The 10 most-cited articles in The English Historical Review, 2018

Abstract This article examines the representation of the medieval past in historical pageants in twentieth-century England. Pageants were an important aspect of popular engagement with the past, and often focused heavily on the medieval period. Different episodes and characters both historical and legendary—Alfred the Great, King John and Robin Hood, for example—featured at different times and in different ways during the twentieth century. Many communities saw their origins as being medieval, and almost all found important stories to tell from this period. However, the emphasis shifted over time, with the lessons of the ‘constitutional Middle Ages’ featuring prominently in Edwardian pageants, whereas by the 1950s elements of the romantic and grotesque were increasingly prominent. Throughout the twentieth century, aspects of civic medievalism were an important feature in pageants, particularly those staged in urban locations, but the style of representation of the medieval period changed over time, partly under the influence of new media—notably the cinema, radio and television. In…

Abstract The abstract for your paper is included below. This will appear online only. After a briefly prominent career in Chartism, Robert Kemp Philp (1819–82) became one of the most widely published authors in Victorian Britain, promoting self-help and self-improvement through education. From a background in magazine journalism, he moved to producing serialised reference works which, when completed, were re-published in book form. This hybridisation of periodical journalism and the non-fiction book created a genre distinct from popular novels, non-fiction and magazines, yet one which was indebted to all three. The best known, Enquire Within Upon Everything (1856) sold almost 1.3 million copies by 1900 and remained in print until 1973. However, Philp has not enjoyed an enduring reputation: almost all his work was published anonymously, while the consumption of popular non-fiction has been largely overlooked in histories of the printed word. John Denman (fl. 1863–9) inhabited the shadier world of horse racing, where he was a high-stakes gambler and promoted off-course betting after…

Prague, Archiv Pražského hradu, MS. O. 83, more commonly known as the Prague Sacramentary, forms the subject of this tightly focused volume, edited by Maximilian Diesenberger, Rob Meens and Els Rose. This manuscript has long been of interest to historians, palaeographers, liturgical scholars and linguists alike; this volume collects together such interdisciplinary perspectives to form a rounded view of this remarkable historical artefact. This microhistorical focus pays clear dividends, evoking not only the context in which the Prague Sacramentary was produced in late eighth-century Bavaria, but also wider trends, for example in the liturgy, early Caroline minuscule and the written forms of Old High German. The Prague Sacramentary is a composite work. The first part of the manuscript consists of a sacramentary and Mass lectionary; the second part, which was produced in the same scriptorium and bound to the first part soon after its composition, includes Theodore of Canterbury’s penitential and Gregory the Great’s Libellus responsionum. Subsequent additions include a list of names…

Abstract The abstract for your paper is included below. This will appear online only. This article offers the first comprehensive investigation into the role of prophecy in the writings of the English Benedictine artist, mapmaker and chronicler Matthew Paris (c.1200–1259). It takes his accounts of visions, dreams, prophetic texts and other prognostic incidents as the starting-point for an exploration of Matthew’s conception of truth and of his understanding of the relationship between the natural and the supernatural, and between history and prophecy. In the process, it challenges widely held assumptions about the role of eschatological thinking in Matthew’s approach to the past, and suggests implications for our understanding of ideas about prophecy and the Apocalypse in the intellectual, literary and religious culture of high medieval Europe.

Abstract For the people of Kenya, recent global debates on the emotional and medical harm caused by female genital mutilation (FGM), allied to arguments about the human rights of the women subjected to such acts, have a significant historical resonance. In the 1920s, Christian missionaries in central Kenya mounted a concerted campaign to prohibit ‘female circumcision’ among their flourishing African congregations. This provoked a backlash, with thousands of Kikuyu Christians deserting the missions to found their own independent churches and schools in the early 1930s. These events, commonly referred to as the ‘female circumcision controversy’, mark a turning point in Kenya’s colonial history. Taking as its starting-point the murder in 1930 of a female missionary with the African Inland Mission, the article explores the actions and attitudes of white women missionaries, revealing a subtle and complex picture of missionary views of African society and the process of Christian conversion, arguing that, as the circumcision crisis developed during 1929, these women stood at the centre of…

