Lucca was the smallest and least important of the three Italian republics that survived the Renaissance. Venice and Genoa still command the attention of historians. But in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for all that it might seem out-of-the-way, Lucca developed an extraordinary political literature. The regular election of senators was marked by the musical performance of a text, generally drawn from Roman history, that illustrated the way citizens of a republic were to behave. The poet and composer were natives and the event was a lesson in citizenship. A close look at the content of these serenades, or operas, makes clear that the republic's motto might have been Libertas but its teaching emphasized constantia. The themes and the heroes of Lucca's political literature were those we associate with neo-Stoicism. The relationship between neo-Stoicism and citizenship in early modern Lucca is the focus of this article. These texts present us with the self-image of an early modern republic and its understanding of what it meant to be a citizen. They are an important source for anyone interested in early modern debates about citizenship and in the political ideas that are conveyed in the commonplaces of baroque visual and musical culture.

This article explores the nature of relationships formed between nuns and male clergy in early modern Venice. It is based on the records of trials for the violation of conventual enclosure, the principle at the centre of the reforms of nunneries decreed by the Council of Trent, which aspired to sever all links between nuns and the world outside the cloister. The trials offer detailed insights into the interactions of male and female celibates, whose relationships were frequently monogamous, long-term, and intense, although rarely overtly sexual. I argue that the constraints of enclosure conditioned the nature of celibate desire, promoting a model of heterosocial engagement in which bodily intimacy was surprisingly unimportant.

This article seeks to establish the burden of direct taxation in the city of London in the sixteenth century. Previous discussions have been confined to the yield of parliamentary subsidies which cannot give a full picture because of the way responsibility for equipping military levies was increasingly devolved on to the locality. Estimates of the costs of the various additional military levies are therefore made. Innovations in parliamentary taxation enabled the crown to levy extraordinary sums in the 1540s, but they required a level of intervention by the privy council which Elizabeth's government was not prepared to make. The subsidy performed especially badly in London in the later sixteenth century. Local military rates compensated to some extent, but tax levels in real terms were very much lower in the 1590s than the 1540s. Nevertheless taxation was becoming increasingly regressive, which helps explain the greater level of complaint in the 1590s.

The article examines the intellectual and ideological debate about the notions of duelling, courtesy, and honour in the Jacobean anti-duelling campaign. Particular attention is paid to the two most important contributions to this campaign – Francis Bacon's The charge touching duells (1614) and A pvblication of his matiesedict, and severe censvre against priuate combats and combatants (1614), written by Henry Howard, the earl of Northampton. By placing these two treatises into their intellectual context of courtesy and duelling manuals, the article seeks to demonstrate their sharply contrasting responses to the problem of duelling. Northampton accepted the notions of courtesy, honour, and insult underlying the duelling theory, but still wanted to abolish duelling. His solution was therefore a court of honour which would solve all the disputes of honour between noblemen and gentlemen. Bacon, on the other hand, argued that the only efficient way of getting rid of duelling was to question the entire intellectual framework on which duelling rested. To accept the notions of honour, courtesy, and insult inherent in the duelling theory and to set up a court of honour, he insisted, was tantamount to encouraging duelling itself. In The charge touching duells Bacon was thus arguing as much against Northampton's plans to suppress duelling as against the theory of duelling itself.

An argument has erupted in recent years over the authorship of A short tract on first principles, a manuscript treatise traditionally regarded as the first philosophical work of Hobbes. Some have denied that it was Hobbes 's work, while others have insisted that it is. Among rival candidates, the prime suspect is Robert Payne, chaplain to the Cavendish family of Welbeck Abbey. This article offers a fresh assessment of the evidence for authorship by examining the manuscript and its contents in the light of the Cavendish family manuscripts, and of the various roles played at Welbeck by Payne. It argues that the tract was written by Payne for his patrons as an attempt to apply the method of contemporary mechanics to problems of human psychology, and that it was based in part – though only in part – upon ideas about the nature of light and motion expounded by Hobbes at Welbeck during the early 1630s.

