History Of England Research Articles

Smashing Statues: Re-evaluating Iconoclasm in History

Abstract In 2020, as statues around the world were pulled down, intellectuals scrambled to make sense of the phenomenon. Veteran voices joined new experts from varied disciplines in contributing to the established field of iconoclasm studies, adding to the ongoing debates around history, memory, politics and public monuments. This seemingly global movement was fuelled by, and indeed fuelled, debates among the broader public about the meaning of statues in public life, and whether colonial statues of white men with dubious political and moral histories should remain in place or be removed from sight. The movement also met with a certain amount of backlash from conservative commentators who positioned themselves as the champions of Empire and a particular version of history in Britain, and from right-wing groups attempting to defend what they saw as an attack on white culture. The debate around statues, in other words, quickly became politically fraught. The authors ask what four recent works on iconoclasm add to an already extensive literature. What do they bring to the debates around history, memory, politics and public monuments? Two of the books (Thompson and Tunzelmann) are aimed at a broader readership, while the other two (Freedberg and Tugendhaft) are more specialised in their approach. We conclude that what is missing from these works is a global and comparative approach to the destruction of racist statues that also considers struggles against colonialism in national independence and Indigenous resistance movements throughout the modern and early modern periods.

Britanya Mitinde Yer Alan Robin Hood ve Kral Arthur’un Folklorik İncelemesi

King Arthur and Robin Hood, as two main folkloric figures, play an important role in British national identity especially in the nineteenth century. Throughout centuries, these mythical stories became well-known in the cultural heritage of other countries besides Britain. The lore and depictions of these two characters were not limited to the written and oral literature but came into existence through different mediums such as television, cinema, and computer games. Both the stories of King Arthur and Robin Hood have topical themes reflecting the political, social, and cultural issues and conflicts in societies and shape the future as timeless artefacts. In this sense, the major aim of this paper is to present and analyze the evolution of these two folk legends by using various historical and cultural sources to demonstrate the validity of the two characters across time, place, and medium. King Arthur and Robin Hood: The History and Folklore of England’s Most Famous Folk Legends by Jesse Harasta (2009) is used as the basis of the evolution of the lore of the two folkloric characters. The stories and the characters, the subjects of various myths and legends throughout centuries, have also been adapted and used in a variety of works and products transmitting local history of the lore of King Arthur and Robin Hood into global folklore. The political, social, and cultural use, adaptation, and evolution of King Arthur and Robin Hood will be traced starting from their emergence in the medieval ages through the twentieth century when the lore of King Arthur and Robin Hood is transformed through story-telling and added to different structures by using different media. As will be exemplified per the aim of the study though some changes in the presentation of the folkloric characters are present; the major dichotomic human characteristics are preserved. The article follows the trajectory of evolution of two legends into myths, literature, and finally products of popular culture. The work questions whether the divisive line between what is local and authentic versus that which is globalized and thus international is as clear as is presupposed.

New perspectives on Rubens’ landscapes: Separation and reunion of Het Steen and The rainbow landscape

