It was common knowledge in early modern England that sexual desire was malleable, and could be increased or decreased by a range of foods - including artichokes, oysters and parsnips. This book argues that these aphrodisiacs were used not simply for sexual pleasure, but, more importantly, to enhance fertility and reproductive success; and that at that time sexual desire and pleasure were felt to be far more intimately connected to conception and fertility than is the case today. It draws on a range of sources to show how, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, aphrodisiacs were recommended for the treatment of infertility, and how men and women utilised them to regulate their fertility. Via themes such as gender, witchcraft and domestic medical practice, it shows that aphrodisiacs were more than just sexual curiosities - they were medicines which operated in a number of different ways unfamiliar now, and their use illuminates popular understandings of sex and reproduction in this period.

This book takes a fresh look at Victorian England's "love of Italy", traditionally constructed as the reserve of the established classes, by revealing a forgotten connection between the radical, Victorian "non-elites" and the Risorgimento democrats. The republican exile Giuseppe Mazzini first introduced the idea of "Italy" to workers keen on self-improvement; his radical ideas circulated in reading rooms and co-operative societies, where republican Italy became a transnational dream. Indeed, when Italy was unified under a constitutional monarch in 1860, British Mazzinians were bitterly disappointed, and subsequently supported Italian republicans for decades; undeterred by Italy's fin de siècle crisis and the rise of fascism, they championed Italian anti-fascists who associated themselves with Mazzini's principles of global democracy. Drawing on a wide range of material, the book provides fresh insights both into the history of Victorian radicalism in Britain, and to the history of the Risorgimento.

At the beginning of the Victorian era, London Zoo thrived as the premier resort of the metropolis. It attracted myriads of people from different walks of life, from urban promenaders to gentleman menagerists, from Indian shipbuilders to Persian princes, and included such leading figures of the day as Charles Darwin. This examination of the Zoo places it within the broader context of nineteenth-century Britain, looking at the politics of culture in the new public domain of museums and galleries, the professionalisation and popularisation of science in a new, consumer society, and how the growing urban population regarded the animals on display. Dr Takashi Ito teaches at Kanazawa Gakuin University, Japan.

After an evening spent drinking with Irish conspirators, an inebriated Owen Connelly confessed to the main colonial administrators in Ireland that a plot was afoot to root out and destroy Ireland's English and Protestant population. Within days English colonists in Ireland believed that a widespread massacre of Protestant settlers was taking place. Desperate for aid, they began to canvass their colleagues in England for help, claiming that they were surrounded by an evil popish menace bent on destroying their community. Soon sworn statements, later called the 1641 depositions, confirmed their fears (despite little by way of eye-witness testimony). In later years, Protestant commentators could point to the 1641 rebellion as proof of Catholic barbarity and perfidy. However, as the author demonstrates, despite some of the outrageous claims made in the depositions, the myth of 1641 became more important than the reality. The aim of this book is to investigate how the rebellion broke out and whether there was a meaning in the violence which ensued. It also seeks to understand how the English administration in Ireland portrayed these events to the wider world, and to examine whether and how far their claims were justified. Did they deliberately construct a narrative of death and destruction that belied what really happened? An obvious, if overlooked, context is that of the Atlantic world; and particular questions asked are whether the English colonists drew upon similar cultural frameworks to describe atrocities in the Americas; how this shaped the portrayal of the 1641 rebellion in contemporary pamphlets; and the effect that this had on the wider Wars of the Three Kingdoms between England, Ireland and Scotland. Dr Eamon Darcy is a research assistant in the School of Histories and Humanities at Trinity College, Dublin.

