This essay begins by celebrating the achievement of Wilhelm Levison, whoseEngland and the Continent in the Eighth Centuryhas both inspired and provoked new generations of explorers. The essay goes on to argue that the historiography of the earlier Middle Ages has been haunted by quests for the end of the Roman Empire. Recent attempts at periodisation, Marxist and other, have extended Rome's decline to span the ninth century, with the Carolingian heyday both truncated and belittled, while Anglo-Saxon England has been split down the middle by representations of the Vikings' impact as a re-run of the fifth-century barbarian onslaught. Since 1989, abundant and diverse historiographical takes, cross-cultural, interdisciplinary and comparative, have made it possible to see the ninth century as a formative and defining period in European history, not least because of multiple contacts between England and the Continent. The last part of the essay examines the pontificate of Leo III (795-816), to show England and the Continent meeting, figuratively speaking, in Rome. A wider world of connections is brought into view and the scene set for further explorations.

Indulgences have long been studied as a contributory factor to the Protestant Reformation. The present essay focuses attention upon their origins in the eleventh century, and the changes that affected both the theology and the practice of indulgences in the period before 1215. The indulgences issued by English bishops tell us much of the role played in the English Church both by Parisian theology and by post-Gregorian theories of papal monarchy. They shed light upon the `birth' of purgatory, and upon twelfth-century penitential practice. The present essay also explores the relationship, previously ignored, between the indulgences advertised by pardoners, and the relics of the saints which pardoners were accused of mishandling.

This paper explores the way in which nineteenth-century travellers to Salonica conveyed in writing the experience of travel to, and in, this Ottoman city. Their descriptions of the city indicate the power of certain aesthetic tropes in shaping their impressions. The claims of the picturesque were pre-eminent for decades but they coexisted with other rationales for travel – in particular the value of the direct impression conveyed by a landscape impregnated with classical and Biblical associations. Nor were most travellers insensible to the changing political prospects for the Macedonian port. The historical value of such works lies less in their reliability as testimony to the changes in the city itself than in the way they express patterns of authorial cultural taste.

Recent quantitative studies of the Atlantic slave trade tend to marginalise the voices of the enslaved and transported Africans who were its victims, but some sense of their experience is provided by surviving narratives by African-born ex-slaves. This essay draws attention to a neglected example of such narratives, the biography (published in the USA, 1854) of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua, from Djougou (in modern Bénin), who was enslaved and exported to Brazil in 1845. It explores some of the problems of interpretation raised by this text, especially the relationship between Baquaqua's Muslim upbringing and his conversion to Christianity in the Diaspora.

The South Sea Bubble of 1720 looms large in popular depictions of eighteenth-century Britain. But in many respects it is seriously misunderstood. This article begins by exploring mythic `facts' about the events of 1720, but is also concerned to explore why the Bubble was mythologised long after the event. On several levels, therefore, the Bubble has itself been bubbled.

Messianic visions burgeoned simultaneously in Judaism, Christianity and Islam in the sixteenth century, directly involving sovereign rulers, and powerfully influencing international relations. This essay examines the propensity of Philip II (1556-98) to frame his policies in messianic terms, with special regard to England. It uses the Ridolfi plot (1570-1) and the Armada (1587-8) to show how the king disregarded strategic concerns, and failed to formulate fall-back strategies, because he expected God to provide a miracle to bridge the gap between means and ends. It also compares his vision with those of his Christian, Jewish and Muslim contemporaries.

This essay explores further the notion associated with W. K. Jordan that a new rational protestant philanthropy emerged after the Reformation. Drawing upon a sample of London wills from the period 1520-1640, it argues that protestants sought to forge an association between protestantism and charity, but suggests that there were rather more continuities with the catholic past than the polemics of the early reformers would leave one to believe. It explores the variety of forms in which voluntary giving was expressed, and argues that although giving was increasingly channelled through public institutions, giving within those institutional frameworks was often mediated through discretionary relationships of patronage and clientage.

THIS new millennium year has led historians to address moments in the past which represent epochs in human affairs. The Enlightenment comprised such a turning-point, since it secularised the world-view and trained eyes and attention towards the future. British thinkers played an influential part in this intellectual revolution – though, as I have maintained in a recent book,Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World(2000), that is a contribution widely ignored or played down, by contrast to that of France. In that book I tried to explain that neglect, and I shall not bore you by repeating myself now. Rather my aim this evening is to set before you some key innovations in theories and thinking which emerged from eighteenth-century Britain, in particular ones specially pertinent to Sir Thomas Gresham and his College, and to the Royal Historical Society. I shall be focusing, in other words, on enlightened ideas about wealth and economics, science and history.

THIS was the first time a Society conference had been hosted by the Huntington. The invitation was issued by Robert Ritchie, Research Director of the Huntington, and the event was organised jointly by Anthony Fletcher and John Tosh. Two days of discussion devoted to the history of English politeness was always going to seem somewhat out of place in the environment of southern California. In the event the choice of theme acquired unanticipated layers of meaning, since it began three days after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on September 11. Its content now seemed even more at odds with the world around us, while the decision to proceed with the event became caught up in the `business as usual' outlook with which so many Americans responded to the tragedy. For a day or two it was not clear whether the conference could be held at all. A substantial proportion of the British contingent was temporarily stranded at the Grand Canyon, while three of the scheduled speakers – Michèle Cohen, Philip Carter and Penny Russell – were prevented from attending altogether by the disruption of air traffic. However, with the strong encouragement of Robert Ritchie, it was decided to proceed with the conference. The first session was preceded by a flag-pole ceremony at which conference participants and Huntington staff could pay their respects to the dead. The size of the audience was inevitably reduced. Some thirty people, mostly from the Los Angeles region, attended, in an atmosphere which was sombre but attentive. Several people made the point that, in these appalling circumstances, it was no bad thing to be reminded of the virtues of politeness, particularly their capacity to transcend their early elitist associations.