The articles in this Oud Holland special issue ‘New perspectives on Rubens’ landscapes’ reassess Peter Paul Rubens’ late landscapes from a number of new perspectives. The occasion for this was the landmark exhibition Rubens: Reuniting the great landscapes held at the Wallace Collection, London from 3 June to 15 August 2021, preceded by a conference ‘Rubens’ great landscapes’ held at the Wallace Collection on 17-18 May 2021. The exhibition was in fact a reunion of A view of Het Steen in the early morning (c. 1636) from the National Gallery, London and The rainbow landscape (c. 1636) from the Wallace Collection – two great panoramic landscapes that were created as a pendant pair, but which had been separated for more than two hundred years. This introductory essay explores the journeys and changing ownership of the two paintings from after their separation in 1803 to the time of their reunion in 2021. It investigates the growing fame of the companion pieces in Britain in the nineteenth century, where the greatest proportion of Rubens’ landscapes were already to be found. It focuses on the decisive moment in the history of the two paintings: the auction of the collection of the third Earl of Orford in 1856, when the chance was lost to reunite the pair at the National Gallery, and the negative press that consequently ensued against the winning bid (4th Marquess of Hertford) and the outbid (the leading national collection of old masters) alike. The authors investigate the fate of Het Steen, from its acquisition by Lady Margaret Beaumont that effectively separated the pair, its role in Sir George Beaumont’s collection and its brief reunion with its companion piece at the British Institution of 1815. As part of the Beaumont Gift, it is one of the foremost paintings within the earliest collection of the National Gallery. The rainbow landscape, on the other hand, passed through a succession of private collections, where it became increasingly visible, engraved and discussed as one of Britain’s greatest masterpieces. The 1856 purchase was a possible turning point for Lord Hertford, the reclusive collector, who at this stage was considering what to do with his collection after his death. This essay charts the trajectory of Rubens’ two great landscapes from the ownership of dealers, to private collectors, exhibitions, and finally to public museums, with increased visibility at each stage of their journey. Originally painted by Rubens for his own collection, to be displayed either on the walls of his manorial castle, Het Steen, itself or his Antwerp home, they would have been seen by a range of visitors, including artists and collectors. Two centuries later, they were to be found on the walls of Coleorton Hall and Wolterton Hall, two grand country houses in England. During periods of leisure spent at the invitation of the owners of these homes, later artists were able to contemplate these works and the surrounding landscapes and draw inspiration from them, and formulate their own artistic responses, in much the same spirit of ‘otium’ as outlined by Corina Kleinert in her essay. In keeping with the themes of this special issue, their history in Britain encompasses both the ‘prosaic’, transactional account of how they were sold, and the ‘poetic’ account of how artists travelled some distance to see the works in situ, to copy and be inspired by them. The pattern therefore complements the earlier provenance of these works, as part of a story of a gradual transferral from the private to the public domain.

Two Houses, Two Kingdoms: A History of France and England, 1100–1300

Two Houses, Two Kingdoms: A History of France and England, 1100–1300

The Politics of Ælfric’s Maccabees

Abstract Ælfric of Eynsham’s Old English homily on the biblical books of Maccabees is a crucial text in the intellectual history of later Anglo-Saxon England, containing the only discussion of ‘just war’ in the surviving corpus of Anglo-Saxon literature, and the earliest attestation to the ‘Three Orders of Society’. It is now generally understood that Ælfric was writing for a predominantly lay audience, exhorting them to take up arms against the Vikings. This becomes particularly apparent from a close examination of Ælfric’s deviations from, and emendations to, the Vulgate, not all of which have hitherto been noticed. After supplementing this literary analysis with new observations, this article attempts to delineate the historical implications of this interpretation of the text. Once placed within its historical context, Ælfric’s Maccabees appears as a sharp critique of the direction of royal policy under Æthelred the Unready during the 990s, especially the payment of tribute to the Vikings and their conscription as mercenaries. This invites us to reconsider both Ælfric’s own intellectual trajectory and the court politics of Anglo-Saxon England in the final years of the first millennium.

Of translation: the conceptual work of multilingualism in David Hume

ABSTRACT Although David Hume never addresses translation at length, he regularly invokes an interlingual movement at decisive moments in his work. Each of this article’s three sections addresses a pair of such moments. The first argues that translation establishes the association of ideas in A Treatise of Human Nature and An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. The second analyzes translation as the ground of both the rational and the emotional arguments for God in the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion. The third and final section addresses translation as a highly regulated object of criticism in the History of England before turning to the Essays where it launches the search for the standard of taste in all criticism. Because translation thus intervenes not only in Hume’s criticism, where one might expect it, but also in his historiography, theology and epistemology, this article concludes by formalizing the interdisciplinary perspective translation opens in Hume’s work.

