Luther's early statements, such as that belief is a ‘free work’ and must not be coerced, gained crucial relevance in the juridical debates about the meaning of the Augsburg Peace of Religion in the empire. Christoph Besold was among those transforming the reformers' message into a legal claim of subjects against their governments, based on an alleged natural right to believe what one wants. He thus transferred Luther's claim based on the reformer's trust in the work of the divine word into a juridical claim for subjects against their civil and ecclesiastical magistrates. Besold's argument is thus an example of the important changes in political and religious thought developing within the genre of the German politica during the first half of the seventeenth century.

In 1643, Robert Rich, the second earl of Warwick, the parliamentary lord high admiral, issued directions for naval officers in the Irish squadron to execute any soldiers seized whilst crossing from Ireland to join royalist armies in England and Wales. An ordinance was duly promulgated by parliament in October 1644 which authorized the killing of Irishmen captured at sea or in England. Thereafter, although a number of captains implemented this policy and put to death mariners, soldiers, and passengers detained on vessels going to and from confederate and royalist ports in Ireland, the killing of maritime captives never became the norm in the war at sea. This article provides a detailed analysis of the atrocities that occurred and the treatment of prisoners taken in the seas around Ireland during the war of the three kingdoms. In particular, this article examines the effect exerted by the threat of retaliatory executions of English seamen held in towns such as Wexford and Waterford on forcing parliament and its naval commanders to moderate their actions.

This article examines the origins of the first Agreement of the people: a draft written constitution presented to the general council of the New Model Army on 28 October 1647. It argues that the Agreement was a document that emerged from concerns amongst some of the soldiery and their civilian allies that the terms of a projected settlement with Charles I, The heads of the proposals, would betray the political programme advanced in the army's earlier public statements, especially its Declaration, or, representation of 14 June 1647. As such, this article moves away from the traditional narrative of seeing the Agreement as a Leveller manifesto that was authored in a deliberate attempt to infiltrate the army, and thereby asks fresh questions about the political networks and the programme behind the document. What emerges is a picture of the post-first Civil War political scene that integrates parliamentary manoeuvrings with City of London politics and the public and private affairs of a politicized army. As a result, the article sheds new light on aspects of the constitutional crisis of the later 1640s.

In the closing decades of the eighteenth century, Alexander Geddes (1737–1802) pressed Catholicism and the Enlightenment to the limits of their tolerance. A Catholic priest, he fled the censure of his Scottish superiors and settled in England, where he became a spokesman for the Catholic laity in their controversies with the hierarchy, and mingled in radical Protestant circles among the ‘Rational Dissenters’. In three domains, he appalled his contemporaries. First, Geddes prepared a new version of the Bible, which threatened to undermine the integrity of revelation, and offered mythopoeic accounts of the Old Testament that influenced Blake and Coleridge. Second, he embraced ‘ecclesiastical democracy’, denouncing papal and episcopal authority and proclaiming British Catholics to be ‘Protesting Catholic Dissenters’. Third, he applauded French republicanism, and adhered to the Revolution long after Edmund Burke had rendered such enthusiasm hazardous. Geddes was an extreme exponent of the Catholic Enlightenment, yet equally he was representative of several characteristic strands of eighteenth-century Catholicism, which would be obliterated in the ultramontane revanche of the following century.

This article re-evaluates the role and importance of the thirteenth earl of Eglinton as president of the National Association for the Vindication of Scottish Rights (NAVSR). Departing from the established historiography, which depicts his career as a romantic absurdity because of his organization of a medieval tournament in 1839, it shows Eglinton to have been a political figure of substance, who played a significant role in public life during the mid-Victorian era. The article emphasizes the importance of ‘administrative devolution’ as a feature of long-term Conservative political thought and points to activities of Eglinton and his circle as an example of the need to give more weight to the importance of Conservatives in modern Scottish history.