The conflict on the Irish seaboard between the years 1641 and 1653 was not some peripheral theatre in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. As this first full-length study of the war at sea on the Irish coast from the outbreak of the Ulster rising in 1641 to the surrender of Inishbofin Island, the last major royalist maritime outpost, in April 1653, shows, it was instead the epicentre of naval conflict with important consequences for the nature and outcome of the land conflicts in Ireland and elsewhere. The book provides a clear and comprehensive narrative account of the war at sea, accompanied by careful contextualisation and a full analysis of its Irish, British and European dimensions. This includes the strategic importance of Irish ports, conflict between organised navies and formidable bands of privateers and pirates, the adoption of new naval technologies and tactics and the relationship between conflict on land and sea. Moving beyond traditional accounts of naval campaigns, it integrates warfare at sea into the wider dimension of political and economic developments in Ireland, England and Scotland. Extensive use is made of a wide range of archival material, in particular the High Court of Admiralty papers held in the National Archives at Kew. Dr Elaine Murphy is a Research Associate working on the ‘Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell’ project at the Department of History, University of Cambridge.

Mid-seventeenth century Ireland experienced a revolution in landholding. Coming in the aftermath of the devastating Cromwellian conquest, this seismic shift in the social and ethnic distribution of land and power from Irish Catholic to English Protestant hands would play a major role in shaping the history of the country. One of the most notorious elements of the Irish land settlement was the scheme of the transplantation to Connacht, which aimed to expel the Catholic population from three of the country's four provinces and replace them with a wave of Protestant settlers from England and further afield. Brought to the forefront of attention by nationalist scholars in the nineteenth century, the transplantation is one of the best-known but conversely least understood episodes in Irish history. Yet it has been relatively neglected by recent historians, a gap in the scholarship which this book remedies. It situates the origins of the transplantation in the heat of conquest, reconstructs its implementation in the turbulent 1650s and explores its far-reaching outcomes. It thus enables the significance of the transplantation, and its relevance to wider themes such as colonialism, state formation and ethnic cleansing, to be better understood. John Cunningham is IRCHSS Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Mobility Fellow in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Trinity College Dublin/Albert-Ludswigs-Universität Freiburg.

The ongoing debate about secularisation and religious change in twentieth-century Britain has paid little attention to the experience of those who swam against the cultural tide and continued to attend church. This study, based on extensive original archive and oral history research, redresses this imbalance with an exploration of church-based Christianity in post-war Birmingham, examining how churchgoers interpreted and responded to the changes that they saw in family, congregation, neighbourhood and wider society. One important theme is the significance of age and generational identity to patterns of religiosity amidst profound change in attitudes to youth, age and parenting and growing evidence of a widening 'generation gap' in Christian belief and practice. In addition to offering a new and distinctive perspective on the changing religious identity of late twentieth-century English society, the book also provides a rare case-study in the significance of age and generation in the social and cultural history of modern Britain. Ian Jones is the Director of the Saltley Trust (an educational charity), Birmingham.

Social welfare, increasingly extensive during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was by the first third of the nineteenth under considerable, and growing, pressure, during a "crisis" period when levels of poverty soared. This book examines the poor and their families during these final decades of the old Poor Law. It takes as a case study the lived experience of poor families in two Bedfordshire communities, Campton and Shefford, and contrasts it with the perspectives of other participants in parish politics, from the magistracy to the vestry, and from overseers to village ratepayers. It explores the problem of rising unemployment, the provision of parish make-work schemes, charitable provision and the wider makeshift economy, together with the attitudes of the ratepayers. That gender and life-cycle were crucial features of poverty is demonstrated: the lone mother and her dependent children and the elderly dominated the relief rolls. Poor relief might have been relatively generous but it was not pervasive - child allowances, in particular, were restricted in duration and value - and it by no means approximated to the income of other labouring families. Poor families must either have had access to additional resources, or led meagre lives. Samantha Williams is a university lecturer in local and regional history at the Institute of Continuing Education, Cambridge, and a Bye-Fellow in History, Girton College, Cambridge.

In the general election of 1931, the Labour Party campaigned on the slogan `Plan or Perish'. The party's pledge to create a planned socialist economy was a novelty, and marked the rejection of the gradualist, evolutionary socialism to which Labour had adhered under the leadership of Ramsay MacDonald. Although heavily defeated in that election, Labour stuck to its commitment. The Attlee government came to power in 1945 determined to plan comprehensively. Yet, the aspiration to create a fully planned economy was not met. This book explores the origins and evolution of the promise, in order to explain why it was not fulfilled. RICHARD TOYE lectures in history at Homerton College, Cambridge.