«I will make no speeches; I come to die»: the duke of Monmouth execution – a simple of Jacobite propaganda, 1685

The article analyzes a document testifying to the last moments of the Duke of Monmouths life. The eldest illegitimate son of Charles II, Monmouth rebelled against his Catholic uncle James II. The rebel militias were defeated by the royal regular army and the Duke was captured. The defeated bastard of royal blood tried to save his life by begging forgiveness from the king, but was executed. Government propaganda used the plot of the dukes execution, showing him as a weak and weak-willed traitor. The text of the article analyzes a pamphlet describing the various stages of preparation for the execution of the duke. The pamphlet shows Monmouths behavior before his death. His dialogue with the priests is given. The attempt of the royal power to force Monmouth to repent is shown. The documents included in the appendix are also being examined the dukes letters to King James and his declaration, in which the rebel is blamed before the Crown. The Duke of Monmouth was the last rebel of royal blood in the history of England to claim the throne of the Three Kingdoms. It is concluded that the rebellious duke has no support from the general population and the popularity of his business. The importance of mass media in early Modern England is shown.

Editorial

MY first experience with the Quarterly was a formative one. In 2009, fresh from graduate school, I submitted an essay on the Maine writer Sarah Orne Jewett and “race suicide” anxieties in fin-de-siécle New England. I was pleased to pass muster with the peer reviewers, but the real work began when Lynn Rhoads led me through multiple rounds of revision, challenging me to clarify each sentence as well as the idea behind it. Her rigor and engagement remain unmatched in my experience of scholarly editors to date. She not only improved my writing at a pivotal time, but also provided a crucial model for me these many years later, instilling in me a high regard for the journal and for the editor's office more broadly. It has been an honor to correspond with her in recent weeks in my new position as Bernard Bailyn Editor of the Quarterly. Indeed, I have been bolstered by a warm welcome from so many in the community that this publication represents, including Emeritus Editor Bill Fowler; Nick Lindsay and his team at MIT Press; and Bob Allison and the Colonial Society of Massachusetts. I would like to thank the members the Board of Directors of NEQ, Inc. for entrusting me with this position and for their guidance, especially Dick Brown, Chris Jedrey, Megan Marshall, and Mark Peterson. Betsy Klimasmith, my colleague of ten years at UMass Boston, has thankfully retained her post as Associate Editor; I have long benefitted from her mentorship and am delighted by this new chapter of our collaboration. I'm grateful as well to our brilliant Reviews Editor, Sara Georgini, for her galvanizing thoughts on new directions in New England studies and the journal's role in them. Our intrepid and meticulous graduate assistants, Amy Lin and Grace Wargovich, have provided steadying continuity in these first months and remain critical to the Quarterly’s operation. Finally, I thank my predecessor, Jonathan Chu, who first invited me to the editorial staff five years ago. We wish him all the best in his retirement, though he has graciously remained at work for the journal during this transitional period, which I am tempted to extend indefinitely if only to keep him nearby.We announce some changes to the Board of Editors as well. First, we gratefully acknowledge the years of service of four members who have completed their terms: Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Daniel R. Coquillette, Andrew Delbanco, and Mary Loeffelholz. Secondly, I'm delighted to announce two new members, Cornelia Dayton (Professor of History, University of Connecticut) and Robert Levine (Distinguished University Professor of English, University of Maryland). I look forward to convening this group in the coming months and drawing on their expertise and wisdom to shape the journal's next chapter.In evaluating our charge, I return to the Editorial Announcement of January 1928, in the first number of the first volume of the Quarterly. In it, the founding editors note that although the early periods of New England history were by no means “exhausted” as fields of study, they would “need fertilizing.” They explain, “History is continually broadening, bringing new aspects of human endeavor within its scope, and each generation must rewrite history from its own point of view.” In this, the journal's ninety-sixth year, we renew our commitment to serving as the venue for the best scholarly writing on New England history and literature, both in the areas that have traditionally organized our fields of study and also in those emerging ones that will help us see New England anew. We are eager to welcome the rising generation into the long conversation in these pages as they reckon with history from their own point of view, aiming to bring new aspects of human endeavor within our scope, as the journal's founders hopefully anticipated.In this number, we are pleased to present two major essays and a newly discovered document with memorandum. In our lead essay, G. Patrick O'Brien traces the life of Flora Lee, a woman enslaved in Revolutionary-era Massachusetts, meditating in particular on the difficulties presented by incomplete and biased archives. Also in this issue, Cory Higdon explores the conflicts arising from religious liberty in the Providence Plantations, teasing out the formative tensions between freedom of conscience and sociopolitical unity. Finally, Alexander Jordan introduces a previously unknown letter from Thomas Carlyle to Charles Stearns Wheeler, who played a crucial role, alongside Ralph Waldo Emerson, in disseminating Carlyle's work in the United States. Jordan offers an engaging account of these relationships and their significance, along with a transcription of the letter and a scanned image of the manuscript, courtesy of the Berlin State Library.On behalf of the editorial team, thank you for reading. We look forward to the work ahead.

