Modern England Research Articles

Ward and Hefferan (eds.), Loyalty to the Monarchy in Late Medieval and Early Modern Britain, c.1400–1688 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020)

The Royal Studies Journal has developed as an offshoot of the successful Kings & Queens conference series and the Royal Studies Network. The Network has provided a framework for researchers in the field to share news and information and make contacts with potential collaborators or to find scholars with similar interests. The Kings & Queens conference series has provided a yearly event for scholars to share their research in the field. However, while both the Network and conference series have drawn attention to the developing and thriving interdisciplinary field of Royal Studies, to date there has not been a dedicated publishing outlet for research in this area. The Royal Studies Journal aims to fill this gap and provide a venue for academic research from all disciplines, areas and periods across the field. The RSJ was founded in 2013 by a group of international researchers and postgraduate students with the support of the University of Winchester. It was decided that the publication should be multi-language, online only and fully open-access with no charges for either readers or contributors in order to make the research as accessible as possible.

Ward and Hefferan (eds.), Loyalty to the Monarchy in Late Medieval and Early Modern Britain, c.1400–1688 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020)

The Royal Studies Journal has developed as an offshoot of the successful Kings & Queens conference series and the Royal Studies Network. The Network has provided a framework for researchers in the field to share news and information and make contacts with potential collaborators or to find scholars with similar interests. The Kings & Queens conference series has provided a yearly event for scholars to share their research in the field. However, while both the Network and conference series have drawn attention to the developing and thriving interdisciplinary field of Royal Studies, to date there has not been a dedicated publishing outlet for research in this area. The Royal Studies Journal aims to fill this gap and provide a venue for academic research from all disciplines, areas and periods across the field. The RSJ was founded in 2013 by a group of international researchers and postgraduate students with the support of the University of Winchester. It was decided that the publication should be multi-language, online only and fully open-access with no charges for either readers or contributors in order to make the research as accessible as possible.

Beyond Bauhaus: Modernism in Britain, 1933–1966

Beyond Bauhaus: Modernism in Britain, 1933–1966

Physics and Psychics: The Occult and the Modern Sciences in Modern Britain, by Richard Noakes

Physics and Psychics: The Occult and the Modern Sciences in Modern Britain, by Richard Noakes

Peter Sloman (2019), Transfer State: The Idea of a Guaranteed Income and the Politics of Redistribution in Modern Britain, Oxford: Oxford University Press, £69.00, pp. 318, hbk.

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Parliamentary Representation in Modern Britain: Past, Present, and Future

AbstractA series of recent books all attest to a revival of interest in the theory and practice of parliamentary representation in the modern era as a scholarly discipline. This review surveys eight different aspects of that history since the early nineteenth century: the spatial dimension of the Palace of Westminster; the comparative framework offered by the history of parliaments in Europe; ideas of parliamentary representation; the history of parliamentary procedure; women in parliament; the House of Lords; the history of corruption; and the Brexit crisis. Insights and perspectives are drawn from recent historical research as well as from political science and intellectual history. The review concludes by observing that the history of parliamentary representation in the modern era is in good shape. Some older interpretive paradigms still lurk, especially an obsession with ‘democratization’. However, more is now known about individual MPs and constituencies than ever before. The digitization of the records of parliament is expediting the kind of longitudinal analysis which was impossible back in the 1960s and 1970s. And the intellectual history and public policy literature around the idea of representation is enjoying a renaissance.

Comfort feminism and the cruelty of a ‘post-racial’ monarchy in Britain

This paper explores the entanglements of love and cruelty in the publicity of the 2018 wedding of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex. We suggest that the wedding failed to inch closer toward a ‘post-racialized’ society. Rather, the wedding and public (but superficial) embracing of Markle promoted a ‘comfort feminism’ which obscured the mundane white supremacy and sexism of modern Britain. The paper concludes with a brief afterward which discusses the legacy of the royal wedding in the context of the social, political, and cultural challenges wrought by the intersections of the global pandemic and structural racism.

Zoe Strimpel. Seeking Love in Modern Britain: Gender, Dating and the Rise of “the Single.” London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. Pp. 233. $81.00 (cloth).

