Every city must in a sense have a city culture. Florence, however, was the only place in which there arose at the end of the Middle Ages what one might call a city ideology, that is to say a set of developed ideas as distinct from a way of living, which was particularly designed by and for city-dwellers. Much of the modern historical interest in Florence has centred around these ideas which emerged in the first half of the fifteenth century, the more so because even the innovations in the visual arts introduced at the same time by Donatello and his contemporaries are in part a by-product of them. The theme which I would like to develop in this paper therefore is the relationship between the city society and its ideology. This is of course a very old and well-worn theme. One of the common presuppositions of Renaissance historiography has been the understandable assumption that the ideology fitted the city, and a good deal of historical analysis has been applied to identifying the congruences between them and illustrating the growth of the humanist school out of the circumstances of Florentine life. The ideology, however, was created in the early fifteenth century, at the end of the period which I am going to discuss, when Florence had already been a great centre of industry and commerce and an independent republic for a very long time. Fruitful as it has been, this approach therefore leaves one with the disquieting feeling that a place which has been for so long and so conspicuously a centre of throbbing urban life ought to have had its ideological revolution much earlier, particularly since economic historians have emphasized the elements of commercial contraction rather than expansion in the early Renaissance period. Some historians have found themselves driven into the paradoxical position of regarding the early Renaissance as a symptom of economic decline. I would therefore like to look at the old theme obliquely by deflecting attention from the great innovations themselves and concentrating it on the factors which favoured or hindered ideological innovation in the century and a half before they appeared.

ON a previous occasion I posed a question: family relations mattered, or did they? I now intend to investigate in what way they mattered. It is a complex problem. In the middle ages men were reminded more frequently than now by the varied representation of the tale of Cain and Abel that family relations are not always easy; they could be supportive, cohesive, quarrelsome or murderous. So it is reasonable to ask: why the one rather than the other? Behind that there are other questions: when did the family matter and when not? Why did it matter when it did and why when not? A long established tradition in Anglo-Saxon scholarship has been concerned with the respective roles of kinship, lordship and local association. What can be said on the same topics for the post-Conquest period? For it is plain that there can be no secure conclusions about the family unless it is correctly located and properly embedded in the matrix of social and political relationships within which men lived their lives.

By the end of the eighteenth century Britain was a world power on a scale that none of her European rivals could match. Not only did she rule a great empire, but the reach of expeditionary forces from either Britain itself or from British India stretched from the River Plate to the Moluccas in eastern Indonesia. Britain's overseas trade had developed a strongly global orientation: she was die leading distributor of tropical produce diroughout die world and in the last years of the century about four-fifths of her exports were going outside Europe. Britain was at die centre of inter-continental movements of people, not only exporting her own population but shipping almost as many Africans across the Atantic during die eighteenth century as all the other carriers put together. It is not surprising therefore that British historians have searched for the qualities that marked out eighteeth-century Britain's exceptionalism on a world stage. Notable books have stressed, not only the dynamism of die British economy, but developments such as the rise of Britain's ‘fiscal-military state’ or die forging of a sense of British national identity behind war and empire overseas.

This essay begins by celebrating the achievement of Wilhelm Levison, whoseEngland and the Continent in the Eighth Centuryhas both inspired and provoked new generations of explorers. The essay goes on to argue that the historiography of the earlier Middle Ages has been haunted by quests for the end of the Roman Empire. Recent attempts at periodisation, Marxist and other, have extended Rome's decline to span the ninth century, with the Carolingian heyday both truncated and belittled, while Anglo-Saxon England has been split down the middle by representations of the Vikings' impact as a re-run of the fifth-century barbarian onslaught. Since 1989, abundant and diverse historiographical takes, cross-cultural, interdisciplinary and comparative, have made it possible to see the ninth century as a formative and defining period in European history, not least because of multiple contacts between England and the Continent. The last part of the essay examines the pontificate of Leo III (795-816), to show England and the Continent meeting, figuratively speaking, in Rome. A wider world of connections is brought into view and the scene set for further explorations.

This article seeks to relate the course of Edmund Grindal's disgrace to the formulation and enforcement of policy against catholics. It argues that the two were integrally related and that the nature of that interrelationship can be seen as a function of certain manoeuvres and debates about a range of issues involving the queen and her councillors and bishops and indeed members of the wider regime. The resulting exchanges were conducted in terms of the nature and relative significance of the popish and puritan threats. The aim here is to reveal the dynamics of the resulting mode of ideological politics and to show how very serious differences of approach, priority and world view could be both canvassed and contained within the consensual mechanisms and assumptions of the Elizabethan regime. Through a close analysis of one political moment the paper also hopes to demonstrate the extent to which a series of conventionally separately told stories – about ecclesiastical affairs, about foreign policy, about puritans and about catholics, about both court and local politics – need to be seen as parts of a unitary political narrative or process, the nature of which this paper is an attempt to reveal.