Current trends and future directions in the rural history of later medieval England (c. 1200–c. 1500)

AbstractThis article surveys a range of work on the later medieval English countryside published since 2000, and offers some predictions and suggestions about future research. It shows that the field of ‘rural history’ has rarely been closely defined, and indeed has tended to be treated as a broad church that can accommodate many different kinds of approach, themselves drawing on a variety of disciplinary traditions. The article identifies and discusses recent and current innovation and creativity in research within two such broad approaches, one mainly ‘economic’, the other ‘cultural’. It concludes by arguing for the gains that can be enjoyed through the combination of elements of the two approaches, and especially through a renewed emphasis on the illumination of the general through an intensive focus on the local.

Words on Fire: Eloquence and Its Conditions, by Rob Goodman

Words on Fire: Eloquence and Its Conditions, by Rob Goodman

The State We are in: UK Public History, since 2011

As public historians living and working in Britain, we live in interesting times. The last twelve years have seen political turbulence in the United Kingdom and its four constituent nations of England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. In this article, we aim to explain why understanding the role of the state in public history in Britain is important. In doing so we consider the current political and public history context, including the rise of non-university based public historians who are working across a range of sectors, as well as the relatively recent rise of taught public history at postgraduate levels within the universities. We do the above in the context of the cultural history wars that have raged in the United Kingdom over the last decade, and the possible links between this and the promotion of wider heritage activities through politically directed funding. We argue that a clear future task for public historians is work aimed at understanding the ways history is being used to shape public perceptions of the past, and how that plays out in the present.

When the Air Became Important: A Social History of the New England and Lancashire Textile Industries by Janet Greenlees

Reviewed by: When the Air Became Important: A Social History of the New England and Lancashire Textile Industries by Janet Greenlees David Rosner Janet Greenlees. When the Air Became Important: A Social History of the New England and Lancashire Textile Industries. Critical Issues in Health and Medicine. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2019. xiv + 250 pp. Ill. $50.95 (978-0-8135-8796-7). In the early 1840s Charles Dickens, perhaps the singular English author giving voice to the horrifying realities of lower class urban life in England, toured the United States to understand the new republic and the people who had broken away from Empire only a few decades before. He made a special stop in Lowell, Massachusetts, one of the new textile mills organized to process the cotton that the slave-based South was pouring into the world economy. He was deeply aware of the importance of the cotton to the textile industry as it was the backbone of the industrial revolution in England where working people drawn to Manchester, Lancaster, Leeds and other cities were suffering from low wages and horrifying living conditions in what William Blake had dubbed “satanic mills.” What Dickens found in Lowell was a world apart from that he observed in the English mill towns. Dickens expected a dispirited workforce living in similar horrid conditions. Yet, in Lowell, the mills he observed were remarkably clean and tidy. “The rooms in which they worked, were as well ordered as themselves. In the windows of some, there were green plants, which were trained to shade the glass; in all, there was as much fresh air, cleanliness, and comfort, as the nature of the occupation would possibly admit of.” The young women who worked there appeared healthy and happy. “Out of so large a number of females, many of whom were only then just verging upon womanhood, it may be reasonably supposed that some were delicate and fragile in appearance: no doubt there were.” But he was at a loss to find them. “I solemnly declare, that from all the crowd I saw in the different factories that day, I cannot recall or separate one young face that gave me a painful impression; not one young girl whom, assuming it to be a matter of necessity that she should gain her daily bread by the labour of her hands, I would have removed from those works if I had had the power.”1 By the turn of the twentieth century, the halcyon days of happy workers and clean, tidy workplaces and living quarters were gone in the New England mill [End Page 165] towns, as they were in the British textile industry as well. By the time of the famous Lawrence textile strike of women made famous by the poem put to song, “Bread and Roses,” the towns were among the most unhealthful in the country. Fall River, Massachusetts had “gained the infamous distinction of having the highest death rate of any northern U.S. city, surpassing that of New York City and the Lancaster mill towns” of northern England. Chief among the diseases and causes of death in these once-salubrious towns was consumption, a collection of symptoms that were sometimes caused by the tubercle bacillus and, in some industrial sites, seen to be caused by the dust laden air created by a host of new water and steam-powered devices that produced huge amounts of dust in confined spaces that workers breathed in. Water driven looms, steam-powered drills and chippers, lung diseases of various forms came to dominate the lives and deaths of workers in textile mills, mines, quarries, foundries, steel mills, brick factories, and a host of other worksites central to the emerging industrial, urbanizing society. Silicosis in the quarries and foundries, asbestosis in the growing auto and brake industries, construction and insulation trades, and, most relevant to Greenlees’s story, byssinosis in the textile mills began to seep into medical and politicians’ consciousness. Heat and humidity in plants driven by coals, steam, electricity, oil and various forms of power, all contributed to a singularly unhealthful work environment. When the Air Became Important traces the history of consciousness of disease...

