This article discusses one of the main phenomena of the crusading movement: how preachers of the crusades to the Holy Land made the crusade indulgence attractive to would‐be crusaders. Since a plenary indulgence for the participants of the crusades is likely to have been introduced by the papacy at the beginning of the crusading movement in the eleventh century, this was used in crusade preaching throughout

Over the course of the long nineteenth century, people in the United Kingdom signed a wide variety of petitions, addresses, testimonials, and related documents. Though many forms of subscriptional culture had medieval and early modern origins, their transformations across this period reveal the shifting perceptions of the crown, parliament, the administrative state, and local government. The article

The focus of Karn's Kings, Lords, and Courts in Anglo‐Norman England is the transformation of the legal landscape of England, whereby the dominance of hundred and shire courts was replaced in the twelfth century by a more complex picture, caused by a proliferation of lords’ courts, alongside the hundred and the shire. The developments which led to the creation of these private courts have yet to be

This article surveys the state of the field of material culture within the discipline of history. The study of material culture – the myriad layers of cultural meaning embedded within objects – has been adopted by historians from colleagues in anthropology, archaeology and museum studies, and continues to thrive as an interdisciplinary field in tandem with art history and literary studies. As inventive

Elizabeth I is regarded as having been parsimonious in creating new noblemen, allowing the nobility to decrease in size as she sought to maintain the exclusivity of the caste. In reality, the queen created a larger nobility than her Tudor predecessors had done. Her failure to sustain this high number was due not to a policy of limiting the number of noblemen but rather because she did not need so many

Life writing holds real potential for historians seeking to understand the construction of narrative identity, and enables a deeper understanding of histories of the everyday and lived experience. It provides a glimpse into personal relationships, experiences of work and leisure, and childhood memories. Using the life writing of eight Mass Observers and University of the Third Age participants, Growing

Sir Thomas More's account of the murder of the ‘princes in the Tower’ has been treated with varying degrees of scepticism over the past century and a half. More's History of King Richard III is notable, nonetheless, for the way it provides precise circumstantial detail and responsibility for the focal point of the succession crisis of 1483. More's account of those deaths is all the more striking because

This article seeks to analyse the political and diplomatic effects of the outbreak of the First World War in the Iberian peninsula, considering the relationship of two small powers, Portugal and Spain, in the context of the political and diplomatic instability caused by the Sarajevo assassination in the summer of 1914, and the debates between neutrality and belligerency that occurred in both countries

The 1917 revolutions and ensuing Russian Civil War (1918–22) resulted in a number of profound changes throughout the embryonic Soviet state. Greater ideological freedom and increased government support during the reconstructive period of the New Economic Policy (1921–8) led to the development of several professional organisations within the social sciences. One of the most prominent of these was a

Henry (Harry) Gullett, the press liaison for the Australian delegation at the Paris peace conference in 1919, was convinced that the valour and sacrifice of Australian soldiers had earned the nation the right to have its voice heard. In this, he was in complete agreement with the Australian prime minister Billy Hughes. Both were equally certain, however, that Australian interests were now ‘grievously

When the Scottish bishop Gavin Douglas (c.1476–1522) translated Virgil's ancient Latin epic the Aeneid into his vernacular tongue in 1513, he produced a literary monument which would go on to be appreciated and praised for centuries. The translation marked the first time that a major classical poem had been faithfully and entirely carried over into English, and even today the work preserves the power

Two notable late‐medieval images depicting St Edmund King and Martyr, or his shrine, associate his cult with prayers and intercession for the king. In Lydgate's illustrated verse life of the saint, Henry VI is shown kneeling before the shrine, while on the Wilton Diptych, Edmund is one of three saints presenting Richard II to the Virgin Mary. This article explores royal devotion to Edmund, examining

This article surveys the state of the field of the history of political thought The premise of the discipline is that political arguments and ideas have developed historically and thus have theoretical histories that can be located and traced But, as our survey of the field shows, what counts as ?context? is up for debate, and contextual methods have become more sensitive to present-day concerns The

The Franciscan custody of York comprised seven friaries located in two counties, Yorkshire and Lincolnshire: Beverley, Boston, Doncaster, Grimsby, Lincoln, Scarborough and York. Arriving in the north of England in the late 1220s, the Franciscans of the York custody saw the suppression of their last house, Scarborough, in March 1539. Using the biographical index compiled by the late John R. H. Moorman

