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Although Irish nationalism in its various phases has been the subject of numerous studies, its 19th-century antithesis – British unionism – has been comparatively neglected.
St George is enjoying something of a scholarly and popular renaissance at present – not that he ever really went away as a figure of interest in the many countries and cities beyond England which associate themselves with him.
Two books on druids in two years, and by the same author! If I were either of Ronald Hutton’s publishers I’d be biting my nails over this, but let me reassure them both right at the start that Hutton pulls it off, and in style. The two really do complement each other. So what does Blood and Mistletoe have that The Druids: A History (1) does not?
During the medieval period the Benedictine abbeys of Westminster and Saint-Denis were major centres of religion, politics and power, while serving as the site of royal shrines and burials.
The subject of Glenn Burgess’ new book is an exciting one, and its author is well qualified to tackle it. Political thought is a lively and flourishing field within history, and Glenn Burgess has done much to promote it.
For scholars of early modern church music, monographs are rather like the proverbial bus; one waits a decade or more for one, and then two come along together; in this case, in the same year, and in the same series. The editors of the St Andrews Studies in Reformation History are to be commended for publishing two substantial studies in what has hitherto been a neglected area.
Mary-Anne (Read) Rawson (1801–87) was everyone and no one. Raised in a family on the cusp of a professionalizing industrial Sheffield, as presented in Alison Twells’s study, Mary-Anne and women like her both personified the absolute personal intimacy of evangelical piety, and married their belief and middle class privilege with a public critique of both the poor and poverty.
On 4 December 1655, following the arrival in London of Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel from Amsterdam and his petition to the Council of State on behalf of the ‘Hebrew Nation’, a conference was begun at Whitehall to discuss the readmission of Jews to England after a supposed absence of 365 years.
Michael Graham’s work is the first book length study of the life and unfortunate death of Edinburgh university student Thomas Aikenhead.
The civil wars that engulfed the three kingdoms of England, Ireland and Scotland in the mid-17th century remain a battlefield, and generation after generation they retain a capacity to provoke passionate debate and heated historical controversy.