Premodern Germany and the teleology of economic history

Premodern Germany and the teleology of economic history

Editorial

Editorial

History of the Dukes of Normandy and the Kings of England by the Anonymous of Béthune

Ever since its publication by Francisque Michel for the Société de l’Histoire de France in 1840, the Old French prose history of the dukes of Normandy translated here has been recognized as an important source for the history of Normandy, England, Flanders, and Capetian France. Its unnamed author is customarily referred to as the ‘Anonymous of Béthune’ because of the prominence in the narrative of the lords of Béthune (dépt. Pas-de-Calais), who were ‘advocates’ (lay protectors) of Arras but also major landowners in England between the eleventh and mid-thirteenth centuries. The same writer is believed to have been the author of a vernacular prose history of the kings of France, usually called the Chronique des Rois de France, which was partly published by Léopold Delisle in 1904. The two Béthune texts reworked and continued two French texts from the beginning of the thirteenth century, known, respectively, as the Chronique de Normandie and the Geste de France, which in turn drew upon and embellished older Latin texts—respectively, in the traditions of Norman and pro-Capetian historical writing. Despite their wealth of original detail, historians have been hesitant to use the two Béthune histories as historical sources. In part, this is due to their genre: vernacular texts, whether in prose or verse, have often been treated with suspicion by medieval historians trained in the use of Latin chronicles, and the relationship between the many vernacular histories from this period is also problematic. Yet there can be no doubt that the lack of either a modern critical edition or an English translation of the Anonymous Norman history has also hindered its use, and so the present work, published in Routledge’s Crusade Texts in Translation series, is very welcome indeed. The translation, using the 1840 edition, was drafted by the distinguished translator Janet Shirley, who died in 2017, but it is Paul Webster who has prepared it for publication, with extensive historical notes and a scholarly introduction.

HUME, HISTORY, AND THE USES OF SYMPATHY

ABSTRACTThis article focuses on the role of sympathy and antipathy in David Hume's History of England (1754–1762) in relation to the broader place of sympathy in Hume's moral philosophy. Hume, in his earlier philosophical work, argues that sympathy is a naturally occurring responsiveness to others’ feelings, similar to the resonance between musical strings. In his History, however, he carefully curates his readers’ emotional responses, inviting sympathy with figures of suffering—such as King Charles I and Mary Queen of Scots—while also, often almost simultaneously, stirring intense antipathy for those whose religious extremism he regards as socially dangerous and beyond comprehension. After first situating the emergence of Hume's theory of sympathy in its early eighteenth‐century context, this article explores in detail the techniques of sentimental management that appear across the six volumes of the History of England. The elaborate deployment of emotions in Hume's historiography is shown to be in tension both with some aspects of his philosophy of natural human sympathy and with his brief reflections on the writing of history. Hume channeled his readers’ sympathies toward particular targets and against others. A careful analysis of this usefully sheds light on the management of sympathy in modern historiography, on which Hume has had an enduring influence.

