The work of the martyrologist John Foxe ensures that the burnings dominate modern accounts of the campaign waged again Protestantism in the reign of Mary I (1553–8). Drawing on other sources, this article examines forfeiture of property, a less noticed but more common penalty imposed upon Protestants. It describes the types of forfeiture that occurred and analyses their legal basis; it considers the impact of the penalty and highlights means of evasion. By examining forfeiture, the article extends and enhances the debate about the effectiveness of Marian religious policy and about the degree of support that the regime could command. Forfeiture, it is shown, could be a powerful form of coercion, but depended upon popular politics to be effective. Subsequent efforts in Elizabeth I's reign to obtain restitution substantiate the article's thesis that a deep-rooted belief in the rule of law constrained the penal religious policies of early modern England.

Jean Mabillon's De re diplomatica, whose importance for diplomatics and the philosophy of history is well recognized, also contributed to the seventeenth-century European debate over the relationship among documents, archives, and historical or juridical proof. This article juxtaposes early works on diplomatics by Mabillon, Daniel Papebroche, and Barthélémy Germon against German ius archivi theorists including Rutger Ruland and Ahasver Fritsch to reveal two incommensurate approaches that emerged around 1700 for assessing the authority of written records. Diplomatics concentrated on comparing the material and textual features of individual documents to authentic specimens in order to separate the genuine from the spurious, whereas the ius archivi emphasized the publica fides (public faith) that documents derived from their placement in an authentic sovereign's archive. Diplomatics' emergence as a separate auxiliary science of history encouraged the erasure of archivality from the primary conditions of documentary assessment for historians, however, while the ius archivi's privileging of institutional over material criteria for authority foreshadowed European state practice and the evolution of archivistics into the twentieth century. This article investigates these competing discourses of evidence and their implications from the perspective of early modern archival practices.

The words and music of ‘Rule, Britannia!’ are synonymous with the expansionist, triumphalist, and imperialist Britain symbolized by fluttering Union Jacks on the Last Night of the Proms. This article explores the cultural and political contexts of the first performance of this important national cultural artefact as the finale of Alfred: a masque to suggest that this opening night served a very different purpose. The first audience was a court in exile from the metropolitan heart of London, popular amongst the general public, but without any prospects of government. Two of the most important members of this group of peers, politicians, poets and a prince had recently died, and with them any cohesive identity. Alfred is both a desperate plea for unity, a rallying cry which forcefully restated the key tenets of this group's identity, and a delayed expression of patriotic celebration occasioned by Admiral Vernon's capture of Portobello. Through addressing this performance, this article makes an important contribution to our understanding of Hanoverian political culture and highlights the continuing impact of Anglo-Saxon England on mid-eighteenth-century Britain.

The Vatican is often cast as a marginal player in the reshaping of the European international order after the First World War. Drawing on new archival material, this article argues for a reassessment of the content and consequences of papal diplomacy. It focuses on the years between 1917 and 1929, during which time the Vatican used the tools of international law and state-to-state diplomacy to expand its power in both eastern and western Europe. The Vatican's interwar activism sought to disseminate a new Catholic vision of international affairs, which militated against the separation of church and state, and in many contexts helped undermine the principles of the League of Nations’ minority rights regime. Thanks in no small part to the assiduity of individual papal diplomats – who disseminated the new Catholic vision of international affairs by supporting anti-communist political factions – the Vatican was able to claim a more prominent role in European political affairs and lay the legal and discursive foundations for an alternate conception of the European international order, conceived in starkly anti-secular terms.

The British Section of the Palestine Gendarmerie was raised in early 1922 by the colonial secretary, Winston Churchill, as a striking force and riot squad for Palestine. Through the agency of the Irish police chief, General Hugh Tudor, this British Gendarmerie was recruited almost entirely from amongst the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) and its Auxiliary Division, then in the process of disbanding as part of the recent Anglo-Irish settlement. The international notoriety of the Black and Tans led to official efforts to obscure the fact that the force was to be drawn from RIC ranks but these were entirely unsuccessful. Indeed, the British Gendarmerie itself quickly acquired a reputation for Black and Tan-type behaviour but an examination of its four-year career indicates that this derived more from preconceptions about the force's composition than from its actual conduct. In fact, in terms of force discipline and levels of police brutality, the British Gendarmerie's record compared very favourably with those of its ‘parent’ forces in Ireland, lending support to recent claims that historians have tended to over-value character-based explanations at the expense of circumstance-based assessments when analysing police behaviour both during the Irish revolution and the Palestine Mandate.

