This article seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the formation of masculinity in early modern Italy, by focusing on literature defending women written by men. The article argues that defence of women emerged as a crucial feature in male self-fashioning and group identity formation in specific environments, such as the courts, the academies, and the Venetian socio-cultural scene of the 1540s and 1550s. By detecting how demarcations of self and other were shaped in the literature under examination, the article suggests that men defending women fashioned themselves both in regard to female ‘otherness’ and against other contemporary male identities. In this process of inclusion and exclusion both gender and social status came into play. Although defence of women initially emerged as a key determinant of elite masculinity, it gradually became the bone of contention among different social groups of men seeking to negotiate, redefine, and appropriate for themselves an idealized form of masculinity.

In December 1540 one of Henry VIII's clerical diplomats defected to the papacy. As contemporaries believed that a king could be judged by the ambassadors he sent to represent him abroad, Pate's defection caused the English king considerable embarrassment. His acceptance of the bishopric of Worcester from the pope in July 1541 made Pate a figure of symbolic importance to opponents of Henry VIII's royal supremacy. This article examines Pate's diplomatic career, paying particular attention to how Pate negotiated the competing claims on his loyalty of the pope and Henry VIII. Although Pate was expected to represent Henry's church policy, his experiences in embassy also provided opportunities for conservatism, as Henry sought to maintain amicable relations with the emperor and deny charges of heresy. Pate's case raises important questions about the religious sympathies of those chosen by Henry to represent him abroad and had important consequences for the practice of diplomacy in the early English Reformation. Pate also offers important insights into the motivations of Henrician Catholic exiles, their views of the Henrician church, and their political opposition to it.

This article explores the uses made of common land in late sixteenth-century England by members of the landowning elite, focusing in particular on those who held manorial lordship. Other studies have focused on landlords’ efforts to enclose the commons, a process identified by some as a key element in the transition to capitalist farming. By contrast, this study shows that landlords made commercial use of common land, using it, for example, as a site on which to build new cottages or by putting large number of animals out to graze. As such, it suggests that the development of commercial farming and the exercise of common right were not mutually exclusive. Based on the evidence of equity court material relating to the Middlesex parish of Enfield, the article sheds light on the nature of relations between landlords and tenants and the strategies both groups adopted in their efforts to exploit and defend communal resources. When the two groups came into conflict, landlords had significant resources at their disposal with which to overcome opposition. Relations were, however, more complicated than this might imply. The politics of common right produced complex alliances based on shifting alignments of interest, and could unite or divide local society along both vertical and horizontal lines.

During the seven years of Edward VI's reign, a variety of ideas about how best to reform the religious, economic, political, and social structures of the English commonwealth were devised, debated, and enacted. London's citizens and governors were increasingly occupied with developing legislative and institutional solutions for pressing social ills such as poverty and vagrancy: the question of how best to govern the commonwealth was not just a philosophical dilemma, but a practical concern. It was within this context that the first English translation of Thomas More's Utopia appeared in London. Published in 1551 by a group of citizens with a keen interest in social reform, the English Utopia may best be described as constituting an engagement with ideas of ‘good government’. This article draws on surviving evidence for the activities and concerns of Utopia's producers, and in particular the sponsor and instigator of the translation, George Tadlowe, in order to demonstrate that this publication represented a timely combination of humanist theory and political practice typical of the civic culture of the Edwardian reformation.

The article considers the rapid increase in the English market for alcohol and tobacco in the 1620s and the set of concurrent influences shaping their consumption. It suggests that intoxicants were not merely a source of solace for ‘the poor’ or the lubricant of traditional community, as historians often imply. Rather, the growth in the market for beer, wine, and tobacco was driven by those affluent social groups regarded as the legitimate governors of the English commonwealth. For men of a certain disposition and means, the consumption of intoxicants became a legitimate – indeed valorized and artful – aspect of their social identity: an identity encapsulated by the Renaissance concept of ‘wit’. These new styles of drinking were also implicated in the proliferation (in theory and practice) of ‘societies’ and ‘companies’, by which contemporaries meant voluntary and purposeful association. These arguments are made by unpacking the economic, social, and cultural contexts informing the humorous dialogue Wine, beere, ale and tobacco. Contending for superiority. What follows demonstrates that the ostensibly frivolous subject of male drinking casts new light on the nature of early modern social change, in particular the nature of the ‘civilizing process’.