During the Second World War, controversy surrounded not the inevitability of psychiatric casualties but the extent to which they could be minimized by selection, training, morale, and leadership. By early 1944, when planning for the D-Day landings was advanced, the problem of the psychiatric battle casualty was considered manageable by careful preparation and clinical understanding. The campaign to liberate Europe offered the newly formed Directorate of Army Psychiatry an opportunity to demonstrate its effectiveness. Psychiatric services were deployed to Normandy to maximize the return of front-line troops to duty. Commanders, however, entertained doubts about the value of military psychiatrists. By offering a sanctioned escape route from battle, some believed that their mere presence undermined the fighting spirit of combat troops. The records of 32 General (Psychiatric) Hospital have been analysed to discover categories of troops most vulnerable to breakdown and to assess the impact of front-line treatments. Infantry soldiers, those most likely to be killed, were disproportionately represented amongst admissions. Senior non-commissioned officers were also at elevated risk of breakdown, some being war weary from earlier campaigns. Probably 36 per cent of admissions returned to combatant duty, and 53 per cent were evacuated to the UK. The scale of psychiatric casualties revealed failures in pre-deployment screening.

It is often suggested that the earliest theorists of neo-liberalism first entered public controversy in the 1930s and 1940s to dispel the illusion that the welfare state represented a stable middle way between capitalism and socialism. This article argues that this is an anachronistic account of the origins of neo-liberalism, since the earliest exponents of neo-liberal doctrine focused on socialist central planning rather than the welfare state as their chief adversary and even sought to accommodate certain elements of the welfare state agenda within their market liberalism. In their early work, neo-liberal theorists were suspicious of nineteenth-century liberalism and capitalism; emphasized the value commitments that they shared with progressive liberals and socialists; and endorsed significant state regulation and redistribution as essential to the maintenance of a free society. Neo-liberals of the 1930s and 1940s therefore believed that the legitimation of the market, and the individual liberty best secured by the market, had to be accomplished via an expansion of state capacity and a clear admission that earlier market liberals had been wrong to advocate laissez-faire.

About the circumstances surrounding Hobbes's dismissal from Charles's court and his subsequent departure from Paris at the end of 1651 we know little. While recent scholarship has clarified the broad outline of events, fresh evidence allows us to add some detail, showing that Leviathan was attacked in a sermon delivered by Richard Steward in the Anglican chapel of Sir Richard Browne, thus confirming Hobbes's claim for the involvement of the Anglican establishment in engineering his dismissal from court and giving us a slightly clearer sense of the source and character of the move against him.

The puritan pastor and writer, Richard Baxter, and a member of a prominent Derbyshire family, Katherine Gell, exchanged a series of letters between 1655 and 1658. This article highlights the existence of three further items of correspondence in this exchange, located in the Derbyshire Record Office, hitherto believed not to be extant. The additional three letters are all penned by Baxter and include his replies to her first two epistles (dated 28 July 1655 and 4 September 1655) as well as a reply to a non-extant Gell letter (dated 31 July 1658). The correspondence provides valuable insights into Baxter's pastoral methods and the nature of puritan piety. The first two items draw attention to the importance of the dimension of duty within Baxter's pastoral agenda; while expressed in a context of warmth and encouragement, he believes that Gell will find a measure of resolution to her spiritual struggles by careful attention to the obligations of Christian living. The third letter, written some years later, after Baxter has discovered that Gell suffers from melancholia, is couched in a gentler tone and reveals a more reciprocal dimension to their relationship.

This historiographical review discusses recent literature on cities in modern Central Europe – mainly on Berlin and Vienna – which reflects the great variety of approaches to urban history and underlines the importance of urban history for the study of modernity. The history of urbanization was a central event in the history of modernity. Especially in the Central European capitals of Berlin and Vienna, where modernization and urban growth started later and then advanced more quickly than in West European cities, all aspects of social, political, economic, and cultural modernity and its consequences can be observed in detail.