Anglican parish registers have been the basis for most studies of population trends and characteristics in early modern England, and one of the most important of the techniques used in analysing them has been family reconstitution. But Anglican registers at all times were an incomplete and inaccurate record of vital events, and their defects tended to become more pronounced in the later part of the period during which they afford the chief source of empirical information about population behaviour. And there are inherent limitations and biases in the results that can be obtained by family reconstitution. This article attempts to describe the range of difficulties and dilemmas involved in studying the demography of populations in the past when using this source of data and this technique of analysis. A variety of tests is deployed to establish the degree of reliability attaching to the results obtained in a recent exercise based on the family reconstitution of 26 parishes, and more generally to assess the opportunities open to scholarship in this area and the pitfalls associated with such work. The conclusion is that reliable results can be obtained but that great care is needed in the selection of suitable registers, and that a number of tests should be employed to monitor the internal consistency and the demographic plausibility of any findings.

This essay explores the circulation of rumour and news among those at the lower levels of society in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. It does so through an analysis of the court records in which people were indicted for spreading false reports or speaking seditious words and which are now preserved in assize files or amid the state papers. These sources reveal the networks of communication by which information was disseminated nationwide and shed light upon the relationship between oral, manuscript and printed media. They show how wild stories could be whipped up in the act of transmission and were fuelled by the political insecurities of this period. At the same time a more sophisticated awareness of current affairs is evident in some illicit conversations which suggest that even humble people were participating in the arguments which anticipated the Civil War.

The capture of Cadiz in 1596 was a spectacular but short-lived success in England's war against Spain. More enduring were the many partisan accounts of the victory, which were prepared and disseminated by various officers from the expedition. This article traces these rival narratives and explores their circulation in manuscript form, including the earl of Essex's notorious ‘True relacion’. Such documents illustrate the increasingly bitter divisions of late Elizabethan politics. The stories of Cadiz gained a fresh currency when England and Spain went to war again in the 1620s, placing a heavy burden of expectation on the government of Charles I.

It has become orthodox to criticize Charles I for his failure as a politician. Such criticism is both accurate and anachronistic. It fails to appreciate that for Charles the business of kingship was not the art of politics but the pursuit of conscience. Charles took to heart his father's injunctions to follow conscience and he obeyed them rigidly. Through the study of speeches, letters and royal prayers this essay examines the centrality of conscience to Charles I's kingship. It shows how the divisions of the 1640s led him temporarily to abandon conscience, and finally it studies the king's self-construction as the conscience of the commonwealth – the central stance of the Eikon Basilike.

It is now common to study the Enlightenment ‘in national context’, and in few cases has the approach been more fertile than in the study of the Scottish Enlightenment. The danger of this approach, however, is that it deflects attention from the international connections of the Enlightenment, fragmenting the movement as a whole. It is argued here that the Enlightenment is better understood as an intellectual movement which was both cosmopolitan and patriotic, and that this is particularly evident in its commitment to political economy, as the key to improving the human condition in this world. The argument is developed through a comparison of Scottish and Neapolitan political economy from the mid- to the later eighteenth century. Though set apart by very different economic circumstances, the Scots and the Neapolitans had a common point of reference in French economic writings, and through these Hume's ideas in particular were transmitted to Naples. It was from within this common intellectual framework that the Scots and the Neapolitans elaborated their distinctive positions on the scope for free trade between nations. If Hume and Smith believed that poor countries such as Scotland would prosper through greater free trade, while Genovesi and Galiani argued that only by measures of protection could the abundant natural resources of the kingdom of Naples be harnessed to its benefit, their differences derived from shared premises, and a comparable fear of the inclination of the leading mercantile powers, Britain and France, to control trade to their sole advantage.

This article addresses the development of the British government's policy towards the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in France, which arose from the British occupation of Toulon from 28 August to 19 December 1793. The discussions conducted by prime minister William Pitt and foreign secretary Lord Grenville on the shape of Toulon's civil government under occupation clarify official British perceptions of an ‘ideal’ Bourbon monarchy in France. British thoughts on this subject were determined, not only by traditional English whig beliefs about the institutional foundations of political, constitutional and civil liberty, but also by consideration for the upheavals that the French Revolution had witnessed. Alhough Pitt and Grenville were interested in establishing a model government capable of healing the French social and political conflicts that had emerged since 1789, their deliberations on the fate of Toulon reveal that the French ancien régime was still a negative entity in British minds despite the advent of the French Revolution and Revolutionary Wars.

According to the prevalent view, German citizenship was acquired only by descent from German citizens from the early nineteenth century onwards. This article argues, however, that a complete reading of the available sources suggests that citizenship was linked to the place of permanent residence in post-1815 legislation, and that the regulation of citizenship was a state responsibility, not one of the powers of the Germanic Confederation. The central points of citizenship law remained unchanged by the 1848 revolution and the unification of German states in 1866 and 1871, so that the increasing emphasis on descent in the 1913 Citizenship Act reflected a new departure rather than a traditional German concept of nationality.