Divisions in the Scottish political community that were evident by the end of the reign of James VI have been posited as roots of the Scottish revolution of 1638 and the wars of the three kingdoms. This article argues that the disengagement of central government from the political nation at large was a key factor in this development. By demonstrating the frequency of conventions of the estates, it highlights the intensity of consultation in James's Scottish government before 1603. A sudden decline in their frequency thereafter was symptomatic of a wider failure of government to adapt to the absence of the king in the context of a composite monarchy. While correspondence between the king and the privy council was copious, communication between the council and the political elites of Scotland withered. Without conventions of the estates as a vital point of contact in which new policies could be tested and negotiated, parliaments became more disagreeable. The crown's reliance on unprecedented levels of management and increased central direction alienated a significant proportion of the political elite, driving them into the oppositional stance which endured through the reign of Charles I.

This article reassesses the political career of Sir Edward Dering (d. 1644), a prominent but extremely controversial MP during the Long Parliament, who has fascinated historians because of the way in which he appears to have ‘defected’ from the cause of political and religious reform, who was eventually expelled from the Commons for publishing his parliamentary speeches, and who briefly flirted with royalism before making a humiliating return to Westminster. It does so by focusing upon his relationship with the public, in terms of how he courted popular support in order to secure election, and how people followed his subsequent parliamentary career, not least through the circulation of scribal and printed texts. It highlights how constituents (and others) responded to such activity, not least by making clear what policies he was expected to promote, thereby revealing that Dering's career was driven not just by his own political and religious views, but also by ideas about his role as an MP, and about his relationship with his constituents. Dering thus provides a rare opportunity to scrutinize the dynamic relationships between MPs and the public, thereby revealing hitherto neglected evidence about transformations in political culture and ideas regarding representation.

Studies of the rise of London's vestries in the period to 1640 have tended to discuss them in terms of the inexorable rise of oligarchy and state formation. This article re-examines the emergence of the vestries in several ways, moving beyond this traditional focus on oligarchy, and noting how London's vestries raised much broader issues concerning law, custom, and lay religious authority. The article reveals a notable contrast between the widespread influence and activities of London vestries and the questionable legal framework in which they operated. The political and ecclesiastical authorities – and in particular Archbishop Laud – are also shown to have had very mixed attitudes towards the legitimacy and desirability of powerful vestries. The apparently smooth and relentless spread of select vestries in the pre-war period is also shown to be illusory. The granting of vestry ‘faculties’ by the authorities ceased abruptly at the end of the 1620s, amid a series of serious legal challenges, on both local and ideological grounds, to the existence of vestries. Their rise had thus been seriously contested and stymied well before the upheavals of the 1640s, although opposition to them came from multiple sources – Laudians, Henry Spelman and the royal Commission on Fees, and local parishioners – whose objectives could vary.

This is an analysis of the extensive forgeries of Reformation history by Robert Ware of Dublin in the late seventeenth century, one of which, Archbishop Cranmer's speech at Edward VI's coronation, is still widely quoted and used as historical evidence. Ware's activity is explained in the context of Popish Plot agitation in Ireland and England, and John Strype's part in preserving some of the forgeries in the historical record is delineated. The survival of Ware's forgeries in English and Irish historiography over three centuries to the present day is exposed.

This article reintegrates the colonization of Tangier into our understanding of the development of the English empire in the latter half of the seventeenth century. At its acquisition in 1661, Tangier appeared integral to the imperial ambitions of the restored monarchy and promised to carry England's commercial and maritime empire into the Mediterranean. This article argues that the particular conceptions of imperial and commercial organization that underlay the occupation of Tangier isolated the city from England's wider empire and contributed to its failure. The creation of a free port and crown colony at Tangier reflected prevalent perceptions of the political economy of trade in the Mediterranean, but added to a wider process whereby ideological debates over the organization of trade and empire helped to create legal and jurisdictional boundaries that differentiated oceanic space. As a free port, Tangier was out of place within an empire increasingly defined by exclusive and restricted trade. It was, however, the ideological significance of Tangier's status as a crown colony that made it unsustainable. Unable to sustain or surrender its sovereignty over Tangier, the crown abandoned the city in the face of Moroccan empire-building.

