Although most accounts of Christian encounters with Muslims in the period between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries pay particular attention to conflict and violence, a body of hagiographical texts emanating from monastic circles points to a different kind of approach. In this article I foreground three examples of Italo-Greek saints’ lives from the tenth and early eleventh centuries in which the saints in question treat Muslims whom they encounter as potential converts, and explain to them the tenets of Christian theology. These texts are examined as precursors of the Cluniac ‘dossier’ compiled about Abbot Maiolus's encounter with Muslims in the 990s. Two of the three saints’ lives were translated from Greek into Latin, one in the late eleventh, the other in the late twelfth century. The motives for and circumstances of these translations are discussed in light of growing hostility towards the Islamic world during the period of the crusades.

This article explores one of the main arenas in which change came over the role of the monarchy as part of Europe's transition to a modern political system: diplomacy. Traditionally, there had been a dual aspect to monarchy that merged dynastic and state interests. The creation of modern constitutional political systems in the nineteenth century forced European crowns to modify their prerogatives and effective power, sharing this with elected politicians. This included foreign policy, which thenceforward pursued national interests that did not always agree with dynastic ones. Focusing on the Spanish branch of the house of Bourbon, I examine this involved and controversial process. Firstly, I trace the breaking of the Bourbon alliance which had been dominant in the eighteenth century and its unsettled reconfiguration into the worldwide system created by the Congress of Vienna. I then discuss the complex imposition of the nation-state interest over the dynastic one in a time of deep ideological division – between constitutional and absolutist systems – and traumatic revolutions that overthrew Bourbon monarchs. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, the liberal and nationalist wave forced transnational family ties to succumb to national interest.

The oral performance of history has been common to many societies from Herodotus and the histories of Beowulf, to the griots of West Africa. The lecture in Western history emerged from these histories of orality, with its name showing the close connection in its origins to reading, and to the lecturer's expertise in that domain. From this starting point, lectures grew to be associated with frameworks of academic authority, as well as markers of community and shared academic, religious and civic identity. From the late eighteenth century onwards, the role of the historical lecture widened to involve public education, and was also later incorporated into political contestations by anticolonial orators such as Maya Angelou, Amílcar Cabral and Fidel Castro. In the twenty-first century, the rise of transnational technology has seen the increasing atomisation of the lecture into a space of performative and disembodied information. As technologies change, in the future the knowledge and thematic being explored in historical lectures may change. What is embraced may prove to be demonstration of mastery of the commercial technology involved in a lecture's delivery, as much as the exposition related to the lecture or reading from which knowledge and academic communities historically have built.

This study examines the role that musical comedy on stage played in shaping popular culture in the long Edwardian period (1890–1914). It is based around two iconic theatrical types of the period: the Gaiety Girl and the matinee idol. Historians have underestimated their importance and what they represented. These two are decoded as a way of understanding the development of a culture based upon glamour, celebrity, fashion, display and public forms of sexuality which started to break with Victorianism. It looks in particular at the musical comedies produced by the West End impresario George Edwardes and explores their links to the developing fashion and beauty industries of the period.

In the past decade, scholars of the here-and-now have (re)discovered the concept of enclosure, applying it with considerable zeal and in a bewildering variety of situations: from the securitisation of the Internet, and patenting genes, to attempts to privatise urban ‘public’ spaces, the English ‘enclosure story’ is presented as a given, a narrative that is set in stone. One critical aspect of this account is that enclosure was exported to Britain's overseas colonies in a one-way process. This paper shows, however, that from the early sixteenth century – and insistently so from the late eighteenth century – arguments for the enclosure of English commons and wastes were framed using techniques and discourses deployed overseas: the languages and practices of colonialism. Commons and wastes, so the paper argues, were not just increasingly seen as empty spaces, but the peoples that inhabited them were written as if they were uncivilised and unable to manage the land. Further, arguments for the enclosure of wastes were made as an alternative to Britain's overseas imperialism. The paper traces a variety of debates and proposals that collectively constitute a coherent body of ‘internal colonial’ thought.

This article explores popular British ideas about Asia from the mid-seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century, using largely neglected sources: geography books. Thanks to their popularity and focus on conventional knowledge, this genre of texts – geographical reference works, gazetteers, encyclopaedias and schoolbooks – allows us to glimpse the commonplace mentalities of the period, and consequently to understand how Asia was perceived by ordinary literate Britons and not just by prominent intellectuals. Geography books typically regard Asia as a ‘place of origin’ for the cultural and societal achievements of Europe. They also assume that Asia possesses plentiful natural resources and is thus ripe for economic exploitation. At the same time, however, Asia is understood to be degenerate and corrupt, usually due to a combination of climactic decay, religious failings and government mismanagement. Asia is thus alien and entirely distinct from Europe, and, simultaneously, it is intimately connected to Europe's rise and future imperial progress. British geography books can tell us a great deal about how ordinary literate people understood Asian peoples and places in the formative age of British empire-building.