There has been much controversy over the role of apocalyptic thought at the court of Otto III of Germany (983–1002). This is in no small part a product of modern scholarship discussing the subject almost exclusively with reference to the so-called ‘terrors of the year 1000’, the result being highly polarised ‘all or nothing’ arguments, which run the risk of underestimating both the complexity and dynamism of eschatological expectation in this period. In contrast, the following paper argues that apocalyptic thought played an important part in politics under Otto III, but one which cannot be explained by the proximity of the first millennium alone.

The most celebrated product of the early English Renaissance was composed not in English but in Latin. It was conceived in Antwerp, completed in London, published in Louvain, and reprinted in Paris, Basle and Florence long before it was finally rendered into English, some sixteen years after its author had been executed. He was executed for refusing to adhere to the doctrine that the head of the Church was to be found in England, not in Europe.

WINSTON CHURCHILL combined a rhetoric of Tory democracy with a shrewd political realism in his approach to the trade unions. When class conflict was strong and law and order under threat, as in 1911–26, the rhetoric evaporated and Churchill became the champion of the anxious propertied classes. So much so that his persistent Dundee opponent, Edwin Scrymgeour, observed during the 1922 general election campaign, shortly after Mussolini took power in Italy, that it would not surprise him in the event of civil war in Britain ‘if Mr Churchill were at the head of the Fascisti party’. While this view ignored Churchill’s deep commitment to democracy and the British constitution, it did reflect concerns about his apparent revelry in the role of Defender of Order. Yet both before and after 1911–26 his approach to the trade unions was emollient.

Many voices prophesied a destructive war for England on the eve of the Civil War. The miseries of the conflicts in Germany had been closely followed in the earliest newspapers published in England. With the outbreak of the Irish rebellion in 1641, and the consequent bloodshed, the wars were only a step away. In 1642 newsbooks and sermons vied with each other to paint the blackest picture possible of the evils in store for England, once it seemed that, at last, the nation was to be swallowed up in the general European conflagration.

‘It is not more than seventy or eighty years since,’ wrote ‘A Member of the Manchester Athenaeum’ in 1844, ‘that a few humble mechanics in Lanarkshire, distinguished by scarcely anything more than mechanical ingenuity and perseverance of character, succeeded in forming a few, but important mechanical combinations, the effect of which has been to revolutionize the whole of British society, and to influence, in a marked degree, the progress of civilization in every quarter of the globe.’

Replying, on 13 January 1308, to letters of Philip IV of France describing the arrest of the Templars, Albert of Habsburg, King of the Germans, after expressing the customary sadness at the turn of events and extolling his own role as the leading prince in defence of the faith, remarked that although a crime of such evil infamy ought to be reprehensible and damnable in all persons, nevertheless it is known to be more reprehensible among the religious, who ought by the splendour of their life to be mirror for others and an example. Throughout the 193 years of its history the Order had indeed been in a position where it was a mirror for others and an example, a position which made it a particularly sensitive indicator and, in its turn, promoter, of social change. This paper is an attempt to tiace this interrelationship.

Erasmus' Folly, orating in 1511, accused modern theologians of treating the scriptures ‘as if they were of wax’. Similar charges were to be commonplace in the sixteenth century. John Fisher, preaching in 1521, maintained that heretics have always ‘turned the wrong side of the scriptures outward, following their own brain and fantasy’. Thomas More, also, criticized the Reformers because they ‘abuse’ the scriptures, comparing Tyndale in 1532 to ‘a butterfly fallen on a lime twig, which the more it striveth and fluttereth, ever the faster it hangeth’. On this conservative side, the Erasmian image was personalized by the Dutch Albert Pighius, who referred in 1538 to ‘someone’ as saying ‘both truly and merrily’: ‘The scripture is like a nose of wax, that easily suffereth itself to be drawn backward and forward, and to be moulded and fashioned this way and that way, and howsoever ye list’. Now, that idea of a ‘nose of wax’ had been used against the papists by Tyndale in 1532: they ‘make it a nose of wax, and wrest it this way and that way, till it agree’.

