This article presents the main findings of the first detailed reconstruction of the pattern of attendance at an early modern German school, based on the exceptionally preserved matriculation records of the Latin (grammar) school of Zwickau/Saxony in the second half of the seventeenth century. It investigates pupils’ social background, their geographical mobility, and reconstructs their educational choices. Prevailing top-down perspectives on early modern education obscure the range of choices available to pupils. This article argues that substantial social mobility into learned professions formed the backdrop to the preoccupation with rank and distinction within the Republic of Letters in the Holy Roman Empire.

This article attempts to uncover the political significance of the Old Testament verse Judges 5:23, ‘the curse of Meroz’, during the English Civil War. Historians who have commented on the printed text of Meroz have done so primarily in reference to a single edition of the parliamentarian fast-day preacher Stephen Marshall's 1642 Meroz cursed sermon. Usage of the curse, however, as shown in more than seventy unique sermons, tracts, histories, libels, and songs considered here, demonstrates that the verse was far more widespread and politically significant than has been previously assumed. Analysing Meroz in its political and polemical roles, from the outbreak of the Irish Rebellion in 1641 and through the Restoration of Charles II in the 1660s, sheds new light on the ways in which providentialism functioned during the Civil Wars, and serves, more specifically, to illustrate some of the important means by which ministers and polemicists sought to mobilize citizens and construct party identities.

This article aims to locate English republican thought and writing in a wider European context and to understand the personal connections that aided the distribution and reception of English republican ideas abroad. It does so through the case-study of a little-known pamphlet published by the English regicide Edmund Ludlow during his exile in Switzerland after the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660. Les juges jugez, se justifiants (1663) was a French translation of the dying speeches and other miscellaneous texts of some of the English regicides, produced in Geneva and subsequently printed in Yverdon with the help of Ludlow's local Protestant network. Rather than propagating a secular republican ideology, Ludlow offered his work to a European Protestant audience in the language of Geneva, promoting a primarily religious cause in an attempt to make martyrs out of political activists. It is therefore to Ludlow's Protestant networks that we need to turn to find out more about the transmission of English republican ideas in francophone Europe and beyond.

This article argues that the failed campaign of one former clerk against corruption in the Royal Navy's sick and wounded service during the Nine Years War sheds light on some roots of modern whistle blowing. During the 1690s, England's parliament took important steps towards becoming an organ of inquiry into the workings of all government departments. Parliament's desire for information that could assist it to check Leviathan's actions, coupled with the end of pre-publication censorship in 1695, encouraged the advent of pamphleteering aimed at showing how to improve or correct abuses within the administrative structure and practices of the expanding fiscal-military state. It was from this stream of informative petitioning directed at the Commons and the Lords that informants such as Samuel Baston, as well as George Everett, William Hodges, and Robert Crosfeild, tried to call time on either systematic injustices or particular irregularities within the naval service for what they claimed was the public interest. What they and others called ‘discovering’ governmental malfeasance should be seen as early examples of blowing the whistle on wrongdoing.

This article seeks to illuminate significantly our understanding of the link between abolitionism and evangelicalism by considering the debate at the formation of the Evangelical Alliance in 1846 surrounding the propriety of Christian fellowship with slaveholders. The leading critic of the pro-slavery faction was the Revd Isaac Nelson, an orthodox Presbyterian minister from Belfast, Ireland. Nelson's importance to anti-slavery was recognized by abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic at the time, but has not yet been adequately analysed by historians. Hence, this article will examine Nelson's role in the dispute with the defenders of the American slaveholders at the London meeting in 1846 and in further debates within the Alliance on the slavery question. The article will conclude by examining Nelson's claim that the Alliance was a failure owing to its alleged compromise on the slavery question.

This article re-examines some of the principal portrayals of military conflict in academic treatises and works of art, arguing that the changing visions of war and peace which they presented were indicative of a wider acceptance within critical sections of the various public spheres of the German lands. The majority of recent studies, which have sought to debunk the myth of national ‘wars of liberation’, have tended to overlook the reasons for and ramifications of such shifts. This study shows how contemporary commentators, faced with an unending series of revolutionary and Napoleonic campaigns, gave up any hope of a perpetual peace and accepted, however reluctantly, the necessity of military conflict. Writers', artists', academics', and other publicists' failure to acknowledge the actual conditions of revolutionary and Napoleonic warfare, despite evidence that the nature of combat had altered, meant that conflicts could be viewed as patriotic, heroic, and defensive struggles, which served to simplify the divided loyalties and complicated diplomacy of the Napoleonic era.

This article examines the figure of Boudica (or Boadicea), with a specific focus on Thomas Thornycroft's Westminster Bridge statue, and on the work of the seventeenth-century antiquary, Edmund Bolton. By synthesizing historiography which investigates the idea of ‘historical culture’ in the modern and early modern periods, this article attempts to bridge chronological and generic divisions which exist in the study of the history of history. It argues that to fully understand the genealogy of popular historical ideas like Boudica, it is imperative that historians of such subjects take a longue-durée approach that situates individual artists and writers, and the historical-cultural works they produce, within their broader political, cultural, and social contexts while simultaneously viewing these works as part of a long, discursive process by which the past is successively reinterpreted. As a consequence, this article eschews an analysis of Boudica which labels her an ‘imperial icon’ for Victorian Britons, and argues that the relationship between contemporary context and the re-imagined past is not as straightforward as it might initially appear.

This article examines the experiences of university elites in Britain and France during and after the First World War. It compares the elite network of the École Normale Supérieure with that of Trinity and King's Colleges in Cambridge, arguing that these communities functioned and understood themselves as families. The war, which suspended normal intellectual practice and placed mobilized university elites (as junior officers) at an increased risk of wounds or death, was seen as a threat to the very existence of the family. The article traces the responses of these groups to the outbreak of war, to the cessation of normal scholarly life, and to the shocking death rate; in so doing, it demonstrates the resilience of these networks. To date, historians have drawn on the writings of members of these families to make broader arguments about the war experience. This study is the first to examine the self-perception of these groups, and in so doing, provides a new context for scholarly activities during and after the war, bereavement, and remembrance, as well as for academic practices in the post-war period. As a Franco-British comparison, it argues for great similarities of experience between two superficially disparate university cultures

The idea of industriousness has been an ever-recurring issue since Max Weber launched it as a putative explanation of the advent of economic modernity. The notion of ‘industrious revolution’ has provoked a renewed flourishing of publications focusing on this issue. Although most historians agree on the emergence of industriousness in seventeenth-century Europe, there is no consensus regarding the chronology, hence the real causes, of this mental and discursive shift. This article emphasizes the problematic role played by literary evidences in these social and cultural models of diffusion of new consumer values and desires. It then establishes the timing of the emergence of the ‘industriousness discourse’ using an original approach to diffusion based both on the quantitative analysis of very large corpora and a close reading of seventeenth-century economic pamphlets and educational literature. It concludes first that there was not one but several competing discourses on industriousness. It then identifies two crucial hinges which closely match the chronology proposed by Allen and Muldrew, but refutes that championed by de Vries and McCloskey. The industrious revolution as described by these authors would have happened both too late to fit its intellectual roots and too early to signal the beginning of a ‘consumer revolution’.