Using records from 113 manors in Yorkshire and elsewhere, this article surveys the changing role of manor courts in English local government over three centuries. These institutions allowed juries of established tenants to deal cheaply and easily with a variety of chronic concerns, including crime, migration, retailing, common lands, and infrastructure. Their focus varied significantly according to region, topography, settlement size, and time period, but active courts existed in most parts of the country throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Ultimately, they had many valuable functions which historians have barely begun to explore. This article thus offers the most systematic analysis to date of the role of these institutions in making and enforcing by-laws in this period, showing that many of the courts evolved to suit the changing priorities of local tenants rather than falling rapidly into ruin as has sometimes been assumed.

This article explores the impulse behind the outpouring of extraordinarily ornate maps representing the inhabitants of Brazil that emanated from Normandy in the mid-sixteenth century. It aims to understand the reasons behind the iconography of Brazil, a region of particular commercial interest for the French. Whereas maps produced elsewhere in this period emphasize the presence of fierce cannibals in Brazil, Norman examples highlight peaceful relations, particularly the dyewood trade. By analysing the maps in comparison with extant maps from other centres of production (particularly Portugal and the German lands), travel accounts, and wider visual culture, this article explores their relationship to possible sources and considers the extent to which their iconography had a basis in experience. By investigating the use of these maps as gifts to French kings, it suggests that the mapmakers’ selective use of trading imagery also played a persuasive role in the Norman maritime world's disputes with the Portuguese crown over the extent of Portugal's Atlantic empire.

This article analyses the records of 595 entrants to the English College, Rome, and 309 entrants to the English College, Valladolid. These Colleges, set up to train young English men as Catholic priests at a time when Catholicism was proscribed in England, required all entrants to complete questionnaires covering their social, educational, and religious background. The Responsa Scholarum are the autograph manuscripts of students at Rome; the Liber Primi Examinis consists of summaries of oral examinations written down by the interviewers. Through a combination of quantitative analysis and close reading of individual accounts, this article explores responses to the questionnaires, focusing on the engagement of young people with religion and religious identity. It argues that their self-writings shed important light on our understanding of both early modern religion and of early modern childhood and adolescence.

Case-studies of the circle of Samuel Hartlib, one of the most prolific groups of reformers in post-Reformation Europe, are flourishing. The uncovering of rich details has, however, made it difficult to draw a meaningful generalization about the circle's bewilderingly wide range of activities. Focusing on the circle's promotion of ‘useful knowledge’, this article offers an analytical framework for building a new synthesis. The eclectic and seemingly chaotic pursuit of useful knowledge emerged, it will be shown, as differing responses to, and interpretations of, pervasive distrust and the pursuit of reformation. The article thus explores how loosely-shared experience shaped the circle's ambivalent practices of collaboration and exclusion. The study thereby contributes not only to studies of the Hartlib circle, but also to the historiography of post-Reformation culture and burgeoning studies of trust and credibility in the history of science and technology.

This article argues that, in order properly to understand the process by which the attitude of the educated towards magical beliefs became prevalently sceptical between the mid- seventeenth and the mid-eighteenth centuries, we need to re-examine the affiliations of ‘sadducism’ and its role in relation to orthodox thought. In late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England, articulate scepticism about witchcraft and related phenomena seems to have become widespread in free-thinking circles, especially in London and predominantly in oral form. Because of the taint of irreligion with which such attitudes were associated, orthodox thinkers were inhibited from adopting them for a generation, while a vociferous minority mounted a counter-attack. In the early decades of the eighteenth century, however, it gradually became apparent that scepticism about such phenomena was less dangerous than it had initially appeared, and the orthodox began more cautiously to advocate such views themselves.

Venereal disease was commonplace among free and enslaved populations in colonial Caribbean societies. This article considers how contemporaries (both in the empire and metropole) viewed venereal infection and how they associated it with gendered notions of empire and masculinity. It further explores how creole medical practices evolved as planters, slaves, and tropical physicians treated sexually transmitted infections. Yet what began as a familiar and customary affliction was seen, by the late eighteenth century, as a problematic disease in the colonies. As medical theory evolved, placing greater attention on behaviour, British abolitionists focused on the sexual excesses and moral failings of Caribbean slaveholders, evidenced by their venereal complaints. The medicalization of venereal infection and its transition from urbane affliction to stigmatized disease helps explain a key problem in imperial history: how and why West Indian planters became demonized as debauched invalids whose sexual excesses rendered them fundamentally un-British. The changing cultural meanings given to venereal disease played an important role in giving moral weight to abolitionist attacks upon the West Indian slave system in the late eighteenth century. This article, therefore, indicates how changing models of scientific explanation had significant cultural implications for abolitionists, slaveholders, and enslaved people alike.