The traditional division of the Klan phenomenon into three or four separate outbreaks (Reconstruction, 1920s, post-1954, and post-1979) is a useful organizing construct for scholars, but is deceptively simple and not necessarily reflective of reality. Alabama's KKK is examined immediately following World War II. During this alleged period of dormancy there is, instead, a thriving Klan presence in perhaps the most racist of the deep South states. Postwar Alabama was especially tense as black voting registration aspirations and the growing appeal of biracial economic liberalism challenged the status quo. Klan resurgence was part of a determined white supremacist reaction. The concept of soft opposition is also coined and introduced to describe the efforts of elites to combat the Klan. While waging a vigorous opposition, elites were not so concerned with Klan depredations as abominations in and of themselves; rather, they were worried about the threat of federal intervention into southern race relations in response to violence. They opposed Klan excesses to perpetuate traditional elite, white control over southern blacks. Such opposition, while genuine, was less than effective, altruistic, or hard opposition; the kind needed to eliminate the Klan as an accepted part of southern society, which evolved only after 1979.

In the course of his challenging reassessment of the parliamentary politics of the early seventeenth century, Conrad Russell has suggested that modern students of the period have approached the subject with deep-seated preconceptions about the existence of fundamental conflicts between the crown and the house of commons. As a result, the willingness of the lower house to take up issues of parliamentary privilege has probably been over-rated. The explanation for this long-standing misapprehension lies in the fact that the views of those M.P.s who wished to pursue such issues have found their way into the record far more often than the silences of their colleagues who did not want to take them up.

After the disavowal of Marxian socialism, the major obstacle to historical studies in the West increasingly appears to be the U.S.A.'s intellectual exceptionalism. That nation's unprecedentedly powerful and self-referential historical profession is largely committed to echo this exceptionalism by its engagement with the demands of the U.S.A.'s ‘civil religion’. For U.S. historiography, the main index of self-absorption or international engagement is nevertheless still its relationship to British historiography. This article argues that the alleged death of British history in the U.S.A. is not a consequence of any loss of intellectual vitality in the subject; it is, rather, a result partly of growing intellectual introversion in the host culture, partly of the inadequate versions of British history often exported to the American market.

Marriage and the English Reformation. By Eric Josef Carlson. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. Pp. ix+276. ISBN 0-631-16864-8. £45.00

Gender, sex and subordination in England, 1550–1800. By Anthony Fletcher. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995. Pp. xxii+442. ISBN 0-300-06531-0. £19.95.

Domestic dangers: women, words, and sex in early modern London. By Laura Gowing. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Pp. 301. ISBN 0-19-820517-1. £35.00.

The prospect before her: a history of women in western Europe, Volume one, 1500–1800. By Olwen Hufton. London: HarperCollins, 1995. Pp. xiv+654. ISBN 0-00255120-9. £25.00.

Sex and subjection: attitudes to women in early modern society. By Margaret R. Sommerville. London: Edward Arnold, 1995. Pp. 287. ISBN 0-340-64574-1. £14.99.

Flesh and stone. The body and the city in western civilization. By Richard Sennett. London: Faber & Faber, 1994. Pp. 431. ISBN 0-571-17390-X. £25.00

Renaissance warrior and patron. The reign of Francis I. By R. J. Knecht. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. xxv+612. ISBN 0-521-41796-1. £45.00.

The early modern city 1450–1750. By Christopher R. Friedrichs. London: Longman, 1995. Pp. ix+381. ISBN 0-582-01321-6. £14.99.

The court artist. On the ancestry of the modern artist. By Martin Warnke. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pp. xx+299. ISBN 0-521-36375-6. £35.00.

Renaissance and revolution. Humanists, scholars, craftsmen & natural philosophers in early modern Europe. Edited by J. V. Field and Frank A. J. L. James. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. xv+291. ISBN 0-521-43427-0. £37.50.

Louis XV and the parlement of Paris, 1737–1755. By J. M. Rogister. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp. xxv+288. ISBN 0-521-40395-2. £37.50, hbk.

Politics and the parlement of Paris under Louis XV, 1754–1774. By Julian Swann. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp. x+390. ISBN 0-521-48362-X. £45, hbk, £19.95, pbk.

Revolt in prerevolutionary France. The Prince de Conti's conspiracy against Louis XV, 1755–1757. By John D. Woodbridge. Baltimore and London: the John's Hopkins University Press, 1995. Pp. xvii+242. ISBN 0-801-84945-4. £33, hbk.

French politics, 1774–1789. By John Hardman. London and New York: Longman, 1995. Pp. x+283. ISBN 0-582-23649-5. £15.99, pbk.

Preserving the monarchy. The comte de Vergennes, 1774–1787. By M. Price. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp. xi+256. ISBN 0-521-46566-4. £35, hbk.

Zionist culture and West European Jewry before the First World War. By Michael Berkowitz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pp. xviii+255. ISBN 0-521-42072-5. £29.95.

The kibbutz movement. A history. Volume I. Origins and growth, 1909–1939. By Henry Near. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Pp. xviii+431. ISBN 0-197-10069-4. £55.00.

The road to power: Herut party in Israel. By Yonathan Shapiro. New York: State University of New York Press, 1995. Pp. vi+208. ISBN 0-794-06067. $12.95.

The partition of Palestine, decision crossroads in the Zionist movement. By Itzhak Galnoor. New York: State University of New York Press, 1991. Pp. ix+379. ISBN 0-791-42193-7. $21.95.

Genealogies of conflict: class, identity and state in Palestine/Israel and South Africa. By Ran Greenstein. Hanover, NH and London: Wesleyan University Press and University Press of New England, 1995. ISBN 0-819-55288-7. $27.25.