Argues that to see the contrasts between late medieval `courtesy books' and early modern manuals of manners as markers of changing ideals of social conduct in England is an interpretation too narrowly based on works written in English. Examination of Latin and Anglo-Norman literature shows that the ideal of the urbane gentleman can be traced back at least as far as the most comprehensive of all courtesy books, the twelfth-centuryLiber Urbaniof Daniel of Beccles, and was itself underpinned by the commonplace secular morality of the much olderDistichs of Cato.

In the early modern period the amenities of the upper-class house provided for approved modes of polite behaviour, while the initial, piecemeal display of antique ornament in the sixteenth century expressed the status and the education of the governing class. In the seventeenth century a more classically correct architecture would spread in a climate of opinion in which approved behaviour was increasingly internalised and external display less favoured. The revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was in superseding architectural languages that had lent themselves to the expression of status with a national style that did not.

Politeness is a `key word' for historians of eighteenth-century Britain. It implied a distinguishing vision of wider social concerns and less constricted cultural tastes than was attributed to earlier ages. What part it played in identifiable shifts of behaviour is harder to judge. Among people who served the growing commercial and professional needs of the day, its influence seems well attested. More problematic was its impact on plebeian life. Yet even here, there is evidence to suggest some degree of `polishing' in line with contemporary expectations, to the extent that politeness itself ceased to describe social aspirations and became synonymous with basic standards of civil behaviour.

Attempts to distinguish modern theories of refinement led eighteenth-century writers to highlight the moral integrity of a new code – politeness – in which outward civilities could be read as the manifestation of inner social virtues. To sponsors of polite culture this assurance was indicative of the superiority of modern manners manifest in the Lockean polite `person'. Yet the possibility and validity of synthesis remained a subject for debate; partly because of the difficulty of communicating character, partly because of the potential exploitation of a supposed congruity between outer expression and inner motive. In response, late century theorists sought to reinvigorate aspects of Locke's ideal through a culture of sensibility which both developed and criticised the existing polite code. But prone to similar weaknesses, sensibility was itself abandoned in the nineteenth century as writing on morals and manners diverged, and the distinctive, enlightened concept of politeness gave way to etiquette and a modern regimen of social dos and don'ts.

Politeness was a quintessentially urban concept; the formulation of a code of polite behaviour was a response to the pressures of urban living and the cultivation and display of polite manners took place in the social spaces of the urban locale. Not all towns were equally polite, however, and the degree of politeness on display in a town became another yardstick by which to categorise and judge provincial society. London was often presented as the centre of true politeness, in contrast to provincial vulgarity, but other towns were quick to appropriate the concept and its rhetoric as a means of self-promotion. In so doing politeness underwent modification as it was reinvented as a virtue of provincial, middling urban society.

Shopping was increasingly seen as a potentially pleasurable activity for middling and upper sorts in Hanoverian England, a distinctive yet everyday part of life, especially in London. This survey considers the emergence of a polite shopping culture at this time, and presents a `browse-bargain' model as a framework for considering contemporary references to shopping in written records and literary texts. The decline of polite shopping is charted with reference to the rise of cash-only businesses at the end of the century, and the shift towards a more hurried and impersonal form of shopping noted by early nineteenth-century shopkeepers, assistants and customers.

This paper explores the impact of polite codes of manners within the home and in marriage. It focuses on marital violence as a manifestation of impolite behaviour, and argues that codes of politeness could offer benefits for wives faced with violent husbands. Instead of silencing discussion of marital violence, ideas about polite behaviour enabled women to define unacceptable male behaviour in marriage, and to find new ways of responding to violence. A case study of one marriage breakdown shows how within the culture of polite manners and sensibility, nervous illnesses became a powerful way for genteel women to signal violent or sexual abuse.

The paper examines the upbringing of five teenagers between 1671 and 1860. It is based on close reading of their diaries. It deals with the relationship between these teenagers and their parents, siblings, friends and tutors or governesses. Politeness, it is argued, was a framework of behaviour which, learnt and observed, made sense of social life. For boys it was rooted in a training in the classics; for girls it meant a training in manners and the social accomplishments which were believed to guarantee a good marriage. English politeness was inculcated across the board in the higher social ranks. The paper considers a few of the human stories that lay behind this inculcation.

In colonial Australia, the meanings of politeness were continually contested. The urban centres held a world of strangers of dubious origin. Social edifices erected to deal with the question of who was `in Society' became ever more elaborate and unstable. To the elite, English manners represented a last bastion of civilisation in a wilderness of social disintegration. To self-made Australians, seeking acceptance rather than exclusion, they were absurd remnants of a class-ridden `Old World'. Important issues of class, gender, social organisation and identity clustered around the problem of comportment and shaped a redefinition of politeness in a colonial world.

Between the late eighteenth century and the mid-nineteenth century the notion of the `polite gentleman' lost its political purchase. `Manliness' became the identifying code of both the business class and the `respectable' working class. The virtues of rugged individualism and personal integrity were emphasised at the expense of sociability and ease of manner. In the political sphere debates about who should be included in the franchise were permeated by the language of manliness, and the politicians with the greatest popular following were hailed as `plain men' possessing a `simple manliness'.