Royal Grief in England, 1485–1640

This essay explores recorded responses to bereavements within the Tudor and early Stuart royal families. It recognizes that customs and conventional expectations may to a large extent have concealed, or distorted the representation of, individual experiences. Thus kings customarily passed their sorrows in seclusion after the death of a spouse. (Monarchs occasionally sought to exercise this privilege more informally and less successfully when favourites died.) Accounts of how kings and queens behaved when they lost sons tended to emphasize manly fortitude and womanly sorrow, but also revealed more complex reactions. Condolences addressed to members of the royal family during this period shared certain conventional themes. New in James I's reign was the outpouring of verse in which the grief of the king, the queen and their children was sympathetically imagined by poets.     

David Underdown’s Revel,Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603–1660

Abstract

This article examines the strategies and tactics of surveillance that were used by Manchester City Police in relation to anxieties about gender, sexuality, juvenile delinquency and drugs misuse in post-war England. In the early 1960s the members-only ‘coffee beat club’ became a target of police activity, resulting in a series of raids, minor prosecutions and the intensification of the licensing laws. Commenting on the relationship between police culture and youth culture, including the leisure practices of adolescent girls, this article argues that the targeting of the ‘coffee beat club’ became a motif for the defence of an older imagined social order.     

Popular Politicians: The Interaction Between Politics and Popular Culture in the Netherlands, 1950s–1980s

ABSTRACT

From the late 1950s onwards, the Netherlands witnessed a transformation of the emotional codes of politics. A culture of political leadership marked by notions of duty and restraint, made way for self-expression and authenticity. This article argues that the interaction between the spheres of politics and popular culture played a vital role in this transformation. The practices and discourses of popular culture became a significant part of the repertoire through which politicians articulated representative claims. The article traces how politicians negotiated their interaction with popular culture, started to cultivate a private persona and eventually turned into political celebrities.     

Middle-Class Fathers,Sons and Military Service in England, 1914–1918

The figure of the hyper-patriotic middle-class father, happy to sacrifice his sons to the war, while remaining snug at home, was a recurrent feature of post-First World War literature. This article places this view of wartime fatherhood under scrutiny, suggesting that middle-class fathers with sons of military age rarely behaved as straightforward enforcers of the state’s call to arms. Alongside expressions of vocal pride in sons who conformed to the manly ideal by volunteering, there were resistance, silence and fear, while support for sons who sought to avoid enlistment was a good deal more evident than any determination that sons should do their ‘bit’ at all costs.     

God's Tribunal: Guilt,Innocence, and Execution in England, 1675–1775

This paper explores the ways in which the early modern English execution functioned as a forum in which various, and often competing, notions of guilt and innocence were expressed. In the context of a culture which placed an inordinate emphasis on the significance of the behaviour and last dying words of men and women teetering on the brink of ‘Judgement and Eternity’, the gallows became, in essence, ‘God's tribunal – the site where solemn oaths and supernatural signs could trump the rulings of secular courts. And it was here that the condemned could proclaim not merely his or her individual innocence of a specific crime, but raise larger questions of relative societal guilt and sinfulness and social justice by invoking the disparity between man's justice and God's.     

‘At Some Point in the 1960s,Hell Disappeared’: Hell,Gender and Catholicism in Post-War England

This article explores changing understandings of Catholic hell in post-war England, focusing on how questions of sex and gender intersected with beliefs in the afterlife. It uses oral testimony from Catholic laypeople alongside the pronouncements of the clerical hierarchy to challenge the pervasive notion that ‘hell disappeared in the 1960s’. Hell did however, change in constitution during the post-war decades, transforming from a material ‘place’ to an abstract ‘state’ in the lay and institutional imagination. Rather than being about a straightforward ‘liberation’ from a coercive theology of damnation, the changing constitution of hell spoke of the way certain religious beliefs became re-categorised in late-modern England.     

Coining Offences in England and Wales,c. 1675–1750: The Practical and the Personal

This article argues for a departure from previous conceptual frameworks that have categorised early modern coining offences as ‘social crimes’ similar to poaching, smuggling and riot. It seeks instead to complement the work undertaken by Malcolm Gaskill, Carl Wennerlind and Nicholas Tosney by contributing to their holistic interpretations of the offences from a variety of legal, economic and cultural perspectives. Through an analysis of elite views, cheap print, and the textual content of Mint depositions and trial summaries, this article argues that the ways in which contemporaries understood the practicalities of clipping, counterfeiting, and uttering as illicit depended largely on individual factors. These included the morality of work and labour, and specific roles and relationships of coiners.     

‘Bloomers’ and the British World: Dress Reform in Transatlantic and Antipodean Print Culture, 1851–1950

The ‘bloomers’ are rarely considered beyond their 1851 origins in the United States and subsequent appearance in Britain. This article expands dress reform scholarship by analysing print culture elsewhere in the British world, specifically Australia and New Zealand. The colonial press manufactured controversy over this fashion – a perceived transgression of gender norms – even though antipodean women rarely sported the outfit. This article focuses on the dress reform lectures and writings of Amelia Bloomer, Caroline Dexter and Dr Mary Walker. While certain continuities resurfaced alongside the bloomer-like rational dress popularised in the bicycling culture of the 1890s, dress reform was largely deemed far less controversial by the turn of the twentieth century.