Histories of Everyday Life: The Making of Popular Social History in Britain, 1918-1979 (Past & Present Book Series). By Laura Carter

In Histories of Everyday Life, Laura Carter offers a fresh and compelling take on the origins and popularization of social history in Britain in the decades after the First World War. Carter argues that this was a story located firmly in schools and cultural institutions rather than universities, and that its pioneers were mostly amateur rather than professional historians. Her central argument is that liberal educationalists and writers saw the history of everyday life as a popular, broadly non-political vehicle for engaging with ‘the masses’ as Britain embraced full democracy after the First World War. The history of everyday life was thus, in Carter’s terms, a central component of Britain’s ‘educational century’, with its peculiar mix of liberal paternalism and popular democratization. With good reason, Carter frames her important study in the context of the pioneering work of Alison Light on inter-war conservatism, Claire Langhamer on mid-century domesticity, and Helen McCarthy on education for citizenship. Women are at the forefront of her story as educators, writers, and broadcasters, and she portrays the histories of everyday life they produced as part of a broader cultural shift inwards, away from the imperialist expansionism of the previous century towards Light’s ‘history from inside’. Carter also stresses the centrality of place to her story. Histories of everyday life fed on, and helped sustain, local and regional loyalties at a time when politics and culture were otherwise becoming increasingly centralized. Intriguingly, she is adamant that, down to the 1960s, this was no less true for Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland than for England (pp. 58, 130, 154).

'½ vol. not relevant': The scrapbook of Winifred Penn-Gaskell

The scrapbook of Winifred Penn-Gaskell – celebrated aerophilatelist and collector of aeronautica –reveals a great deal about its maker and the social and political context of early flight history in Britain. It is argued here that a ‘reading’ of the book as a non-textual object offers a predictive argument for the aesthetic and cultural representation of heavier-than-air craft and pilots in the years immediately prior to the First World War. By viewing each section of the scrapbook as parts of a contingent whole, the early-twentieth century interest in performative masculinity (physical culture and boxing) becomes a part of the technological narrative of aviation development. In this paper I question the implications of branding an object such as this ‘irrelevant’ to the broader themes of the Penn-Gaskell collection, and offer some views of my own on how the notion of failure affects museological practices.

A Century of Literary Criticism: A Large-Scale Analysis of the Monthly Review

ABSTRACT For almost 100 years, the Monthly Review documented literary history in Britain through its efforts to review every published text. Appearing monthly from 1749 to 1844, the periodical sheds light not only on texts published during this time, many of which are now “lost” to scholarly analysis, but also on the original critical discourse surrounding these texts. Analysis of the Monthly Review presents an opportunity to discern influential trends in publishing and literary criticism, yet close examination of the periodical proves formidable due to its size. In this paper, we use statistical topic modeling to “read” the over 140,000 pages of the Monthly Review, revealing prominent themes and discourses in the corpus. In particular, we highlight the periodical’s presentation of genre differences and its privileging of specific discourses and frameworks of critical evaluation, all of which served to shape contemporary readers’ perceptions of the rapidly expanding literary sphere.

The reversed gaze: Krishnabhabini Das’s travelogue A Bengali Lady in England (1885) as a transnational narrative

ABSTRACT This paper sets out to examine cultural encounters between India and England in an 1885 Bengali travelogue Englandey Bangamahila [A Bengali Lady in England] by Krishnabhabini Das, who travelled to England with her husband at a time when the idea and practice of travelling women was either inconceivable or deemed a taboo in India. The travelogue under study deals with Das's several journeys in England and provides an intriguing account of her understanding of colonial English culture. My prime objective is to underline how Das presents England from the perspective of a female, marginal subject. To this end, I elaborate on foregrounded tensions between London and Calcutta, and Englishwomen and Hindu women as they are represented through the reversed gaze. By highlighting the cross-border connections in the travelogue as a transnational narrative, I aim to shed light on the connective histories of India and England in the long nineteenth century.