How did work shape people's identity before industrial capitalism? It is a question that early modernists have never really got to grips with. Thanks to decades of research by social and cultural historians, we now have a much better understanding of how people in the past saw themselves and labelled those around them. But until recently scholars of early modern England have had surprisingly little to say about how a person's working life – their occupation, trade, vocation or livelihood – influenced their social identity. This essay is therefore an attempt to synthesise recent research on the subject into a more explicit historiographical intervention. Early modernists need to broaden their research to consider ‘working identities’ as a whole, rather than merely the narrower concept of ‘occupational identities’. By exploring how work influenced a person's self-image and social role, we can reshape our understanding of broader social relations in this period and challenge some of the ‘grand narratives’ of early modern social and economic change.

Debates on the proportionality of political representation surfaced repeatedly, and in similar forms, from the English to the American and French Revolutions. They contributed to shaping those revolutions’ outcomes and, through them, to the emergence of modern democracy – especially so as they were linked up with voting rights: demands to make seats in assemblies more numerically proportionate to electorates – in other words, to weigh all votes equally – implied the equal weight of individual votes and thus also entailed calls for more equal standards regarding the right to vote. This did not yet signify voting rights for all: only specific categories of individuals – as a rule, male and propertied – were considered, even by the most ‘enlightened’ writers, to be politically entitled. Nevertheless, it was only one step from here to envisage voting rights for all individuals – or at least, for the time being, for all male individuals – as can also be seen in all three revolutions. If claims for more proportional and equal representation showed their full impact only on the American and French Revolutions, finally, this was due to the intervening emergence of statistics (or ‘political arithmetic’) as a tool of reflection and debate that gave numbers and calculations increasing persuasive power.

This article argues for an essentially political definition of empire with sovereignty at its core, which recognises that British assertions of sovereignty were multiple, mutually contradictory and thus, taken together, incoherent. Tracing the history of conflict between different archetypes of sovereign authority, we argue that imperial crises occurred when empire's different ideas were forced to speak to one another, during world war, for example. The emphasis here on sovereignty and incoherence contrasts with conceptions of the history of the British empire which assert to the contrary that empire was a coherent entity. Such coherence can, we argue, only be maintained by treating empire as a metaphor for broader conceptions of power and thus collapsing the history of empire into other totalising meta-concepts such as global capitalism or Western cultural dominance. Recognition of the incoherence of imperial sovereignty offers new, more nuanced, readings of central concerns in the literature such as imperial violence and the economics of empire.

In their focus on queer sexuality, letters 77 and 78 in Augustine's letter collection are unusual. Same-sex acts and sexual violence are mostly tightly controlled and deliberately erased in antiquity. This article looks again at the case of sexual abuse preserved in letters 77 and 78 between the monk Spes and the presbyter Bonifatius, applying modern critical understandings of gendered violence, victimisation and harm to reach beyond previous critical approaches that have seen the exceptionalism of the case as a reason not to engage with it. This research takes a new critical approach, re-situating the incident within the wider context of gendered violence in Augustine's letters. It engages with the case of sexual abuse solely between men intrinsically, and as a uniquely available point of comparison with sexual violence perpetrated by men against women. It examines how sexual violence is gendered, in Augustine's response, in the adjudication of the case and in the behaviours and expectations of both victim and perpetrator. Whilst working outwards from absence and silence is a central historiographical approach to gender and violence in the past, this article reaches new understandings by turning towards evidence that is usually siloed and working it back into a framework of sexual violence in Augustine's letters.

This article explores the use of empathy in historical research. Using evidence collected from a number of academic historians working in UK higher education institutions in 2022, this article uses empathy as a window into historians’ attitudes towards the professional self, the appearance of objectivity and their relationship to the historical subject. It explores the role of empathy in learning history, teaching history, in historical research including the selection of sources, and in the communication of historical research to different audiences. It discusses empathetic historical approaches, suggesting that these can be categorised into three distinct taxonomies: historical empathy, where the researcher engages with the historical subject using professional detachment to manage their affective response; historicised empathy, where the researcher employs deep knowledge of historical context to understand and appreciate the worldview of their historical subject; and empathy as historical approach, so person-centred (rather than system-centred) accounts of history. Finally, this article tests its hypotheses by exploring histories in which empathy is absent.