The one important, indeed invaluable, source for the history of the council in the early-fifteenth century is the Proceedings and Ordinances of the Privy Council of England, 10 Richard II–33 Henry VIII, edited by Sir Nicholas Harris Nicolas and published by the Record Commission in seven volumes in the years 1834 to 1837, but in so far as the title of this work implies a formal and continuous record of proceedings it is misleading, for, unlike parliament, the council left no regular account of its activities. The Rolls of Parliament, even though their account of the proceedings is one-sided, official and incomplete, do at least record such bare facts as the dates of meeting, the names of the Speakers, and usually the dates of adjournment; but there are no similar rolls for the council. The phrase ‘privy council’ in Nicolas's title is also something of an anachronism, at least for the early part of the period covered. At this time the future privy council was generally known simply as the council or the king's council, although it was sometimes called the continual council to distinguish it from the larger body known to contemporaries as the great council. This distinctionis usually made in official records, but chroniclers often referred indifferently to either body as the council, and the differences are not now always apparent to us.

Thex period 1772–84 was the formative period of British Indian history. During these years Indian affairs were constantly before Parliament; the questions of the relation of the East India Company to the State, and of the home to the Indian administration were dealt with, and the system of government instituted in 1784 was not fundamentally changed until 1858.

The great Helmuth von Moltke, addressing the German Reichstag in May 1890 in the last year of his very long life, gave a sombre warning of wars to come: Gentlemen, if the war which has hung over our heads for more than ten years like a sword of Damocles—if this war were to break out, no one could foresee how long it would last nor how it would end. The greatest powers in Europe, armed as never before, would confront each other in battle. None of them could be so completely overthrown in one or two campaigns that they would have to admit defeat, accept peace on harsh terms, and not be able to revive again after a years' -long interval to renew the struggle. Gentlemen, it could be a Seven Years' War; it could be a Thirty Years' War; and woe to the man who sets Europe ablaze, who first throws the match into the powder barrel.

The early National Trust reflected current concerns about national identies. Small-scale buildings, acquired 1895–1910, demonstrate a desire to monumentalise English political, religious (Anglican) and literary traditions for English-speaking peoples at home and abroad, particularly in America. Its active, though overlooked, founders include Liberal politicians such as James Bryce (Britain's ambassador to Washington). Its buildings had antiquarian appeal but seeing them only in terms of their architectural history or regional characteristics overlooks conscious attempts to use architecture as historical evidence for a vision of an English life and social order, as both that order at home and England's status abroad altered.

In one of his characteristic outbursts to the British military attaché at Berlin, the Kaiser complained, ‘All my life I have worked for a good understanding with England, but you do not help me’. This is only one of the oft-repeated complaints, made sometimes to the British ambassador and more often to the military attaché, but its frequent repetition, in varying forms, represented a genuine conviction of German good-will and British lack of response. In the history of the ten years which began in 1892 this reproach has a special significance, for one at least of the important results of the developments of British policy in this period was that the era of co-operation between Britain and the members of the Triple Alliance was ended.

Yet another survey of the much-traversed field of Anglo-German relations will seem to many historians of modern Europe to border on the realm of superfluity; probably no two countries have had their relationship to each other so frequently examined in the past century as Britain and Germany. Moreover, even if one restricted such a study to the British side alone, the sheer number of publications upon this topic, or upon only a section of it like the age of ‘appeasement’, is simply too great to allow a compression of existing knowledge into a narrative form that would be anything other than crude and sketchy. The following contribution therefore seeks neither to provide such a general survey, nor, by use of new and detailed archival materials, to concentrate upon a small segment of the history of British policy towards Germany in the period 1864–1939; but instead to consider throughout all these years a particular aspect, namely, the respective arguments of Germanophiles and Germanophobes in Britain and the connection between this dialogue and the more general ideological standpoints of both sides. In so doing, the author has produced a survey which remains embarrassingly summary in detail but does at least attempt to offer a fresh approach to the subject.

This address examines the ‘Old Corruption’ of Georgian Britain from the perspective of diplomacy and material culture in Delhi in the era of the East India Company. Its focus is the scandal that surrounded the sacking of Sir Edward Colebrooke, the Delhi Resident, during the reign of the penultimate Mughal emperor, Akbar II. Exploring the gendered, highly sexualised material politics of Company diplomacy in north India reveals narratives of agency, negotiation and commensurability that interpretations focused on liberal, Anglicist ideologies obscure. Dynastic politics were integral to both British and Indian elites in the nineteenth century. The Colebrooke scandal illuminates both the tenacity and the dynamic evolution of the family as a base of power in the context of nineteenth-century British imperialism.