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Freedom of speech, 1500–1850. Edited by Robert G. Ingram, Jason Peacey and Alex W. Barber. (Politics, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain.) Pp. xii + 263. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020. £85. 978 1 5261 4710 3

Freedom of speech, 1500–1850. Edited by Robert G. Ingram, Jason Peacey and Alex W. Barber. (Politics, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain.) Pp. xii + 263. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020. £85. 978 1 5261 4710 3 - Volume 72 Issue 4

Walking, and Knowing the Past: Antiquaries, Pedestrianism and Historical Practice in Modern Britain

AbstractHow do those who write history know the past? This article addresses this question by examining the work of late eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century antiquaries, whose historical practice was closely tied to their embodied experience of the places about which they wrote. On‐foot out‐of‐doors observation provided them with evidence as important as that which might be derived from written sources, while also acting to stimulate their historical imaginations. This was the method of the Rev. Richard Warner, who made a 469‐mile ‘pedestrian tour’ of Wales in August 1797, and for whom walking (often more than 20 miles a day) was an essential element of his approach to understanding the past. Similarly, William Hutton’s History of the Roman Wall (1802) was not based on consultation of the accounts of others, or even on separate in‐person site visits, but on a single journey, on foot, along the course of the fortification. As argued here, these and other pedestrianised forms of historical knowing had a lasting influence on the writing of history in Britain.

Marketable Values: Inventing the Property Market in Modern Britain, by Desmond Fitz-Gibbon

Reviewed by: Marketable Values: Inventing the Property Market in Modern Britain by Desmond Fitz-Gibbon Katrina Navickas (bio) Marketable Values: Inventing the Property Market in Modern Britain, by Desmond Fitz-Gibbon; pp. v + 240. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2018, $105.00, $35.00 paper. “House Hunting,” a cartoon in the July 1867 issue of London Society (1862–98), depicts a middle-class couple visiting a house agent’s office. Some of the features satirized are familiar to us today, not least the sharp-suited agent confidently giving a no doubt elaborate spiel about the properties for sale and to let, as advertised on his wall. This image appears in Desmond Fitz-Gibbon’s study, Marketable Values: Inventing the Property Market in Modern Britain, to exemplify change. Such a scene of house hunting, coordinated by agents and mediated by a specialist press, had been rare in the eighteenth century but was commonplace by the mid-Victorian era. Marketable Values is a well-written and thoroughly researched study that tells the story of a definitive transformation in the economic and cultural aspects of the property market. The rapid growth of urban Britain, fueled by industrialization and imperial expansion, pushed the sale of property in new directions. The property market was also shaped by changing practices, organizations, and representations created by what became a national web of agents, economic institutions, and media. Land had long been bought and sold in Britain, but Fitz-Gibbon specifies changes specific to the Victorian period. Particular factors resulted in a more abstract idea of a property market that was as much a cultural phenomenon as it was an economic structure. This convincing argument is supported by a wealth of evidence from trade journals, auction catalogs, and case studies, positioned within recent “histories of capitalism” and with an emphasis on the contingent and everyday practices of real estate marketization (7). A cultural rather than an economic study, there is no analysis of property market data. It focuses on England and Wales, with the proviso that the Scottish and Irish land markets operated differently, notably in terms of long-existing processes of title registration. The first four chapters carefully construct a picture of an emerging national land market through four factors. The first involves the shift from private property transactions toward a more widespread and highly visible market orchestrated by auctions; London Auction Mart and the Tollerhouse Yard provide the case studies. The second studies the development of real estate services that made house agents into central figures, manipulating inside knowledge of an increasingly national market. The middle classes moved from rented properties to an aspirational world involving advertisements, particulars of sale, property registers, and orders to view houses issued by the agents. Third, this cultural imagining of marketability was shaped further in the later nineteenth century by the growth of the property trade press, with specialist publications such as the Estates Gazette (1858–present). The fourth factor was the growing campaign for title registration, the foremost political and legal implication emerging from the developing market. Debates over whether or not land titles should be registered nationally revealed tensions created by the new marketability of land as saleable property. Fitz-Gibbon highlights the colonial context of title registration as another important corrective to traditional accounts of the history of English landownership. He shows that, through the peripatetic imperial career of such land registration agents as Robert Torrens, who operated in South Australia before returning to Britain, ideas and practices flowed back and [End Page 449] forth between England and the colonies. Given this emphasis on reciprocal exchange, it would have been enlightening to know more about the re-exportation of such methods back to empire, or how settler-colonial domination was more deeply embedded through these processes. The final chapter explores the limits of property marketability. Fitz-Gibbon revisits the history of the Victorian commons preservation movement that fought against the parliamentary and private enclosure of common land, and against impediments to rights of way and customary rights such as pasturage of animals on commons. The popularity of the preservationist campaigns from the 1860s onward reflected wider shifts in liberal opinion away from earlier calls for free...

Physics and Psychics: The Occult and the Sciences in Modern Britain. By Richard Noakes. Science in History. Edited by Simon J. Shaffer and James A. Secord. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xvi+404. $120.00 (cloth); $96.00 (Adobe eBook Reader).