Abstract This paper looks at the choice, reception and afterlife of both the Chinese and the British gifts given during Britain’s first embassy to China. Earlier studies have tended to fault the Qing court for understanding the gifts they received as tribute and failing to appreciate the scientific items given by the British. However, gift-giving was a highly charged political issue in the domestic politics of both countries at this time and the terms in which the argument was conducted differed widely. This paper argues that the Chinese term that has been translated into the English ‘tribute’ did not have the same resonance in China, and that instead the gifts were received by both sides as part of the negotiations that accompanied the embassy. The most successful gifts in this context were those with an accepted monetary value in the existing trade between the two countries, notably high-quality textiles. British military gifts were also of importance in shaping the outcome of the embassy. However, attempts to use the gifts to present the culture or wider philosophical outlook of…

Abstract This article considers the emergence of the Chaldaean (East Syrian Catholic) Church in the 1550s, a topic of considerable relevance for scholars of eastern Christianity and of Counter-Reformation Catholicism alike. The Chaldaeans seem to present a paradox, in that they broke away from their existing Church and turned towards the papacy for support, yet continued to espouse their traditional beliefs and venerate their traditional saints, deemed heretical by Catholics. This paradox has often been attributed to the Chaldaeans’ ignorance of Catholicism, but this argument risks patronising the Chaldaeans and denying their agency. This article seeks to reconceptualise this problem, arguing that the apparent paradox largely disappears when viewed from an eastern Christian rather than a western Catholic perspective. First, an awareness of the highly tense political situation in Mesopotamia leads us to view some of the apparently contradictory Chaldaean writings as polemical and performative, rather than ignorant and confused. Secondly, it is necessary to appreciate the Chaldaeans’…

Abstract The fourteenth century was an age of transition in the recruitment of armies in the Low Countries. In the princely host, the traditional feudal ties remained important, but they underwent a process of multiplication and diversification. In this article, we explore the changing nature of these feudal relations and other bonds, and the consequences for the power relationships between princes and their vassals in the later Middle Ages. It discusses the implications of five types of ties between a prince and the men who fought in his army. These five forms of military recruitment were triggered by the increasingly business-like way in which princes raised their armies, and mark the transition from a feudal host to a contract army. For a long time the feudal host remained the core of the army, but the underlying feudal relations became increasingly monetarised through the granting of fief-rentes and fief-rentes de reprise. In this, the feudal ties and military contracts in the Low Countries show striking similarities to bastard feudalism in England, although there are also…

Abstract Between the foundation of the Anti-Slavery Society in 1823 and the passage of the Slave Emancipation Act in 1833, the British West India interest mounted a pervasive and influential campaign in defence of colonial slavery. This article gives the fullest account yet of the strength and activities of the West India interest during that decade of debate and argument. Moreover, this article demonstrates that the West Indians—far from a reactionary political rump—successfully created a broader pro-slavery lobby. First, the West Indians cultivated the support of numerous leading conservative periodicals such as Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, the Quarterly Review, and Fraser’s Magazine. Secondly, the West Indians courted the political favour of several leading Tories of the day, among them Canning, Huskisson, Peel and Wellington. Consequently, this article shows that pro-slavery sympathies were prevalent and influential with British print and political culture until 1833. It concludes that, for many Britons and especially British conservatives, colonial slavery—as much as the…

Abstract Faced with persistently high unemployment in the first half of the 1980s, the Conservative government fundamentally recast the social policies directed at those who were out of work. Rather than regarding them as victims of economic problems beyond their control, Thatcher and her allies came to view the unemployed themselves as an economic problem because they allegedly lacked sufficient motivation to take up paid employment. In response, the government implemented measures that required the unemployed to play a more active role in changing their employment status. In particular, it designed new disciplinarian welfare regulations to force the unemployed onto the labour market irrespective of the incomes that available positions offered. Drawing on the national press, memoirs, parliamentary debates and official archival records, this article explores the motivations behind the gradual implementation of changes in social policy that redefined the social citizenship of millions of Britons by exposing those out work to market mechanisms. In addition to espousing market…