Although Henry Hallam (1777–1859) is best known for his Constitutional History of England (1827) and as a founder of ‘whig’ history, to situate him primarily as a mere critic of David Hume or as an apprentice to Thomas Babington Macaulay does him a disservice. He wrote four substantial books of which the first, his View of the state of Europe during the middle ages (1818), deserves to be seen as the most important; and his correspondence shows him to have been integrated into the contemporary intelligentsia in ways that imply more than the Whig acolyte customarily portrayed by commentators. This article re-situates Hallam by thinking across both time and space and depicts a significant historian whose filiations reached to Europe and North America. It proposes that Hallam did not originate the whig interpretation of history but rather that he created a sense of the past resting on law and science which would be reasserted in the age of Darwin.

The history of emotion has focused on cognition and social construction, largely disregarding the centrality of the body to emotional experience. This case-study reveals that a focus on corporeal experience and emotion enables a deeper understanding of cultural mores and of transmission to the next generation, which is fundamental to the process of change. In 1914, parents in Dronfield, Derbyshire, attempted to get the headmistress of their school removed because she had taught their daughters sex education. Why did sex education arouse such intense distress in the mothers, born mainly in the 1870s? Examination of their embodied, sensory, and cognitive experience of reproduction and sexuality reveals the rational, experiential basis to their emotional responses. Their own socialization as children informed how they trained their ‘innocent’ children to be sexually reticent. Experience of birth and new ideas relating disease to hygiene reinforced their fears. The resulting negative conception of sexuality explains why the mothers embraced the suppression of sexuality and believed their children should be protected from sexual knowledge. As material pressures lessened, women's emotional responses lightened over decades. The focus on emotion reveals changes that are hard to trace in other evidence.

After 1945, neo-liberal thinkers and think-tanks in the US and UK outlined different state welfare systems for the poor, such as Milton Friedman's negative income tax. These were underpinned by a rational, economistic conception of human nature. Between 1975 and 1979, Thatcher's Conservative party abandoned attempts to develop comprehensive, state-led, paternalistic schemes to tackle poverty. Thatcherites focused instead on creating what they saw as a rational tax/benefit system which would provide a safety-net for the poor, but encourage effort and thrift. They attempted to marginalize the importance of state welfare for the middle classes, to re-invigorate the ‘bourgeois virtues’ which had flourished in Victorian Britain. A family-centred, moralistic individualism underpinned Thatcherite policies; this individualism was not precisely congruent with that of neo-liberal theorists. Its roots lay in personal sources (particularly Methodism), as well as home-grown discourses on poverty and a Hayekian fear of the state. Though Thatcherites took ideas from diverse sources, their political project had a single guiding purpose: the moral (and, secondarily, economic) rejuvenation of Britain. Thatcherism was, thus, an ‘ideology’ in the sense used by Michael Freeden.

Recent scholarly debate about the Glorious Revolution has put renewed focus on the fear of a new aggressive Catholic confessionalism that was widespread among English and European Protestants. One important example is the threat of an imminent French-led joint Catholic aggression against the Netherlands and other Protestant states. This fear was shared by William of Orange and contributed to his decision to risk invading England in the autumn of 1688. Thanks to new archival sources, it is clear that Emperor Leopold contributed substantially to increasing this fear. In July 1688, the imperial government informed William of Orange about unprecedented French offers to Leopold to win over the emperor for a new Catholic alliance. Almost certainly these offers were fictitious, but nevertheless they had an alarming effect on William: he was convinced that an autonomous, ‘uncontrolled’ development in England (regardless of whether it would lead to a ‘popish’ despotism or to a Protestant republic) would only benefit France and should be avoided in this decisive situation. Consequently, after July 1688 William and his diplomats repeatedly referred to the supposed ‘indiscretions’ from Vienna to demonstrate the necessity of intervening in England.

In the last thirty-five years there has been a fundamental reinterpretation of the history of Christianity in China. This reinterpretation has resulted from a changing atmosphere in China that has greatly reduced anti-Christian feelings and allowed for more extensive study of Chinese historical documents. In addition, there has been a remarkable growth among Chinese Christian churches. These changes have led to a reconceptualization of the role Christianity played in China's long-term history. As a result, there has been a transformation from viewing Christianity as a failed foreign graft to a creative indigenous force. This historiographical review surveys the evolution of this reinterpretation as well as the most significant recent publications on the topic.