The article explores ‘commonwealth’ both as a term and a conceptual field across the early modern period, with a particular focus on the Anglophone world. The shifts of usage of ‘commonwealth’ are explored, from a term used to describe the polity, to one used to describe a particular, republican form of polity, through to its eclipse in the eighteenth century by other terms such as ‘nation’ and ‘state’. But the article also investigates the variety of usages during any one time, especially at moments of crisis, and the network of related terms that constituted ‘commonwealth’. That investigation requires, it is argued, not just a textual approach but one that embraces social custom and practice, as well as the study of literary and visual forms through which the keyword ‘commonwealth’ was constructed. The article emphasizes the importance of social context to language; the forms, metaphors and images used to describe and depict the polity; and to show how linguistic change could occur through the transmutation of elements of the conceptual field that endowed the keyword with its meaning.

Counsel was central to negotiating the politics of Reformation monarchy in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. In a personal monarchy, particularly one wherein the monarch was supreme governor of the church, shaping the character of the ruler was vital for the smooth functioning of the political system. This article provides a conspectus of a broader project on early modern kingship and counsel which will discuss advice-giving provided by privy councillors, parliaments, preachers, and courtiers between 1509 and 1689. It shows how ecclesiastical counsel was central to defenders of the established church and in absolutist theorizing, and how men between 1558 and 1688 drew on patristic examples of its practice. Comparing ecclesiastical counsel to other genres of advice-giving also shows their common and distinctive features.

Around 1670, a group of moderate Restoration puritans published extended explanations of their movement at a particularly tense and pregnant time, when the recently erected, unstable barriers between the institutional Church of England and puritanism were under extreme pressure. Their efforts are important and revealing for their analyses of Restoration puritanism's contemporary situation and its historical roots. These publications, however, have received little scholarly attention. Restoration scholars tend to use the term ‘puritan’ in a static even perfunctory way that bears little resemblance to the self-conscious, fluid approach of historians of earlier puritanism. This usage also bears little resemblance to how Restoration puritans understood themselves. A close examination of these treatises helps to locate Restoration puritanism as the latest evolution of a century-old movement and helps to evaluate and refine the analytical frameworks within which historians attempt to make sense of that movement.

The clergyman-scholar Charles Dodd used the study of the past to articulate a defence of the English Catholic community that enjoyed a rich legacy. His Church history proclaimed a vision of Catholic patriotism that appealed to the influence of medieval and Reformation history on contemporary religious debates, and informed the later push for civil emancipation. Dodd's work brought together two fashionable but seemingly contrary, historical sensibilities: grounded upon antiquarian recoveries of the gothic past, but shaped by a cosmopolitan spirit of ‘reason’ that drew upon continental reformist schools. Challenging the narratives forged through the Reformation, he pitched his works across a wide spectrum of English scholarly life, seeking dialogue with high-churchmen, constitutionalists, and supporters of religious toleration. But Dodd's later reputation as a herald of Catholic Enlightenment belied the controversies roused in his career. In delivering his view of history, Dodd was forced to suppress radical thoughts on the nature of English monarchy, stumbled into conflicts with fellow clergymen, and risked the taint of heresy with reflections upon the Holy See. Conceived to construct a new intellectual platform for his co-religionists within their national community, his works served inadvertently to reveal the complexity and fragility of English Catholic life.

Following the execution of his father Charles I in January 1649, the exiled king Charles II pursued various political, military, and diplomatic strategies to recover his kingdoms. Proclaimed king of Ireland and Scotland, Charles II adopted the traditional view of monarch–subject relations and expected the loyalty of his subjects and their devotion to his restoration. The recent experiences of war and regicide, however, had changed the ways in which Irish and Scottish subjects determined the nature and degree of allegiance owed to the king. In Ireland and Scotland, subjects placed their own interests above the royalist cause. Tensions in Ireland among Catholics and between Catholics and Protestants tested the bonds of loyalty to Charles II, and Scottish Covenanters circumscribed the king's authority and imposed strict conditions upon their political and military support. Moreover, Charles II's position of exile exacerbated existing tensions within his kingdoms. While Charles I experienced the withdrawal of his subjects' allegiance and strove to recover that loyalty, as an exiled king Charles II struggled to gain the allegiance of his kingdoms and to secure loyalty in the face of religious tension, geographic distance, failing war efforts, and conflicting interests among his subjects.

