Although Richard II's Irish expedition of 1394–95 has attracted considerable scholarly attention, the focus has largely been on Richard's relations with the colonial administration in Ireland, pointing mainly to the colonial government's plea for greater royal investment in the colony as the main factor underpinning Richard's decision to intervene in Ireland. Little attention, by comparison, has been devoted to exploring the king's relations with both the Gaelic Irish and Gaelic Scottish nobility. Using Richard's relations with the expanding Gaelic world as the main case study, this article reconsiders how developments in the Gaelic west influenced the king's decision to intervene in Ireland. Set against the backdrop of Anglo-Scottish relations and the Hundred Years’ War, the article draws on a broad range of Gaelic sources from Ireland and Scotland, English and Scottish governmental records, and material from the Avignon papacy. It uncovers and traces the development of the main Gaelic Irish and Gaelic Scottish dynasties during the late fourteenth century, their relationships with one another, and their unfolding connections with the English and Scottish crowns. By locating Richard's expeditions within the broader archipelagic context, this article argues that the wider Gaelic world, though on the geographic periphery of Ireland and Scotland, was capable of exerting a far greater degree of influence on the course of “British” politics than has previously been acknowledged.

From the beginning of the seventeenth century, Englishmen professed as Benedictine monks in mainland Europe began returning to their homeland. Until that point, the Catholic mission to England had been run by secular clergy and Jesuits, relationships between the two clerical parties growing increasingly troubled over how the Catholic Reformation should be implemented in England. The arrival of the Benedictines saw the offering of a “third way” to England's proscribed Catholics. Yet with the various missions dependent on lay Catholic resources and support both in England and in mainland Europe, it was necessary for the Benedictines to justify their presence in this often fraught environment. As such, they forcefully laid claim to contemporary English Benedictine martyrs against rival claims by other clerical groups. These battles for validation reached a new level of intensity following James I's serving of the Oath of Allegiance. This article explores how competing groups of English missionary clergy sought to justify their presence in England. Taking the case of two conflicting images of the executed George Gervase, it argues that the contest for martyrs sheds new light on the ways in which martyrdom was exploited by different groups; it also contributes to debates about the Oath of Allegiance, which was threatening to derail the wider Catholic Reformation across mainland Europe. By placing these clashes over English religious identity in both domestic and international contexts, the article makes evident that events on the peripheries of mainland Europe affected discussions at its center.

John Locke's comparison of the mind to a blank piece of paper, the tabula rasa, was one of the most recognizable metaphors of the British Enlightenment. Though scholars embrace its impact on the arts, humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences, they seldom consider why the metaphor was so successful. Concentrating on the notebooks made and used by the schoolchildren of Enlightenment Scotland, this essay contends that the answer lies in the material and visual conditions that gave rise to the metaphor's usage. By the time students had finished school, they had learned to conceptualize the pages, the script, and the figures of their notebooks as indispensable learning tools that could be manipulated by scores of adaptable folding, writing, and drawing techniques. In this article, I reveal that historicizing the epistemology and manipulability of student manuscript culture makes it possible to see that the success of Locke's metaphor was founded on its appeal to everyday note-keeping activities performed by British schoolchildren.

This article reappraises the debate about war prevention in the Bryce Group, the first study circle in Britain to devise a plan for the League of Nations. While scholars have tended to associate pro–league of nations activists with idealism, more focused accounts of the group have mostly depicted its postwar plan as a product of realistic thinking. Drawing on the underused manuscripts of the intellectual founders of the League of Nations, this study first reveals that their early thinking defies simple categorization. Not only was their war prevention plan realistic about the role of armed force but it also depended critically on idealistic expectations about the moral force of public opinion. This article shows that realistic and idealistic views could rarely be separated, and both developed the group's plan for peace, which incorporated the collective use of force as a crucial element of the postwar order. A mixture of the two views, however, hardly ensured consistencies and a balance between them. The paradox of collective security discussed by the group in 1914–15—that peace at least in part rested on the threat of force—was unresolved by the foundation of the League, and remains intact to this day.

What better laboratory for an experiment in racial integration could there be than the nascent community of a new town? The architect Roy Gazzard posed this question in 1969, as he embarked on designing the new town of Killingworth in northern England. A self-proclaimed “social engineer,” Gazzard applied his experience as a town planner in colonial Uganda to shaping a new community in the postimperial metropole. Historians have long recognized the way that built forms were translated from metropole to colony, but the reverberations of colonial planning in the postwar European welfare states have received little attention. In this article I use intellectual biography to chart the trajectory of notions of community, spirituality, space, and place as they migrated from colonial Uganda to postimperial Britain. I focus on the career of Roy Gazzard, an outspoken social engineer and devout Christian, who hoped to use his colonial urban planning experience to counter what he saw as the increasingly secular and centrifugal forces in modern British society. An examination of letters, private paper, lectures, planning documents, and diagrams held in the newly opened archive of Gazzard's work illuminates the course of colonial expertise as it was refracted back into the postcolonial metropole.