The purpose of statues in public spaces has recently become a matter of controversy. Using a 1937 quotation from the artist Paul Nash and the surrealist leader André Breton, this paper explores the circumstances in which a statue is read as appropriately – ‘in its right mind’ in their terms – situated in public space. In doing so, it draws primarily on examples from Britain, Europe and North America during the rapid expansion in the number of statues in public space from the eighteenth century onwards. The rightmindedness of a statue is shown as primarily determined not by the subject of the statue itself, or by its reception among the public, but by ways in which public authorities and local elites authorise the use of public space. Yet these authorities’ understanding of the fit between a statue and public space can vary over time. Shifts in the political context often prompt changes to where statues are seen as appropriately located. However, picking up on Nash/Breton's phrase, to place a statue in ‘a state of surrealism’ involves more than mere relocation. This is shown to require additional disruption to a statue's artistic language and/or spatial syntax.

Around the year 1200, the court of the Roman pope produced a list of all the bishops – and hence of all the cities – in the Christian world. For the next three centuries this text was copied and updated by kings, priests, lawyers and academics across Europe. The numerous surviving manuscripts of this text – the so–called ‘Roman provincial’ – have received some attention from scholars, but the sheer number of manuscripts has meant that any attempt to catalogue and study them en masse is all but destined to fail. This article suggests a different approach: that the most interesting feature of the provincial manuscripts is their differences; the ways in which copyists changed the ecclesiastical and political geography of Europe to meet their own preferences and expectations. Political geographers and modern historians have long been aware of ‘contested cartographies’ and battles over borders on maps; by studying the Roman provincial we can apply such lenses to the medieval world too. Thirteenth-century kings were quite as aware as we are that maps and lists constitute, rather than just describe, political realities.

This historiographical review considers a corpus of literature which examines the spread of modern Western sport within and beyond the locus of public schools, princely playgrounds and club greens in colonial India. While locating the old historiographical problems and new social historical interpretations, a great deal of attention has been paid to foregrounding significant research areas that are less catered to in existing scholarships. As well, this review contends that the eagerness to examine colonial interventions in the sports field without tracing the conflict and negotiation between two different – pre-colonial and colonial – ideas of leisure and body cultural movements expounds an incomplete history of Western sport in modern India. While doing so, it urges a rectification of the methodology of current academic studies in which vernacular literary sources are treated as a ‘passive mediator’ merely reflecting the popular enthusiasm for sport. It concludes that this ‘reflectionist’ approach is a hindrance to research work on the diffusion of Western sports in colonial India, which recognises the emergence and development of a new sporting culture as the discursive formation that surrounded the ideological meanings and images of the literary construction of sport.

Can decolonising the university create possibilities for new stories to come into being, in the wake of the devastation wrought by colonisation? In Aotearoa New Zealand a particular instance of decolonising universities is under way. This is one that highlights how engagement with decolonising approaches may end up harming academic work. In New Zealand, public universities have involved themselves in negotiating a delicate compromise between activism and the demands of the state. This compromise brings into question the robustness of institutional autonomy and academic freedom. Conjoining the activist idea of decolonising with language that refers to a distinctive form of state governance foregrounding a political relationship between the Crown (executive government) and Māori, several universities have committed themselves to a ‘Treaty partnership’ with Māori. The idea is rooted in recent interpretations of the colonial Treaty of Waitangi/Te Tiriti o Waitangi, signed in 1840. The Treaty is and has been a contested text, event and idea. When universities invoke a particular idea of the Treaty as if it is a consensus view in order to advance social objectives, they risk thwarting the role and responsibility of academics, and particularly historians, to the common good as ‘critic and conscience’ of society.

Unpicking Britishness on a global stage: a review of Stuart Ward's Untied Kingdom.

Review of Untied Kingdom: A Global History of the End of Britain, by Stuart Ward (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022)

This response to Stuart Ward's Untied Kingdom examines his treatment of Scottish and Welsh nationalisms. This is a crucial part of the book because it is here that Ward completes his narrative arc, which depicts the loss of empire as a fundamentally destabilising force for the UK state and its basis in a shared British identity. So how should we think about the pressure that decolonisation places on British identity within Britain? While admiring much of Ward's treatment of this question, this response suggests that he underestimates the importance of post-war social democracy as a possible alternative basis for British identity and the decay of that social democracy as a causal factor in the rise of Scottish and Welsh nationalisms.