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.

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.

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.

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.

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 1854, the Crystal Palace reopened at Sydenham. Significantly, it featured a court of natural history. Curated by the philologist and physician, Robert Gordon Latham, it was designed to provide the public with an ethnological education. Understanding Latham's project is of particular importance for broader understandings of the scientific importance of displayed peoples and mid-nineteenth-century debates on the nature of human variation. Recent scholarship has shown considerable interest in the relationship between exhibitions of foreign peoples and anthropology, particularly within the context of world fairs. Nevertheless, anthropologists are routinely claimed to have used fairs merely to display or publicly validate, rather than to make, scientific knowledge. Meanwhile, the 1850s and 1860s are often seen as having witnessed the emergence of a new ‘harder-edged’ scientific racism as, older, elastic definitions of ‘race’ were successfully overthrown by one rooted in biological difference (most commonly exemplified by the anatomist Robert Knox). By examining how Latham produced and used his museum of human types, this article proposes an alternative approach. It suggests that displayed peoples were used as ethnological specimens and that Latham's work is at a particularly significant crossroads for the mid-nineteenth-century remaking of ‘race’.

This article surveys the fiercely contested posthumous assessments of John Stuart Mill in the newspaper and periodical press, in the months following his death in May 1873, and elicits the broader intellectual context. Judgements made in the immediate wake of Mill's death influence biographers and historians to this day and provide an illuminating aperture into the politics and shifting ideological forces of the period. The article considers how Mill's failure to control his posthumous reputation demonstrates both the inextricable intertwining of politics and character in the 1870s, and the difficulties his allies faced. In particular, it shows the sharp division between Mill's middle and working class admirers; the use of James Mill's name as a rebuke to his son; the redefinition of Malthusianism in the 1870s; and how publication of Mill's Autobiography damaged his reputation. Finally, the article considers the relative absence of both theological and Darwinian critiques of Mill.

This article reconsiders the culture of popular Conservatism in Edwardian Britain, when it has often been claimed that the Unionist parties underwent a profound crisis. According to Ewen Green, for example, in the immediate years before the First World War, Conservative leaders failed to offer policies that could unite their party or enable it to develop an effective popular appeal. Consequently, the party appeared to be drifting towards potential disaster and disintegration. Whilst historians are correct to argue that deep divisions emerged within the Unionist ranks, inhibiting their electoral prospects, the vibrancy of rank-and-file Conservatism in Edwardian Britain nevertheless tends to be underestimated. By embracing a variety of populist causes in 1913–14, the Conservative party appeared to have found a way to overcome its electoral malaise. Moreover, by taking important steps to widen their social appeal, the Conservatives laid the foundations for post-war success during these years of supposed ‘crisis’.

This article explores the late flowering of ‘black loyalism’ during the visit of the British royal family to Southern Africa in the summer of 1947. Whereas most accounts of post-war African politics emphasize the radicalization of political organizations, the growth of nationalism, and grassroots insurgency, this account of African engagement with the royal tour indicates that professed faith in the British monarchy as the embodiment and guardian of the rights and liberties of all peoples living under the crown was more widespread and longer lived than is generally assumed. However evanescent the phenomenon, extensive participation in the ceremonial rituals associated with the tour and the outpouring of expressions of black loyalism underlines the fluidity and unpredictability of black politics in this decade. At such a highly charged moment internationally, with India on the cusp of independence, and political turmoil at home, there was reason to hope that the loyalty of Africans during the Second World War might just be rewarded by the extension of political rights. This article traces the complex legacies and contested expressions of ‘black loyalism’ in what was effectively its swansong.

This review assesses scholarly attempts to synthesize various forms of Scottish philosophy in the context of eighteenth-century America. It suggests potential new directions for the study of Scottish Enlightenment ethical theories on the western side of the Atlantic, and then examines scholarship on a separate and neglected Scottish influence in American thought: an evangelical notion of religious authority that was not opposed to wider incorporation in multi-denominational political unions. The ideological basis for American independence owed much to a tense counterpoise between Scottish moral sense reasoning and Presbyterian evangelicalism, rather than to their singular and starkly binary contributions to colonial American ideology.