This article re-examines the nature and extent of conformity to the Religious Settlement amongst the parish clergy in the first decades of Elizabeth I's reign. The estimate of Henry Gee, made over a century ago, that only around 300 clergymen were deprived for non-conformity to the Settlement has been remarkably influential and durable, and it continues to shape broader assessments of the ways in which religio-political change was implemented and received in this period. Using digital resources such as the Clergy of the Church of England Database, in conjunction with hitherto neglected biographical compilations, the article argues for a significant revision of Gee's figures. More broadly, it reflects on the complex meanings of ‘conformity’ in a period of perplexing change and dramatic institutional disruption, disputing any suggestion that apparent acquiescence signalled pervasive ‘acceptance’ of the alteration in religion among the clergy. In the process, it draws attention to the pitfalls of uncritical deployment of numbers and statistics, and of using them as explanatory short-cuts in understanding the dynamics of Reformation change.

The development of the Scottish privy, or secret, council has hitherto been located in the 1540s and attributed to the pressures on government brought about by royal minority. Concomitantly, scholarship exploring the personal rule of James V (1528–42) has focused on the king's relations with individual magnates and neglected the subject of institutional development during his reign. Through an examination of commentary on the council outwith the council register, ranging from acts of parliament to correspondence and reports by foreign observers, this article posits a significantly earlier date for conciliar development in Scotland than has hitherto been appreciated. The council is visible throughout the personal rule of James V, assuming a particularly significant role in Anglo-Scots diplomacy from 1540 until 1542, when it was delegated by James to respond to letters during his frequent absences from Edinburgh. This aspect of council activity provides an example of institutional development facilitating rather than hindering the continuation of a peripatetic royal court, an unusual combination in not only a Scottish but a wider European context. Reassessing the significance of James V's council thus has broader implications for understandings of his kingship and the expansion of crown power in sixteenth-century Scotland, whilst throwing light on questions of Anglo-Scots diplomacy.

This article explores the social, legal, and administrative response in Tudor and early Stuart England to people known in law as ‘Egyptians’ or ‘counterfeit Egyptians’ but commonly called ‘Gypsies’. It argues that such people differed from ordinary poor vagrants in their heritage, their language, and such activities as horse dealing and fortune-telling. Elizabethan and Jacobean publications placed Gypsies on the fringes of fecklessness, criminality, and the picaresque, and established a stereotype of deceit and imposture that has not yet disappeared. Acts of Parliament in 1531, 1554, and 1563 criminalized ‘Egyptians’, forbidding their entry, ordering their expulsion, and eventually making them liable to the death penalty. Enforcement, however, was haphazard, and repression co-existed uneasily with growing registers of tolerance. This is a neglected topic in early modern social history, with links to international and interdisciplinary Romani studies as well as work on itinerancy, ethnicity, and marginality.

Honour was a gendered phenomenon for the eighteenth-century English social elite; scholars have argued that for women, honour was mainly equated with chastity. By problematizing the concept of chastity as well as chastity's relation with women's social reputation, this article questions the widely adopted view of the crucial importance of female chastity for maintaining honour and social status. A critical examination of eighteenth-century discourses of feminine propriety shows that even though chastity was presented as an internal feminine feature, it was evaluated by external signs, making it less dependent on physical continence than on public display of purity. Chastity should thus be seen as a negotiable performative identity rather than a stable state of sexual virtue. Moreover, the relation between chastity and social reputation is more complex than hitherto supposed; even a public loss of chaste reputation did not necessarily lead to the social disgrace threatened by eighteenth-century writers, but could often be compensated through other performative means. The article concludes that not only was chastity's role in the construction of female honour ambiguous, female and male honour also resembled each other more than has been assumed, since they were both based on an external spectacle of proper honourable appearance.

This article examines the exodus down the Rhine in 1816 and 1817 of tens of thousands of German migrants, who attempted to reach the United States after the Napoleonic Wars. It establishes the episode as an important link between the mass-migration periods of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which saw more Germans land in North America than any other European group. The article focuses on the active commercial, logistical, social, and religious networks, produced in the eighteenth century, which made the exodus possible, and how it in turn changed future migration patterns. This integrates the exodus into an evolving German Atlantic movement, where previous historiography has treated it as an isolated episode, produced by extraordinary post-war conditions.

Histories of the Jews are a fundamental and polemical aspect of Christian and especially Protestant historiography in the nineteenth century. This article considers, in their context, the five most popular and influential multi-volume histories published in Britain, namely those of Henry Hart Milman, Heinrich Ewald, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Ernest Renan (the one significant – lapsed – Catholic historian in the tradition), and Emil Schürer. It shows how each of these major historians constructs an opposition between Alexandrian Judaism and Palestinian Judaism, a hierarchical opposition which denigrated Alexandrian Judaism as a betrayal or corruption of true religion because it depended on an assimilation of Jewishness and Greekness. The opposition of Greek and Jew was fundamental to nineteenth-century thought for a high intellectual tradition (most famously embodied in Matthew Arnold's categories of Hebraism and Hellenism). The Alexandrian Jews become for these historians an icon of a dangerous hybridity – despite the fact that the Septuagint, the Alexandrian Greek Bible, was the Bible of early Christianity. The article considers the different strategies adopted by these historians in response to this constructed opposition of Jerusalem and Alexandria, and its continuing implications for the historiography of the Hellenistic world.

