The 10 most-cited articles in The English Historical Review, 2024

Six decades after ‘The Year of Africa’, when francophone sub-Saharan Africa gained independence in 1960, the legacies of colonialism remain a sustained, sometimes heated topic of conversation in French political and academic circles. A constellation of debates clusters around the epithet Françafrique. This term has had many lives. It was first coined by the socialist résistant, Jean Piot (1889–1948), who was trying to refashion and deepen the connections within the Francophonie during the Second World War. (In a similar spirit, in June 1940 General de Gaulle proclaimed: ‘La France n’est pas seule! Elle a un vaste Empire derrière elle!’ [‘France is not alone! She has a vast Empire behind her!’]) Later, the phrase was popularised by Félix Houphouët-Boigny, the enduring president of Côte d’Ivoire, to convey the supposed benefits of the continued association between metropolitan France and postcolonial Africa. More recently, however, in the hands of Tier-Mondialiste NGOs, such as Survie [‘Survival’], the term became a syllogism for a distinctive French form of neo-colonialism,…

Abstract: The Sutton Hoo ship burial is one of the most famous examples of a group of lavishly furnished graves of the late sixth and early seventh centuries in south-east England. The discovery in 2003 of another, at Prittlewell (in Southend, Essex), and its publication in 2019, has brought our knowledge of them into sharper focus. One of the characteristics of these burials is that they tend to contain objects that were made in the eastern Mediterranean which were current, rather than old, when buried, and were of very unusual types. This article argues that they were acquired by men who were recruited into the Byzantine army in 575 to serve on the eastern front against the Sasanians. Those who returned brought back with them metalwork and other items which were current, and distinctive, and not the kinds of things that were part of normal trading networks. This opens up a startlingly new view onto early medieval British history.

Abstract It is high time we took stock of the field of carceral history—something particularly true for the French-speaking world. In the last twenty years, the Francosphere has seen a frenzy of research activity centred on the prison, and more broadly around multiple forms of confinement. The field is being radically transformed under the watchful eye of a whole new generation of researchers who have produced numerous monographs, articles and colloquia on the subject. The research and thinking about the prison model that the current generation is developing diverges so completely from the classical revisionist historiography as to be unrecognisable, transfigured from previous iterations. The purpose of this article is to explore those recent transformations of the field following three parameters. The first is linguistic (reviewing only the work emerging from the Francosphere); the second is one of academic discipline (History); and the third is temporal (the emphasis is on research touching on the long pre-Revolution period). These three parameters provide a focused view, while…

Abstract: The 2019 discovery of Yersinia pestis ancient DNA at Edix Hill in Cambridgeshire unquestionably confirms that plague was present in sixth-century Britain. Prior treatments of this evidence have decontextualised it from its British setting, considering it aside from the richly studied British archaeological and textual records, to detrimental effect. This article considers this new evidence in context, presenting a historiography of early medieval British epidemics and a summary of current scientific knowledge of the topic to contend that the discovery marks a significant shift in our understanding of early British plague and to clarify what palaeoscientific data can and cannot tell us about plague’s presence in and its impact on Britain. It then argues a new theory of the spread of plague based on recent developments in our understanding of British demographics, ecology and trade routes, contending that early first-pandemic Y. pestis was transmitted to Britain at least two distinct times via separate routes, with the first introduction potentially pre-dating the…

Abstract While early modern collaborative practices have long been associated with the natural sciences, humanistic scholarship has mostly been depicted, ever since Mark Pattison’s classic biography of Isaac Casaubon, as a lonely and even self-destructive affair. This article reconstructs a moment in English intellectual history when textual scholars did collaborate in a semi-professional manner. To this end, it examines the relationship between Daniel Waterland, Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, and three ambitious young scholars who assumed roles within his enterprise: Edmund Law, Thomas Johnson and John Chapman. By showing how an unofficial research team was assembled over several years and directed to perform separate but related tasks with the stated goal of defending the Church of England, the article highlights the dynamics at work within a collective, subtly top-down model of scholarly interaction. Though a passing reference has been made in the historiography to ‘Waterland & Company’, this article is the first to delve into the nature and scope of this network and its…

