Childbirth in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century England was not simply a medical affair but a social and religious event, with an associated array of complex devotional practices. This article challenges the widely held view that such practices were generally confined to the home and shows how the English parish church accommodated public devotional childbirth customs and objects. Using the perspectives of space, materiality, mobility, and recycling, I investigate a set of mobile material culture associated with childbirth (namely prayer beads, linen, and girdles) which moved between the parish church and domestic spaces. The article explores the shifting devotional significance of these objects, not only as they moved through space but also through time, by examining their fate during the English Reformation. Highlighting the previously under-examined public presence of the childbearing woman in the English parish, the article demonstrates that attention to devotional spaces and objects can shed new light on the emotional experiences of childbirth and women's wider religious and social practices during a period which was simultaneously one of incremental change and intense upheaval.

This article offers a new interpretation of the history-writing produced in Enlightenment Scotland. It argues that after the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 was blamed on Scotland's ‘feudal’ institutions, Scottish jurists and historians began to interrogate what it meant to become 'modern'. Instead of accepting the Whig claim that England provided the ideal model for social and political development, they subsumed English history into a broader debate about whether and how modern Europe had emerged from its feudal past. By reconstructing this debate, the article shows how Scots rewrote European history in ways that subverted the English whig tradition while rejecting universal or ‘cosmopolitan’ explanations of social progress. In doing so, the article reopens the question of how the Scottish Enlightenment shaped British imperial culture across the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

This article analyses the biggest pilgrimage event of the Napoleonic era, showing how Catholics used imperial opportunities and imperial loopholes to progress on their path toward religious revival. In September 1810, more than 200,000 pilgrims rushed to the small provincial city of Trier to venerate one of Christianity's most important relics, the Holy Coat of Jesus. This pilgrimage could take place and grow to such gigantic dimensions because both clerical elites and laypeople deftly navigated territorial frameworks created by the Napoleonic state. In the Rhenish borderlands to which Trier belonged, French hegemony enabled the return of the relic to the city in the first place, but pilgrims subsequently exploited the malleability of public order that also characterized imperial governance. The great pilgrimage of 1810 represented neither a form of exclusively top-down mobilization orchestrated by the church and controlled by the state, nor an act of overt, politicized opposition – even as state officials, in turn, proved undeniably hostile to pilgrim mobility and ‘superstition’. The article therefore argues that, in the more peaceful parts of Napoleon's empire, pilgrims and pilgrimage organizers accelerated post-revolutionary Catholic renewal by using that empire rather than either resisting or collaborating with it.

This article explores the place of Finland and the Swedish military volunteers of the 1918 civil war, and 1939–44 Finno-Soviet wars, in the Swedish fascist imaginary. The loss of Finland to Russia in 1809 was heavily romanticized in Swedish nationalist culture, and shaped Swedish responses to both conflicts, mediated through famous literary works which encouraged a sense of shame and betrayal. Through examination of the historical relationship between the two countries, the volunteer effort in 1918, and the subsequent emergence of fascism in the interwar period, it is shown that this imaginary of the Finnish–Swedish relationship strongly shaped Swedish fascism. The article traces key military volunteer veterans in various fascist organizations, and the symbolic appropriation of the veterans. Rather than a comparatively peaceful manifestation of fascism in neutral Sweden, Swedish fascism was possessed of a heavily militarized imaginary rooted in violent proxy conflicts in its former eastern borderlands – in this regard it also showed substantial overlap with Swedish conservative nationalism.

Manchester ‘working men’ approved an address in support of Abraham Lincoln's emancipation policy and the American Union at the Free Trade Hall on 31 December 1862. The US president described their gesture as ‘sublime Christian heroism’ when hopes of restoring the cotton supply and reopening the mills were better served by Confederate recognition. This transatlantic exchange became an integral part of the scholarly traditional interpretation that the British working class frustrated the pro-Confederate designs of the upper classes during the American Civil War. It formed the historiographical orthodoxy until revisionists countered that Lancashire workers advocated Confederate recognition. The Manchester meeting, revisionists claimed, was contrived to give the impression of working-class support for Lincoln which was, in fact, a myth. These two incompatible interpretations simplify and flatten the complexity of an event with local, national, and international ramifications. This article presents the first detailed examination of who organized the Free Trade Hall meeting and why. It moves scholarly understanding of the British public response to the American Civil War beyond its current stasis of ‘traditional’ versus ‘revisionist’ by placing the field in conversation with the recent history of radicalism and ‘class’ in the Victorian era.

This article investigates clerical child sexual abuse in the first decades of the French Third Republic. Thanks in large part to the difficulty of accessing relevant archival records, we know very little about this crime or how it was investigated by judicial officials. This study addresses this gap by drawing on a rich and untapped collection of correspondence between local prosecutors and the Ministry of Justice in Paris. The files reveal the process for investigating and prosecuting abusive priests, as well as the reverberations within local communities. Though generated by the state rather than the church, they offer an insight as well into the response of ecclesiastical authorities. Finally, they shed light on the relationship between clerical crime and the culture wars pitting French republicans against Catholics, a conflict that was reaching a peak of intensity in this period. What emerges from this study is an appreciation of the personal toll and political impact of clerical sexual abuse, as well as a new perspective on the recent scandals which have engulfed the Catholic church in a range of nations.