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsPhysics and Psychics: The Occult and the Sciences in Modern Britain. By Richard Noakes. Science in History. Edited by Simon J. Shaffer and James A. Secord. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xvi+404. $120.00 (cloth); $96.00 (Adobe eBook Reader).Michael SalerMichael SalerUniversity of California, Davis Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 93, Number 3September 2021 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/715333 Views: 51Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

‘Johnny Onions!’: Seasonal Pedlars from Brittany and their Good Reputation in Great Britain (1870s–1970s)

Abstract The Onion Johnnies were a group of French seasonal migrants and door-to-door traders who travelled to Britain from the mid-nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries. This article explores their surprisingly good reputation among the British population and authorities: while pedlars were often conflated with tramps, suspicious aliens or disreputable individuals by the police, the Johnnies’ reliance on established familial and commercial networks meant they benefited from a positive stereotype. While hawking was generally perceived as an anachronistic and unrewarding occupation, French onion sellers were exoticised by the British population, who celebrated they rural roots. The seasonal, semi-sedentary and ‘picturesque’ aspect of the onion trade enabled them to reverse the stigmas associated to itinerant trading, their doorstep performance becoming their selling point. The case study of the Johnnies helps us understand the stereotypes linked to peddling in late modern Britain and to go beyond the narrative of decline surrounding this occupation.

Review: British Gods: Religion in Modern Britain, by Steve Bruce

Steve Bruce is one of Britain’s best-known sociologists of religion. Over a career spanning four decades, he has become a noted expert on the relationship between religion and politics as well as vocal defender of the secularization theory. Bruce calls British Gods an “end-of-career summation study” (vi) and in many ways it continues ideas that he has outlined in previous publications. The central argument underlying the book is that not only has religious adherence declined significantly in Britain since the mid-nineteenth century, but that its power and prestige has similarly crumbled. Throughout, Bruce draws not only upon the quantitative data demonstrating this national decline but also localized case studies from across the country.British Gods covers a range of topics. These include the decline of widespread elite patronage of local churches; the changing social roles of the Christian clergy; the rise of the Charismatic and Black Pentecostal movements; the growth of Islam; Spiritualism and New Age; and religion’s impact on recent British politics. Bruce is certainly convincing in his argument that religion as an organized, institutional phenomenon has seen a clear numerical decline that shows no sign of reversal in Britain. The growth of minority religious communities, usually of immigrant origin, have not offset this much larger decline. Where Bruce’s argument perhaps faces its biggest challenge is in the perseverance of supernaturalism in the form of belief about ghosts, mediumship, horoscopes, and so on, among those who do not align with a particular religious identity. He repeats the argument, which he has made elsewhere, that less than 2 percent of the UK population engages in New Age activities, but that perhaps fails to account for those who believe (or at least take an agnostic interest) in such topics without actually taking part in related activities. If I understand correctly, Bruce leans toward not considering this sort of unstructured belief to be religion at all. If that is the case, it would be better if he provided a clear stipulative definition of precisely what he means when he talks about religion.In keeping with Bruce’s trademark style, British Gods is characteristically straightforward, down-to-earth, and eminently readable. Here is a writer who knows how to get his argument across to a wide and often non-academic readership. At points the book is genuinely funny, a rare quality in scholarly writing. Not one to be swayed by academic fads or community lobbyists, Bruce refuses to serve as an apologist for any particular religious community or for religion itself. When he wants to criticize religious groups, he does so. He readily refers to those who object to developments like same-sex marriage as “homophobes” (87, 88), for instance. Moreover, he pulls no punches in pointing to how accusations of Islamophobia are sometimes used to stifle criticism of Islam in British public life and rejects the premise that self-segregation among many British Muslim communities can be purely explained as a response to prejudice from non-Muslims. While Bruce’s own beliefs certainly inform his writing, here he has (perhaps unintentionally) championed the value of evidence-based argument over scholarship informed more by ideology, apologetics, or wishful-thinking.This is not a book about new religious movements per se, and thus its especial value to new religions scholars is limited. Its discussions of Spiritualism and New Age are perhaps most useful in this regard, although such topics have been covered in far greater depth elsewhere. However, this is probably a book that anyone interested in religion in Britain (or the Western world more broadly) would really benefit from reading—students and established scholars alike. Those of us who study new religions can sometimes forget how small and uninfluential such groups typically are in the grand scheme of things. A book like British Gods serves as an important corrective to such attitudes.

Before ‘Farm to Table’: Early Modern Foodways and Cultures. Entrevista con Amanda Herbert

Nahema Hanafi and Sophie Vasset: What brought you to the history of food? What specific elements of your research path triggered such an interest? Amanda Herbert: I’m a historian of the early modern body: how it was imagined, what poisoned or nourished it, how it got sick or well, what it thought and felt. My past work has addressed constructions of gender and feeling (my first book, Female Alliances: Gender, Identity, and Friendship in Early Modern Britain, was on the histories of femininity...

Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance: An Examination of Segregated Muslim Neighbourhoods in Modern Britain

Abstract The twenty first century has witnessed a heightened interest in Muslim settlers in western democracies. In Britain, following the suicide bombings of 9/11 and particularly in the aftermath of the 7th July 2005 bombings in London, much of this focus has been on the threat of terror attacks emanating from radicalised Muslims. It is clearly the case that the same focus also applies to other west European countries which have witnessed similar attacks. The question arises as to the kind of milieu in which domestic jihadist perpetrators have been raised and live. In most cases—though not all—an upbringing in segregated Muslim neighbourhoods is a recurring theme. These can be deemed ‘closed communities’, yet they are situated in open societies underpinned by a secular, liberal democratic polity. This paper provides reasons and evidence for the epithet of closed communities with respect to Muslims in Britain and explores how these—in many significant respects—differ from mainstream, liberal, secular society. The tensions that inevitably arise are considered together with their implications. The inspiration for this paper stems from Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies.

Tamara Atkin and Jaclyn Rajsic, eds., Manuscript and Print in Late Medieval and Early Modern Britain: Essays in Honour of Professor Julia Boffey. Woodbridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2019. Pp. x, 291; 2 black-and-white plates and 10 black-and-white figures. $99. ISBN: 978-1-8438-4531-7. Table of contents available online at https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/manuscript-and-print-in-late-medieval-and-early-modern-britain/E95FC66D581603E60C7C11A981150515.

Previous articleNext article No AccessReviewsTamara Atkin and Jaclyn Rajsic, eds., Manuscript and Print in Late Medieval and Early Modern Britain: Essays in Honour of Professor Julia Boffey. Woodbridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2019. Pp. x, 291; 2 black-and-white plates and 10 black-and-white figures. $99. ISBN: 978-1-8438-4531-7. Table of contents available online at https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/manuscript-and-print-in-late-medieval-and-early-modern-britain/E95FC66D581603E60C7C11A981150515.Mimi EnsleyMimi EnsleyGeorgia Institute of Technology Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Speculum Volume 96, Number 3July 2021 The journal of the Medieval Academy of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/714839 Views: 150Total views on this site Copyright 2021 by the Medieval Academy of America. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

“Thrust from the society of many dear friends”: loneliness in early modern Britain and in the humanities today

Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, when terms such as social distancing and self-isolation quickly entered the common lexicon, dozens of studies have been done on the effect of loneliness on people from a wide variety of demographics. The increasing prevalence of loneliness in modern discourse, and an awareness of the hazards that it poses to society, have resulted in a growing number of historians turning to the archives to study the ways in which people of the past might have dealt with this state of being.

Enoch Powell: Politics and Ideas in Modern Britain, by Paul Corthorn

Enoch Powell: Politics and Ideas in Modern Britain, by Paul Corthorn

БРИТАНСКОСТЬ И ДИАСПОРАЛЬНЫЕ ИДЕНТИЧНОСТИ (НА МАТЕРИАЛАХ МУСУЛЬМАНСКОЙ ЖЕНСКОЙ МОЛОДЕЖНОЙ КУЛЬТУРЫ ВЫХОДЦЕВ ИЗ ПАКИСТАНА И БАНГЛАДЕШ)

The article presents the results of a study of British Muslims and multiculturalism in the context of national identity in modern Britain. The authors investigate the mechanisms, strategies and roles of religious, social and gender identities of modern “British Muslim women”, British citizens and residents of cities such as London, Manchester, Oldham, and Bradford. The article focuses on the so-called “third generation” of Muslim women of Bangladeshi and Pakistani origin, born and educated in Britain, the so-called Britons “in-between”, and their Britishness. The authors show that British Islam today represents not so much a danger of radicalization, cultural segregation, anti-secular tendencies contrary to British culture—or is breaking with cultural and family connections between different generations within the “immigrant” community. Rather, it is a resource for uniting disparate ethnic communities, contributing to the success of the young generation’s social competition with representatives of “indigenous peoples”, personalization and the reduction of religious radicalization. The study is based on a variety of textual, visual and material sources, as well as original research data (70 in-depth interviews, 52 respondents) from the field seasons of 2012–2020 in the UK’s Pakistan-Bangladeshi regions of Rusholm and Longsite in Manchester, Glodwick in Oldham, Pakistani Manningham in Bradford in Northern England, and the Bangladeshi Tower Helmets in London.