Abstract King Alfred (r. 871–99) is the only native-born English ruler to have gained the byname ‘the Great’. This was not a contemporary sobriquet, but is often considered to have been bestowed in the Elizabethan era by Reformation scholars who increasingly cast Alfred in the role of the founder of the English nation. The acknowledged exception is a reference to Alfred as Rex Alfredus magnus (King Alfred the Great) in a marginal annotation in Matthew Paris’s early thirteenth-century text, Deeds of the Abbots of St Albans Monastery. This medieval attestation of Alfred’s sobriquet is, however, less isolated than has been previously thought. Drawing on a variety of medieval English and Old Norse-Icelandic texts, this article identifies twenty-five examples of Alfred being called ‘the Great’, twenty-three of which have previously gone unremarked. In so doing, it argues for a widespread tradition of Alfred as ‘the Great’, the first sole ruler of all England, from at least the thirteenth century.

Abstract Since the 1960s, when historians first dethroned the dominant view of Benjamin Disraeli as a Tory democrat and social reformer, his association with an interventionist, socially inclusive Conservatism has largely been considered an exercise in political myth-making. This focus on the Disraeli ‘myth’ has tended to obscure the myriad and substantive ways in which Disraeli’s life and works were interpreted and put to work in Conservative ideological debates and political practice in the twentieth century, reducing them to social policy and state intervention in the economy and overlooking the lineages of his political career in Conservative political economy debates, conceptions of the nation and the constitution, and imperial and foreign policy thinking. This article examines interpretations of Disraeli, and how his legacy was constructed, by conservative biographers, historians and public intellectuals from the decades after his death until the historiography of the 1960s. It traces how Disraeli was memorialised and celebrated in the Conservative movement and popular…

Abstract The historiography of fifteenth-century France overwhelmingly finds that towns worked with the monarchy against rebellious princes in pursuit of a centralised royal state. Focusing on the War of the Public Weal of 1465, this article demonstrates instead that urban communities played a central role in the rebellion and that there was considerable urban support for the league. This evidence suggests both that we need to re-evaluate the view that the princes lacked popular support in their rebellions against the Crown in fifteenth-century France and that we need to reconsider the current model of town–Crown relations. The article begins by highlighting regional patterns of support for the king and the princes during the war, before moving on to examine ideology and the reasons why towns favoured one side over the other. It then goes on to consider what townspeople hoped to gain from their actions during the War of the Public Weal, taking particular account of the presence of urban factions and the competition for urban privileges. A study of urban participation in the War of…

Abstract This article examines what it meant to be Lutheran in the early modern Middle East. Its point of departure is a letter in which Stephan Gerlach, a sixteenth-century Lutheran chaplain to the imperial ambassador in Istanbul, asked his superiors about the type of behaviour that befitted him as a Lutheran. Was he allowed to wear a Turkish turban to see mosques and learn about Islam? Was it permissible for him in exceptional circumstances to accept communion under both kinds from a Roman Catholic monk? Was he allowed to postpone the Sunday sermon to attend Greek Orthodox ceremonies? Reconstructing how sixteenth-century Lutherans who had business in the early modern Middle East tried to resolve such issues not only affords new insights into the Lutheran experience in the Ottoman Empire; it also raises a set of fundamental questions about late sixteenth-century Lutheranism itself. Did Lutherans in this period develop forms of religious accommodation similar to those of early modern Catholics? Did travel in the Eastern Mediterranean demand a more flexible and more fluid form of…

Abstract The danger of a war on two fronts presented the late seventeenth-century Habsburg court in Vienna with a strategic choice, epitomised by the two factions of ‘Easterners’ versus ‘Westerners’. As long as Leopold I wanted to keep his hopes of claiming the Spanish inheritance alive, the priority of western issues was hardly ever in doubt. There was little evidence of an Austrian Drang nach Osten at the time, perhaps surprisingly. But there was a predictable tug-of-war between ‘hawks’ and ‘doves’ (or ‘appeasers’) in Vienna. The issue that concerned imperial decision makers in 1681–2 was less the French ‘réunions’ and the ‘rape of Strasbourg’ than the far less strident but potentially far more dangerous moves of Louis XIV to secure footholds in Italy. Above all, turning their back on the nascent anti-French coalition would have entailed huge opportunity costs for the Habsburgs. That is why the Emperor was willing to risk a war on two fronts. What was regarded as a desperate gamble before the battle of the Kahlenberg developed into a subtle attempt to let others bear the brunt of…