This article examines Germany's efforts to instrumentalize Islam in the Balkans during the Second World War. As German troops became more involved in the region from early 1943 onwards, German officials began to engage with the Muslim population, promoting Germany as the protector of Islam in south-eastern Europe. Focusing on Bosnia, Herzegovina, and the Sandžak of Novi Pazar, the article explores the relations between German authorities and religious leaders on the ground and enquires into the ways in which German propagandists sought to employ religious rhetoric, terminology, and iconography for political and military ends. Interweaving religious history with the history of military conflict, the article contributes more generally to our understanding of the politics of religion in the Second World War.

Simone de Beauvoir's The second sex was first published in English in 1953, four years after its publication in French. Since the 1970s, many scholars have come to view de Beauvoir as the most important feminist thinker of the twentieth century and consequently to regard the initial American reactions to The second sex, which rarely discussed it in explicitly feminist terms, as showing that de Beauvoir's work had been misunderstood or misrepresented. This article focuses on what American commentators did say about de Beauvoir, rather than what they did not, and it shows that The second sex was quite widely, and often enthusiastically, discussed. Critics often saw de Beauvoir through the prism of social science, in particular anthropology and the ‘science’ of sexology. However, three things impeded a wholly sympathetic reception. First, unlike de Beauvoir, American writers believed that ‘modern’ society, by which they meant America, should combine female emancipation, especially at work, with the preservation of ‘femininity’. Secondly, de Beauvoir's view that ‘woman is made not born’ clashed with biologically determinist ideas popular among American social scientists by the 1950s. Thirdly, and most importantly, American critics were incensed by what they took to be de Beauvoir's denigration of motherhood.

In July 1971, one of the most non-conformist and Western-oriented leaders in the Soviet bloc, made what appeared to many as a radical turn of his domestic policy: liberalization of arts, culture, and social life were drastically limited and the communist party engaged on a course which was strongly inspired by Stalinism. Since then, questions had been raised as to the reasons and the timing of the change. This article explores various hypotheses in light of newly available archival documents in order to assess the role of the external factors in precipitating or determining the change. Soviet pressures are considered as well as the Chinese source of inspiration, as the change had been initiated shortly after Nicolae Ceauşescu's visit to China, demonstrating that the change was the product of interfering factors. What appeared at the time to be a sudden and unexpected change had in fact been prepared years before, under various forms. Romania was at the time dealing with growing social expectations due to liberalization measures, just as most other East European societies, but Ceauşescu chose to react differently, in the Chinese-style of mass mobilization, aiming to consolidate his party's grip on society and avert risks of Soviet intervention.

At some point in or shortly after 1607, the opening passage of Francis Bacon's earliest surviving philosophical work, Valerius Terminus of the interpretation of nature – the first version of what ultimately became Bacon's Instauratio magna – was copied into the natural philosophical notebook of Edmund Leigh (c. 1585–1658), a Bachelor of Arts at Brasenose College, Oxford. Whereas contemporary scribal copies of Bacon's political, religious, and legal writings are common, copies of his unpublished philosophical writings are rare, and tend only to be found in unique exemplars with a direct Baconian association. As such, the Valerius Terminus has hitherto only been known from a single manuscript, with corrections in Bacon's hand, that was first printed in 1734. The discovery of a ‘user’ copy in a student notebook is therefore significant for what it suggests about the circulation of Bacon's earliest philosophical ideas. This significance is enhanced by the fact that the new copy appears to record an early draft of Bacon's work.

The present historiographical review discusses the subjective dimension of Nazism, an ideology and regime that needed translation into self-definitions, gender roles, and bodily practices to implant itself in German society and mobilize it for racial war. These studies include biographies of some of the Third Reich's most important protagonists, which have important things to say about their self-understandings in conjunction with the circumstances they encountered and subsequently shaped; cultural histories of important twentieth-century figures such as film stars, housewives, or consumers, which add new insights to the ongoing debate about the Third Reich's modernity; studies that address participation in the Nazi Empire and the Holocaust through discourses and practices of comradeship, work in extermination camps, and female ‘help’ within the Wehrmacht. In discussing these monographs, along the way incorporating further books and articles, the piece attempts to draw connections between specific topics and think about new possibilities for synthesis in an overcompartmentalized field. It aims less to define a ‘Nazi subject’ than to bring us closer to understanding how Hitler's movement and regime connected different, shifting subject positions through both cohesion and competition, creating a dynamic that kept producing new exclusions and violent acts.