This article re‐examines the causes of the May 1917 engineering strike, the biggest strike in Britain during the First World War. Besides official files, it uses private papers and the records of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers. The stoppage began in sympathy with sacked employees at Tweedale & Smalley in Rochdale, who were resisting the spread of ‘dilution’ (replacing skilled by unskilled workers)

Computing and the use of digital sources and resources is an everyday and essential practice in current academic scholarship. The present article gives a concise overview of approaches and methods within digital historical scholarship, focussing on the question: How have the Digital Humanities evolved and what has that evolution brought to historical scholarship? We begin by discussing techniques in

The debate about the purpose (and uses) of studying diplomatic and international history are as old as the subject itself. This article traces the origins and development of diplomatic history as a specialized field within history as a wider discipline, before exploring more recent challenges to it. The article seeks to highlight both the scope for, and the opportunities to be found in, cross‐fertilization

On 6 February 1918, the Representation of the People Act was passed; it enfranchised all men over twenty‐one and women over the age of thirty if either they or their husband met the requisite property qualifications. In public and media history this legislation was regarded as a reward for women's contribution to the war effort and evidence that one of the legacies of the First World War was a range

This article analyses the first two decades of the flagship museum of revolutionary history in Petrograd/Leningrad following the October Revolution of 1917. The article discusses the purpose behind the efforts to enlighten the masses on the revolutionary movement and the methods employed to collect and display artefacts of the revolutionary period in Russia. Further examination is made of the communication

Samantha Smith came to fame by writing a letter to the Soviet leader, Yuri Andropov, in December 1982, expressing her fears about a potential nuclear war between the two superpowers. Her letter was quoted in the main Soviet newspaper Pravda in April 1983 and the Smith family was subsequently invited to visit the Soviet Union during the summer. Samantha’s trip captured the attention of the world media

Robert Mills's generously illustrated new monograph is a welcome addition both to medieval studies and to gender and sexuality studies (including queer, transgender and feminist theory). Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages is an interdisciplinary study that brings together art history and literary analysis in order to explore ‘the relationship between sodomy and motifs of vision and visibility in medieval

In the early Nineteenth-century, there was a concerted effort by the judiciary, media and the Home Department to close down official discussion and deny official recognition of same-sex relationships and sex amongst men. The crime that dare not speak its name became a literal description, given that the offence of buggery or sodomy was replaced with ___ in official records and media reports. The case

This article focuses on the repression of erotic and pornographic imagery (artworks, statues and figurines) by the Inquisition in Madrid during the last six years of its existence between 1814 and 1820. This period in the Inquisition's history has tended to be overlooked and dismissed as insignificant. After tracing the history of the Spanish Inquisition's desultory attempts in earlier years to suppress

This article is a clarion call for the rehabilitation of works on intelligence in what Christopher Andrew once referred to as the ‘airport bookstall’ genre. It argues that a more fitting epitaph for the literature from intelligence history's earliest days is better designated as the ‘Muckraker Era’, rather than the ‘airport bookstall’. My argument proceeds on three fronts. First, these writers from

This article examines how concepts of mergers and acquisitions shaped potential horizontal mergers, namely stock swaps, and vertical mergers shaped oil and ranching on the Southern Great Plains in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

This article uses letters of advice, outlining key principles of royal power, to explore how abbots and bishops in high medieval Europe sought to demonstrate compliance with widely shared norms about the role and nature of clerical counsel when interacting with kings. It will show that the type of the remonstrating cleric was deeply engrained in epistolary culture. While this expectation may not always

In 1783 the British and Irish governments launched an experiment by funding the establishment of a settlement that was expected to become a new city. It was called ‘New Geneva’ and was situated on the site of a village called Passage, just outside the port of Waterford in Ireland. New Geneva was to be peopled by rebels, Genevans who had fled or were ready to flee in the aftermath of the failed revolution

The history of British relations with the states of pre-unification Italy is a neglected field of enquiry. The research that has been undertaken has tended to focus on the generally good relationship Britain shared with the Kingdom of Sardinia, the state which presided over Italy's national unification between 1859 and 1861. By contrast, the extent to which Britain's poor relations with the Papal States

