as between Francis Bacon's unpublished Aphorismi de jure gentium maiore sive de fontibus justiciae et juris and A discourse of laws, which was published anonymously in 1620. It is suggested that around 14 per cent of A discourse consists of unacknowledged translations from Bacon's Latin. Questions are raised as to when, where, and why A discourse was composed. These questions bear on, though fail to resolve, the debate over the identity of A discourse's author. The two names discussed most often in this connection are those of William Cavendish and Thomas Hobbes.

In the 1960s a comparative approach, covering different continents and periods of time, was common in the study of witchcraft. During the 1970s it fell out of fashion because of criticism by some anthropologists, and collusion between the disciplines of anthropology and history over the subject more or less ended. In the 1990s, unnoticed by virtually all historians, some anthropologists and sociologists began again to emphasize a global, and interdisciplinary, perspective on the issue. The following article reviews these debates, and then pools research undertaken in various parts of the world to suggest that a supranational model for the figure that English-speakers call the witch is indeed viable. It also distinguishes attributes of the figure that do vary significantly between various cultures, and identifies many peoples among whom the witch-figure does not seem to have existed at all. In doing so, it suggests that anthropology may once again be one of the disciplines with which historians of Europe have the option of collaborating over the subject to mutual benefit.

Recent writing on early modern London offers new perspectives on a wide range of topics. Interest in the literary and cultural is particularly strong, and much attention has been given to John Stow, London's sixteenth-century historian. This review discusses recent work on three themes prominent in Stow's Survey of London (1598), and its later editions: the character of religious life in post-Reformation London; the importance of place and space to the experience of the city; and the question of civic and business morality in a changing world.

Historians face the problem of how to write the history of the eighteenth-century British empire. How can the history of Britain and the history of its empire be brought together? Recent research has demonstrated the value of employing the idea of networks to describe the interrelatedness of empire. In the history of science and economic history such a notion has been quite thoroughly articulated, particularly in relation to the exchange of botanical knowledge and the transaction of goods. Here it is argued that conceiving of empire as a set of networks through which knowledge and ideas were exchanged, trust was negotiated, goods were traded, and people travelled is an avenue worth pursuing in the project to write the history of the eighteenth-century British empire.

The quincentennial of Christopher Columbus's first voyage in 1992 generated an enormous outpouring of both emotion and scholarship. At times, it seemed that the emotional issues prevailed. Unlike earlier generations of scholars who had celebrated Columbus's achievements, the cohort of 1992 mostly attacked the Admiral of the Ocean Sea. As the historian Kenneth Maxwell put it, ‘Columbus was mugged on the way to his own party.’ By the time many commentators got through with him, Columbus had become responsible for precipitating centuries of slavery, environmental degradation, and ethnic cleansing in the Americas. He became the antichrist of a secular United States.

‘The word [reform] is a singularly vague one; it means every thing, and any thing; it conveys no positive idea whatever; but seems to have a different acceptation in each different mouth.’ So declared John Walsh, an opponent of parliamentary reform in his 1831 pamphlet, Popular opinions on parliamentary reform. Walsh's observation, which shrewdly identifies a recurring semantic problem for historians of the early nineteenth century, is but one of many illuminating texts to be reprinted in the History of suffrage, 1760–1867, edited by Anna Clark and Sarah Richardson. This publication, when read alongside the other two volumes under consideration, Hannah Barker and David Vincent's Language, print and electoral politics, 1790–1832, which reprints a plethora of electoral ephemera from pre-reform Newcastle-under-Lyme; and Martin Hewitt and Robert Poole's The diaries of Samuel Bamford provides fascinating insights into the constellation of vocabularies, strategies, and concerns that comprised the reforming project.

The five books under review represent some of the recent achievements of Italian historiography of the early modern period. The gradual opening of Inquisitional archives in the 1990s and the growing sophistication of historical analysis of Inquisitorial documents have expanded dramatically our knowledge of and familiarity with the institutional and legal histories of the Inquisition and of the operation of justice in the Italian peninsula. One result of this is that the earlier and innovative work of Carlo Ginzburg in Inquisitorial archives has come under scrutiny. The books under review present a new view of the functioning of the Italian Inquisition, and by so doing shed new light on issues of authority and power in early modern Italy. Implicitly, the books under review also posit themselves against microstoria and address the larger working of power over long periods of time.