Discussions of classical scholarship and of the Anglican church in Victorian England have both at times identified an ‘age of the Greek-play bishop’ during which there was a close relationship between classical distinction and episcopal promotion. Closer investigation reveals few prelates fitting the description. This article explains this paradox by tracing the idea of the ‘Greek-play bishop’ across a variety of nineteenth-century literatures, in the process suggesting the significance more generally of the migration of ideas between overlapping Victorian print cultures. The article demonstrates how the concept originated in the radical critique of Old Corruption around 1830, before in the 1840s and 1850s satirists (notably Sydney Smith) adopted it in ad personam assaults on two bishops, J. H. Monk and C. J. Blomfield. In the 1860s, the concept became a less polemical category in the context of more wide-ranging analyses of the composition of the episcopate, gradually acquiring an elegiac aspect as new intellectual challenges arose to Victorian Christianity. By 1900, the ‘Greek-play bishop’ had begun to find the place in the conceptual armoury of historians of the nineteenth-century church that it would hold for much of the twentieth century, its polemical origins long forgotten.

In the decades which immediately followed the union of 1707, most Scottish towns saw limited economic and cultural change. The middle of the eighteenth century, however, marked the beginnings of a new provincial urban dynamism in Scotland, which, from the 1780s or so onwards, was accompanied by far-reaching and rapid cultural change. This article seeks first to establish the scope, nature, and geography of this cultural transformation before discussing its wider historical significance, not only for our view of modern Scottish urbanization but in terms of patterns of urban change within the British Isles in the long eighteenth century. It is a story in part of convergence on Anglo-British cultural norms, but more saliently of the emergence of an increasingly British cultural synthesis, albeit one with distinctively Scottish elements. Another underlying purpose of the article is to re-direct views of Scottish urbanization away from Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen and on to a group of towns which hitherto have barely featured in discussions of British urbanization in this period.

In 1787, Frederick William II of Prussia made substantial changes to the urban excise. These changes were largely the result of public pressure. Urban tax-payers had resisted the tax in different ways since Frederick II had reformed it in 1766 in order to extract more revenue from Prussia's towns. The article explores the motives that led to tax-payer criticism and resistance and the ways in which urban tax-payers opposed the state's growing fiscal appetite. The success of urban tax-payers in this political conflict with the Prussian state suggests that Prussia's burghers were important actors within the Hohenzollern polity and that they wielded considerable political power. The events described here resembled not only other contemporary conflicts over fiscal matters in the Atlantic world, but were also interconnected with debates and events outside Prussia through exchanges of individuals, arguments, and publications.

Matthew Tindal's Rights of the Christian church (1706), which elicited more than thirty contemporary replies, was a major interjection in the ongoing debates about the relationship between church and state in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England. Historians have usually seen Tindal's work as an exemplar of the ‘republican civil religion’ that had its roots in Hobbes and Harrington, and putatively formed the essence of radical whig thought in the wake of the Glorious Revolution. But this is to misunderstand the Rights. To comprehend what Tindal perceived himself as doing we need to move away from the history of putatively ‘political’ issues to the histories of ecclesiastical jurisprudence, patristic scholarship, and biblical exegesis. The contemporary significance of Tindal's work was twofold: methodologically, it challenged Anglican patristic scholarship as a means of reaching consensus on modern ecclesiological issues; positively, it offered a powerful argument for ecclesiastical supremacy lying in crown-in-parliament, drawing on a legal tradition stretching back to Christopher St Germain (1460–1540) and on Tindal's own legal background. Tindal's text provides a case study for the tentative proposition that ‘republicanism’, whether as a programme or a ‘language’, had far less impact on English anticlericalism and contemporary debates over the church–state relationship than the current historiography suggests.

This article explores the representations of burglary and burglars created by the burglary insurance sector in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain. Two lines of argument are developed: first, that the marketing strategy of the burglary insurance sector exacerbated existing fears about the nature and prevalence of burglary in a calculated bid to attract custom; and secondly, that the depictions of crime and criminal used in marketing this form of insurance were subsequently revised in the contracts issued to customers as part of the industry's commercial transactions, thereby securing against supposed ‘negligence’ by homeowners as well as malicious attempts to defraud insurers. As the self-styled commercial ‘protection’ against burglary, burglary insurance became an ordinary household investment. Its prosperity therefore enables us to identify certain ideas about crime and criminal then current. Crucially, this research highlights the intersection of media, state, and market discourse about crime in weaving a specific version of burglary into the very fabric of everyday life, uniting three domains that historians of crime have traditionally treated separately.