First, the time-lapse has meant that Professor Gunn has produced a book of breathtaking scholarship and thoroughness. The list of sources consulted, many of them unpublished, should shame even the most hardened and assiduous of source-conscious historians. In his bibliography, I counted no less than 60 National Archives classes, 13 in the British Library and 56 public and private local collections

Brown v. Board of Education and Plessy v. Ferguson dominate discussion of the impact of the Supreme Court on matters of southern race relations, and understandably so given the significance of Brown in overturning Plessy. As a result, historians have focused heavily on the Plessy case as a way of understanding the emergence of Jim Crow segregation. Yet this is to study the late nineteenth century from

Scotland was overwhelmed with injured servicemen and their families during the wars of the 1640s. Centralized attempts to help support war veterans and, later, their families were ambitious but continued to rely upon local church sessions to collect, distribute and monitor charitable payments. Using local parish-based manuscript material, this article shows how this system proved remarkably successful

Most of the celebrations of Magna Carta in 2015 concentrated on it in a more or less exclusively English context. It is the argument of this article that the ideas of Englishmen about society, government and law were much the same as those of other Europeans at the time and that Magna Carta can best be understood in that wider context. Contemporary communities in other kingdoms were also securing charters

The article focuses on the view of the Mediterranean in early geopolitical writings. Through this lens, it looks at the space metaphors and imaginative geographies that defined the core meanings of the Middle Sea over the last 200 years. The author discusses the role that the Enlightenment philosophy of history had in the shaping of classical geography. Moving on similar grounds, early geopolitical

The representations and experiences of children inside pauper lunatic asylums embody a significant lacuna in the understanding of children and childhood during the nineteenth century. Considering the Victorian period as a time when the conceptual notion of a sheltered and romantic childhood emerged it is essential, both to studies of childhood and to the history of the asylum, to examine how children

The choice by different regimes as to what matters in the past and what does not is always a telling factor in their character. Mussolini's dictatorship in Italy made major play with romanita through its representation of the dictator as a new Caesar and its claim to be ‘restoring’ the Roman empire. The centro storico of Rome is still full of such Fascist messaging. The regime was also the first to

This chapter investigates the relationship between the legitimization of acts of aggression in wars and the outlawing of violence at home. It focuses on soldiers' responses to violence during the transition from nineteenthcentury warfare to total war, which relied not only on mass conscription but also on the mobilization of civilians. In the ‘wars of the masses’ of the late nineteenth and early twentieth

This article considers the clothing choices made by some of the Tudor (and Stewart) elite who met their end on the scaffold. While the final speeches of the condemned have been analysed, what they chose to wear has been neglected – yet contemporary observers often recorded their choices in detail indicating that it was significant to both the prisoner and their audience. By exploring the clothes worn

This paper explores the continued debate concerning the status and treatment of Anglo-Saxon saints after 1066 through the discussion of the fate of St AEthelwold of Winchester's cult. Current historiography favours Susan Ridyard's 1986 thesis that the new Norman bishops and abbots used the Anglo-Saxon saints to establish their authority, integrate themselves into their new religious houses, and guard

This article introduces the idea of ‘Wrightsonian incorporation’ in the later sixteenth century to a wider audience. A number of scholars have taken Wrightson's original idea, that village society split in the later sixteenth century as the ‘yeomen’ were incorporated into the state as officeholders, and elaborated upon it, particularly using it to explain why a late medieval tradition of rebellion

This article traces the later history of the Whiteway anarchist community in Gloucestershire. The sole survivor of the various communal experiments of the latter half of the nineteenth-century, the Whiteway colony was a bohemian enclave that attracted political militants, draft-dodgers, exponents of colonial separatism, and cultural and religious dissidents in exile from Europe. In common with other

This article considers the power of Philip the Bold, duke of Burgundy and count of Flanders, Artois and Burgundy Palatine, and his attempts to use violence against England to strengthen his rule in the Low Countries, and help to secure his nephew's rule in France. In 1385, and again in 1386, he came close to launching a large-scale invasion of England with the support of Scotland and of Brittany that