In this article I explore the cultural impact of the First World War by analysing the work of libraries and librarians in different settings, from German-occupied Belgium and prisoner-of-war camps to Germany's own public and private libraries. By examining the work of German, Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, and American librarians, the article makes a case for applying the notion of a ‘long’ First World War to cultural and intellectual history. Considering ephemeral and established libraries, along with new types of collections generated by the war itself, the article sheds light on the changes to library work as a result of mobilization, censorship, and the growth of mass readership. While these changes concerned librarians in all belligerent states, German librarians were particularly affected after the burning of the Leuven library during the city's occupation by German forces. This singular event damaged Germany's national reputation and thereby laid the groundwork for a significant politicization of library work all the way to the Second World War. In addition to tracing the importance of librarians for German foreign policy, the article reconstructs how this professional community, whose intellectual formation was ultimately supranational, responded to the First World War.

The 1939 Option Agreement between Italy and Germany concerning South Tyrol was the first population transfer agreement in western European history. Its analysis offers a unique opportunity to shift the focus of the historiography on interwar minority questions from eastern to western Europe, thus challenging the lingering view of eastern Europe as a land of endemic ethnic heterogeneity and conflict. Furthermore, the 1939 Option illuminates a form of ‘consistent ambivalence’ that problematizes dominant analytical frameworks concerning the management of ethnic differences. Italian fascists consistently affirmed the inevitable assimilation, and therefore inclusion, of minorities within the Italian nation, but they also deeply distrusted them. As this ambivalent attitude reached a climax in the 1939 Option, in order to understand fascist behaviour during the implementation of the agreement we need to consider the longer history of fascist attempts to homogenize the new provinces. Three features structured these attempts: a belief that the assimilation of these minorities would be inevitable; the absence of means to carry out radical solutions; and a deep-seated distrust of the minorities. Fascist policy during the Option was simultaneously more ambivalent than the current historiography suggests and more consistent with the regime's interwar homogenization policies.

Javier Fernández Sebastián's latest book is truly a tour de force. While it offers a lucid appraisal of conceptual history, with a focus on the ‘conceptual revolution’ that the Iberian Atlantic underwent during the first half of the nineteenth century, it is also a serious statement on the profession – indeed, ‘no discipline’, as he tells us, can sustain itself ‘if it is not based on a theoretical reflection about its own status as a discipline’ (p. 17). His is an invitation to engage more fully with an approach to history that prizes above all the language of contemporaries to make sense of the past.

Javier Fernández Sebastián's outstanding book, Historia conceptual en el Atlántico ibérico: lenguajes, tiempos, revoluciones, is already an essential reference for all those interested not only in conceptual history or the history of Ibero-American societies, but also in reflecting on history itself, as well as on the dilemmas and challenges involved in its writing. Its text is the fruit of a seasoned and remarkably erudite intellectual trajectory, which expresses the successful endeavour of uniting the theoretical, methodological, and empirical dimensions in the historian's work. This bid is unambiguous in the structure of the book, as well as in the divisions and linkages among its sections and chapters, and is embodied in its very narrative and in the way it unfolds.

This remarkable book is an outcome of many years of reflection on conceptual history by one of its leading exponents, who through the magnificent Iberconceptos project has explored the scope for thinking about the life of ideas ‘beyond Bielefeld (Koselleck) and Cambridge (Skinner)’. Fernández Sebastián here offers a master class in what conceptual history can be in the hands of a seasoned practitioner who is both rigorous and imaginative, not to mention formidably well read in the historiographies of Iberian America, Europe, and the United States. Many historians would have been content with that, but Fernández Sebastián's ambitions go a great deal further. His work on the conceptual history of the Iberian independence revolutions leads him to urge historians to take seriously the theorizing of history, not of History in a Hegelian sense, but as an intellectual discipline. This would require scrutiny of historical practice beyond discussions of method (which, he suggests, all too easily reduces to technique) to a far deeper level of reflexivity about historical consciousness. The author engagingly reveals, tucked away in a footnote, his hope that the book might persuade readers who think they are not interested in theory of history to think again.

First of all, I would like to thank my interlocutors for their interest in my work, and for their kindness in agreeing to participate in this Roundtable. It is a great honour for me to have three such distinguished scholars commenting on my book and offering their criticisms and remarks, which help me to refine and nuance some of its arguments. I also hope that this discussion will enable readers of The Historical Journal to get an idea of the content and limits of my book, but above all to raise their interest in recent developments in intellectual history in the wider Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking world, developments that go far beyond this modest contribution of mine. I will try to reply as briefly as I can.