In preparing this brief talk or walk as I'd like to think of it on this nursing history tour of Europe, I'd like to approach my task from the point of view of the flaneur. By that I mean my perspective will be of one who experiences the city of nursing history by strolling around, focussing on what takes my fancy as a way of navigating the scholarly field. If it falls into Baudelaire's category as one who loiters, I hope it is loitering with good intent. Clearly, given my allotted time, this is not the place to provide an encyclopedic over- view of the forces that have shaped the field and the extent to which that has gone beyond professional boundaries or international borders. My remit rather is to comment on some of the trends in nursing history in Europe. But that begs the question of which Europe to take as the starting point for our tour? The Europe of language groups? Of geography? Of political geography? Of cultural kinship? Of religion? Any excursion into the history of nursing in Europe immediately raises questions about definitions. Delving into the historical vaults of Spain, Portugal, France, Germany, Italy, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Scandinavian countries demands a facility for those lan- guages. Clearly, this is beyond the scope of anyone less than a superhuman- polyglot and would demand a much more collaborative and comparative approach than I can offer here. What I can do is to map some of the macro themes that I have gleaned partly from work published in English and partly from talking to my friends and colleagues, opinion formers in the field: Anne Summers, Celia Davies, Sioban Nelson, and Christine Hallet who all send greetings and birthday wishes.One major development that will certainly make this task easier in the future is that a new European Nursing History Network has just been launched by Christine Hallett and colleagues from Ireland, which pulls in colleagues from the Bosch Institute in Germany along with the UK Centre for the His- tory of Nursing. It looks like English may be the lingua franca but hopefully the network will help to bring work currently buried to light and help to set out a new scholarly agenda for the future. In addition, some countries have active groups, networks exchanging research and resources-the Portuguese link strongly with their Latin American colleagues. Hiades, nursing history journal, was started in 1994 by the Andalusian Nursing Association. There is a history of nursing society in Denmark which is hosting an international conference this year and a nucleus of scholars in Norway so there are healthy signs of life and I wish the new European Union network every success.ReligionAs far as the big picture is concerned, three macro themes stand out: religion, war, and politics-indeed the great taboos of the dinner table conversation. Of particular relevance for our purposes, and perhaps the most significant differentiator between continental European and Anglo Saxon his- toriography, is the greater and earlier emphasis on the relationship between religious and secular nursing. Nursing plays its part in the great dramas of life and features in those settings where the church has played a prominent, if not the dominant role as a provider of health care. In catholic countries, the separation of church and state occurred at different times and the impact that this has had on changing approaches to welfare policy have been ana- lyzed by commentators in France, Spain, and Italy. Of particular interest is the influence that this shifting political dynamic has had on shaping the role and development of the profession and how the profession in turn seized the opportunity to align itself with wider political movements such as the claim to citizenship. Within this debate, gender played a crucial role-its elastic, even latex-like, qualities stretched between the coordinates of ecclesiastical essentialism on the one hand (devotion, self-sacrifice, and subordination) counterbalanced by its more radical opposite assertion (autonomy and authority) on the other. …