John Stuart Mill's support for, and predictions of, co-operative production have been taken as a coherent wedding of liberal and socialist concerns, and as drawing together later nineteenth-century political economy and working-class radicalism. Despite its evident significance, the alliance of political economy and co-operative production was, however, highly conflicted, contested, and short-lived, in ways that help to shed light on the construction of knowledge of society in nineteenth-century Britain. Mill's vision should be seen as developed in contrast to the sociological and historical perspectives of Auguste Comte and Thomas Carlyle, as an attempt to hold together political economy as a valid form of knowledge with the hope of a new social stage in which commerce would be imbued with public spirit. This ideal thus involved debate about competing social futures and the tools of prediction, as well as entering debates within political economy where it was equally embattled. Even Mill's own economic logic tended more towards support of profit-sharing than co-operative production, and hopes for the latter became significantly less persuasive with the introduction of the concept of the entrepreneur into mainstream British economics during the 1870s and 1880s.

Seeking to challenge the totalizing theory of an ‘ethnographic state’, this article examines a mid-nineteenth-century paradigm shift that impacted the colonial study of borderland populations along India's North-West Frontier. While the establishment of metropolitan ethnographic societies in the 1870s facilitated the rise of socio-cultural evolutionism, colonial agents also utilized folklore and proverb studies to represent the borderland societies as dynamic cultural entities reactive to British encroachment. Four case-studies, moreover, demonstrate that a variety of motivations compelled colonial agents to produce ethnographic material. These factors included personal scholarly ambition, political activism, and a commitment to transregional ‘scientific’ data collection projects. This study complicates the relationship between knowledge production and state power by reasserting the significance of personality as an operative force in the formation of colonial discourse.

This article explores how political parties in France, West Germany, and Italy conceptualized democracy and challenged the conceptions of democracy of their political adversaries between the end of the 1940s and the early 1960s. It studies from a comparative perspective the different conceptions of democracy held by Christian democrat, Left-wing, and Gaullist political actors and shows how these diverged on key issues such as the economic system, foreign policy, the separation of powers, electoral systems, and the use of state institutions in the defence of democracy against anti-democratic forces. In this way, the article reveals how in the first fifteen years after the Second World War, government and opposition parties disputed each other's democratic credentials and political legitimacy, and it thereby reconsiders the claim that there existed a broad consensus on the meaning of democracy among political elites in post-war Western Europe. It is argued that these different conceptions of democracy only started to converge after they had clashed during political crises at the turn of the 1960s in all three states. This study thereby contributes to an enhanced understanding the formation of the post-war democratic order in Western Europe.

This article uses the debate over environmental and human health effects of nuclear testing to shed light on the ambivalent relationship between scientists, the public, and the state in Britain during the crucial, but often overlooked, period leading up to the first cycle of anti-nuclear weapons mass protests. In this, it examines how members of Britain's main organization of nuclear scientists – the Atomic Scientists’ Association (ASA) – used their expertise in their engagement with both the public and the state to assess these effects of fallout from nuclear testing. What made the ASA stand out from other groups of the atomic scientists’ movement was its ambivalent relationship with the government. This was, by and large, the result of several ASA members’ occupational backgrounds in government employment and the association's self-imposed adherence to an ambiguous principle of scientific ‘objectivity’ in political matters. The ASA's role in the debate over fallout thus exemplifies a basic dilemma that many scientists in Britain and other Western liberal democracies faced between their roles as ‘objective’ and ‘unpolitical’ scientific experts, on the one hand, and socially responsible scientists, on the other, illustrating the ambivalent position of experts and uses of their knowledge.

The Egyptian experience of the Suez crisis and subsequent conflict of 1956 has received significantly less treatment than those of the other major players, Great Britain, France, Israel, and the United States. The consensus over Egypt's role in the crisis has, moreover, has advanced very little from the narrative put forward by official participants at the time, portraying the event as a landmark in a nationalist struggle to restore Egypt's independence and national dignity. This article takes a fresh look at the Suez crisis from the perspective of the figures of an emergent Egyptian political opposition in 1955–6, whose responses differed substantially from this received view. By bringing domestic Egyptian political struggles to the foreground of this international crisis, the article will offer a more nuanced view of the origins of Suez in British planning, and of its significance for contemporary Egyptians. The conclusion will seek to explain how a collection of sometimes extreme nationalists could take such a counter-intuitive position in the Suez crisis through exploring the diversity of nationalist thought in the Egypt of the 1950s.

A widespread trend in Enlightenment studies is to emphasize the particular ‘national contexts’ within which key ideas were disseminated and appropriated during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This may be one way to read the three books under review: on one level they appear to look at how three emblematic figures of Modern Greek Enlightenment (Adamantios Korais, Iosipos Moisiodax, and Veniamin Lesvios) transmitted ideological and philosophical tenets of Western modernity to the non-Western context of a country under construction: nineteenth-century Greece. Yet there is much more at work here. On closer study, these books collectively take an important step by suggesting a reversal of perspectives. The desideratum is an approach that no longer considers the Modern Greek Enlightenment (roughly extending from 1760 to 1821) as an a priori peripheral and dependent movement, but rather as a vehicle for elaborating on aspects of the Enlightenment as a transcultural phenomenon. Seen in this light, the space of the Modern Greek Enlightenment is not primarily geographical or geopolitical, but cultural and intellectual. Owing to the fluidity of borders and the mobility of intellectual agents inherited from the Ottoman imperial structures, the impact of the Modern Greek Enlightenment stretches across a vast area from south-eastern Europe to Asia Minor and from Transylvania to Kydonies. Interestingly, the same is true of the ideological and religious opponent of Enlightenment intellectual constellations in the Balkan peninsula: Orthodox Neo-Palamism. This spread from Mount Athos to Romania, offering a competing version of transnationalism and illumination with roots in Hesychast theology, rather than in the West. The emerging tension tested the application of Enlightenment ideas in ways alien to the West and shaped the outlook of intellectuals who are perhaps little known, but who merit a unique place in the broadly construed canon of Enlightenment thought.