This article compares the circulation and reception of useful knowledge—from medical and craft recipes to prognostications and agricultural treatises—in late medieval English manuscripts and early printed practical books. It first surveys the contents and composition of eighty-eight fifteenth-century vernacular practical manuscripts identified in significant collections in the United States and United Kingdom. Close analysis of four of these late medieval practical miscellanies reveals that their compilers saw these manuscripts as repositories for the collection of an established body of useful knowledge. The article then traces the transmission of these medieval practical texts in early printed books. As the pressures of a commercial book market gradually transformed how these practical texts were presented, readers became conditioned to discover “new” knowledge in the pages of printed books. The introduction to England of the “book of secrets” in 1558 encouraged readers to hunt for “secrets” in unpublished medieval manuscripts, ensuring that these century-old sources would remain important sites for useful knowledge well into the early modern era.

The health and well-being of pets became a significant matter of medical and scientific concern during the first decades of the twentieth century. Addressing the case of dogs, this article contends that this circumstance was not primarily a consequence of developments internal to veterinary practice but rather emerged from the broader-based domestic-science movement. The elaboration of scientifically oriented approaches to dog care signals the incorporation of pets within a maternal ideal that emphasized care and efficiency as domestic virtues. Via consideration of canine milk foods, women-led canine medical institutions, canine-concerned domestic workers, and rationalist approaches to kennel design, the article demonstrates that dogs should be placed alongside such established objects of domestic scientific reform as children, homes, and human bodies. Moreover, it shows that scientific reconceptualizations of dogs relied on an extensive network of (primarily women) laborers that included food producers, nursing staff, kennel attendants, and breeders. The article thereby contributes to a growing body of scholarship highlighting ways in which the domestic-science movement forged new scientific objects and practices around the turn of the twentieth century. By the 1930s, dogs were routinely being upheld as exemplars of the kinds of homely existence made possible by scientifically informed approaches to domestic living.

Historians have not paid close attention to the activities of freebooters operating out of Dunkirk in the late 1620s. This essay corrects that omission by first studying the threat from Dunkirk to England's east coast and then addressing how the central government, counties, and coastal towns responded. A surprisingly rich vein of manuscript material from Great Yarmouth and particularly from the Suffolk fishing community of Aldeburgh informs this case study of the impact of this conflict around the North Sea.

In modern critical imagination, Richard Steele is almost always seen as Joseph Addison's friend and collaborator, as half of the periodical essay-writing team devoted to the promotion of civility, urbanity, and a moral and well-mannered lifestyle. Scholars focus almost exclusively on the Tatler, the Spectator, and Steele's sentimental drama, The Conscious Lovers (1722), virtually ignoring his substantial canon of party journalism and pamphlets. Partly because of Steele's bitter and extensive quarrel with Jonathan Swift—or because most scholars assume that Swift got the best of him—he is now rarely taken seriously as a political player in late Stuart and early Hanoverian England. This essay focuses on Steele the party writer—and especially on his attitude toward religio-political authority and the sanctity of vox populi. Though Steele is now described as (like Addison) “not so enthusiastic about the potential for public politics,” he was for excellent reasons regarded by contemporaries as a writer not only trying to politicize the people but actually succeeding in doing so. This essay attempts to recontextualize Steele's polemical contributions; he has been read alongside Addison and other Whig wits, but he rarely figures in discussions of the history of political ideas in early eighteenth-century England, in discussions of debates about authority, resistance, and the nature of obligation, about public religion and liberty of conscience, the political implications of heterodoxy, and the use of reason as a challenge to dogmatic clerical authority.

During the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the British Empire grew through its invasion of Dutch colonies around the Indian Ocean rim. The incursions entwined British and Dutch politics, cultures, and social networks. These developments were significant for the Dutch East Indies, but have received relatively little attention in histories of the Second British Empire. In light of recent interest in Anglo-Dutch interaction, connectivity across empires, and the uses of prosopography to question the boundaries of imperial history, this article uses Dutch biographies to interrogate the relationship between the politics of liberal reform and despotism in the Cape Colony and Java under the British. A dialectic between despotism and liberalism dominates the Second Empire's historiography. Conversely, tracing the biographies of two interstitial figures who passed between the Dutch Empire and that of Britain shows how despotism and reform were connected. The Dutch drew notions of reform from their social networks into the Cape and Java through their manipulation of loyalist rhetoric. Concurrently, the use of such rhetoric legitimized societies and controls linked to the entrenchment of autocracy. This article thus reveals links between connectivity and control in Britain's Indian Ocean empire.

Jodhpurs, despite their Indian name and provenance, are a quintessentially “British thing” in that they exemplify the material and cultural exchanges between Britain and its Indian colony in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The trousers, originally associated with elite Indian sportsmen and royalty, have become an iconic staple of British equestrian culture, cavalry uniforms, and fashionable leisurewear. This particular example of sartorial borrowing illustrates the complicated cultural proximity of empire within metropolitan Britain.