This article explores the nature of relationships formed between nuns and male clergy in early modern Venice. It is based on the records of trials for the violation of conventual enclosure, the principle at the centre of the reforms of nunneries decreed by the Council of Trent, which aspired to sever all links between nuns and the world outside the cloister. The trials offer detailed insights into the interactions of male and female celibates, whose relationships were frequently monogamous, long-term, and intense, although rarely overtly sexual. I argue that the constraints of enclosure conditioned the nature of celibate desire, promoting a model of heterosocial engagement in which bodily intimacy was surprisingly unimportant.

This article locates Sir Thomas More’s Utopia within the broader context of the sixteenth-century Greek revival in England. More and the other humanists whom Erasmus befriended during his time in England became the first Englishmen to learn Greek and to make a polemical point of preferring Greece to Rome. During the period of Utopia’s preparation and publication, this circle’s Hellenism took on a new intensity, as several of its members were called upon to defend Erasmus’s controversial project of using the Greek New Testament to correct the Vulgate. Responding to opponents of the new Greek learning, the Erasmians launched a particularly energetic attack on Roman philosophy. It is argued that Utopia intervenes in this quarrel by dramatizing a confrontation between the values of the Roman republican tradition and those of a rival commonwealth theory based on Greek ethics. Utopia suggests that, when seen from a Roman perspective, Greek advice looks like ‘nonsense’. But, for More, that ‘nonsense’ yields the ‘best state of a commonwealth’.

The nationwide campaign to erect railed altars in the 1630s has always been seen as a central feature of the Laudian reformation of the Church. Recently some scholars have denied its close association with Laud and Arminian sacramentalism, and have proposed that the policy originated with Charles I, to be reluctantly endorsed by his archbishop. As for its enforcement, Julian Davies has identified at least five variants which were implemented in the dioceses. This article argues instead that Archbishops Neile and Laud were centrally involved in the introduction of the railed altar, and that they oversaw the imposition of a single altar policy, with only Williams of Lincoln briefly championing a variation on it. Differences did emerge, however, over where communicants should receive, since this had not been prescribed by authority. Charles I, on this reading, was not the driving force for change, although he clearly came to support it.

This article examines the influence of a distinct Irish Protestant faction on parliamentarian policy-making in the mid-1640s – the Irish Independents. These men were not merely clients of parliament’s lord lieutenant, Viscount Lisle, but formed a group with consistent personnel and policies, which can be traced back to the ‘Boyle group’ in the Irish council of the 1620s and 1630s. In the 1640s they came into an alliance with the English Independents, based on common hostility to the Presbyterian party, the Scots, and the supporters of Ormond and Inchiquin in Ireland. This coalition was, however, inherently unstable. Faced with equivocation at Westminster, where Ireland had always been low on the list of priorities, from December 1646 the Irish Independents were forced to take charge of parliament’s Irish policy, and many of the initiatives previously attributed to Lisle in 1646–7 can more properly be laid at their door. In conclusion, it is suggested that the Irish Independents represent a radical strain in Irish Protestantism, which supported Ireland’s closer integration into an ‘English Empire’, and which would see its fulfilment in the unionist agenda developed in the 1650s.

This article argues that the development of teaching as a profession for women in England has often been written using an anachronistic and gendered conception of the term ‘profession’. A closer examination of the work of middle-class schoolmistresses in the first part of the nineteenth century reveals that the image of the amateurish governess was in part a fiction, which concealed the commitment and expertise of many women teachers. The mid-century reformers drew on this earlier tradition of feminine pedagogy and did not simply adopt the standards of boys’ education and their male peers. On the contrary, they contributed to the ongoing process by which teachers of both sexes sought to claim the status and authority of the ‘learned professions’. However, by the 1870s, the pressure to conform to the dominant model in boys’ education meant that this independent strand in education had largely been eclipsed.

The Manchester Progressive Municipal Programme of 1894 has been viewed as indicative of a new Liberal approach to labour and social questions, heralding the New Liberalism of the Edwardian era and marking a gradual transition to class-based politics. Rather than focus on the role of senior individuals, such as Manchester Guardian editor C. P. Scott, in fostering the change, this article explores the practical problems of grass-roots party co-operation and the problems that Progressive approaches brought to Liberals. Progressive ideas had already permeated much Liberal thinking before 1890 and the Progressive Programme was less of a departure than might be imagined. Progressive policies may have helped consolidate Liberal working-class support but they did little to encourage co-operation with the Independent Labour Party (ILP). Where senior Liberals attempted to forge alliances they were invariably rebuffed. When Liberal candidates stepped down in deference to the ILP, Irish and working-class Liberal trade unionists revolted and split the party. The 1895 general election demonstrated the dangers of being too closely associated with the ILP and the limitations of Progressivism as a political strategy.

During the Second World War, the Independent State of Croatia was the scene of intense guerrilla warfare as well as a programme of ethnic cleansing undertaken primarily, though not exclusively, by the Croatian state under the control of the Ustaša fascist party. This article investigates the Wehrmacht’s contrasting perceptions of its own violence in the anti-partisan war and its views of the Ustaša’s assault on Croatia’s Serb minority. The author argues that these different views emanated from the Wehrmacht’s conviction that its strategic concepts offered the only correct strategy for the prosecution of modern warfare. As the key to victory, Wehrmacht staff officers emphasized the maximization of force on the operational level. By contrast, the Ustaša state pursued a strategy of nationalizing war that moved away from Wehrmacht strategic concepts and infuriated Wehrmacht staff officers. Moreover, the Wehrmacht employed a starkly different vocabulary in describing its own violence and Ustaša violence. These descriptions more deeply entrenched the Wehrmacht’s sense of difference regarding the two types of violence. By examining the Wehrmacht’s views of violence, this article suggests that factors other than anti-Slavic racism more strongly determined the way in which the Wehrmacht both perceived and acted out violence in Eastern Europe.

Recent writing shows that eighteenth-century Irish society was both less and more divided than was supposed by Lecky, whose History of Ireland in the eighteenth century (now over a century old) dominated so much subsequent historiography. Because Lecky enjoyed access to records that were subsequently destroyed his work will never be entirely redundant, but this article looks at ways in which his views have been and continue to be modified. It surveys the various interpretative models now being used to open up the period, which invite comparisons not merely with England, Scotland, Wales, and colonial America but also with Europe. It also considers how that endlessly fascinating decade, the 1790s, has emerged from the spotlight turned on it by a plethora of bicentenary studies.

This review examines the state of current research on the fate of the Jews under the Vichy regime. Remarkable studies, from native and foreign scholars, dealing with the persecution of the Jews have examined aspects of that process hitherto ignored. They constitute a major contribution to our knowledge of the wartime involvement of the upper echelons of the French administration, the legal profession, and the banking system in the persecution of the Jews. And yet, despite recurring revelations of the involvement of the administration in the wartime treatment of Jews, despite the outstanding contribution of studies of the Vichy regime, and the space occupied by the Jewish question in the media, they have failed to bring to a close that chapter in French history.

Zionism and the creation of a new society. By Ben Halpern and Jehuda Reinharz. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Pp. 293. ISBN 0-19-509209-0.

Land and power: the Zionist resort to force, 1881–1948. By Anita Shapira. Translated by William Templer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Reissued Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Pp. x+446. ISBN 0-8047-3776-2.

The founding myths of Israel: nationalism, socialism, and the making of the Jewish state. By Zeev Sternhell. Translated by David Maisel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Pp. xv+419. ISBN 0-691-00967-8.