John Stubbs's controversial pamphlet against Elizabeth's proposed marriage with Francis, duke of Anjou, The discoverie of a gaping gulf (1579), has conventionally been seen – with Edmund Spenser's The shepheardes calendar and Philip Sidney's letter to Elizabeth – as part of a propaganda campaign organized by Leicester and Walsingham to force Elizabeth to reject the marriage. Yet the evidence linking Stubbs with Leicester and Walsingham is thin. This article re-examines that evidence in the light of recent research on court factionalism, men-of-business, and concepts of counsel. It argues that A gaping gulf was an independent initiative taken by Stubbs which expressed very different attitudes to ‘counsel’ from Sidney's letter. It suggests that participants in public debate need to be explored on their own terms, rather than as necessarily catspaws of councillors; that there was an emergent Elizabethan public sphere independent of the court which, in holding different attitudes to counsel than councillors, could bring them into conflict with Elizabeth.

This article argues that many traditional historical narratives of individualism have been reproduced in more recent discussions of the self and selfhood, and that attempts to discover a point at which the ‘modern’ self came into existence have been hampered by such assumptions. To provide an alternative to these approaches, discussions of the self in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries will be examined. Eschewing overarching narratives, the discussion will focus on how neo-stoic sources were employed in the context of challenges to traditional forms of the humanist ethics of office-holding. Such ideas, important in writers like Montaigne, Pierre Charron, and William Cornwallis, have been associated with an idea of ‘new humanism’, but this article aims to discuss with precision how they relate to early modern ethical discussion. Here an insight can be gained into a particular philosophical development of the idea of the self. This can be more productive than some recent ‘new historicist’, or sociological, approaches to the literature of this period, which tend to the deconstruction of a particular set of sources through the use of the self as a theoretical heuristic.

This article locates Sir Thomas More’s Utopia within the broader context of the sixteenth-century Greek revival in England. More and the other humanists whom Erasmus befriended during his time in England became the first Englishmen to learn Greek and to make a polemical point of preferring Greece to Rome. During the period of Utopia’s preparation and publication, this circle’s Hellenism took on a new intensity, as several of its members were called upon to defend Erasmus’s controversial project of using the Greek New Testament to correct the Vulgate. Responding to opponents of the new Greek learning, the Erasmians launched a particularly energetic attack on Roman philosophy. It is argued that Utopia intervenes in this quarrel by dramatizing a confrontation between the values of the Roman republican tradition and those of a rival commonwealth theory based on Greek ethics. Utopia suggests that, when seen from a Roman perspective, Greek advice looks like ‘nonsense’. But, for More, that ‘nonsense’ yields the ‘best state of a commonwealth’.

Contrary to stereotypes that represent it primarily as an expression of machismo or romantic chivalry, military honour in early modern England was professional, moral, utilitarian, and a force for social stability. It was pragmatic as well as idealistic. It shared attributes of civilian honour but also comprehended rules and obligations specific to soldiers. Professional honour required that the soldier should know and observe the codes and practices of his métier. To do so satisfied his internal sense of personal integrity and brought external reputation. Honour also had a broader social value. Mutuality and utility marked its operation in the English civil war. This mutuality safeguarded practices both sides found useful, such as prisoner exchanges, for the honour of each side was engaged in observance of the relevant rules. The survival of a bipartisan soldiers' honour ameliorated relations between enemies. It helped to prevent irrevocable social divisions, to sustain social order, and to enable previously warring Englishmen to live together with tolerable equanimity.

This article addresses a neglected facet of a familiar political debate, the contribution of Anglican royalist writers to the Engagement controversy. A new interpretation of the core issues at stake in the debate is offered by focusing on these Anglican responses. The work of Quentin Skinner, Margaret Judson, and John Wallace concentrated on the discussion of the duty of obedience to de facto powers. This article contends, however, that it was a debate over the nature of oaths and the lawfulness of taking apparently contradictory sworn promises which was at the heart of the controversy. Writers offered competing interpretations of the bond of oaths and covenants, the supporters of the Rump claiming that they were conditional and dependent for the obligation on circumstantial considerations, the Engagement's opponents claiming that these sworn bonds were non-reciprocal and indissoluble. In this debate both pro- and anti-Engagement authors used casuistic arguments to urge their readers either to take or to refuse the declaration of loyalty to the Commonwealth. Yet, whilst in print Anglicans had counselled against subscribing, in two manuscript cases of conscience they allowed correspondents to take the Engagement.

This article explores the lengthy and convoluted history of a Jacobean project to set the idle poor to work making ‘new draperies’. Although the projector, Walter Morrell, convinced the Cecils, King James, and the privy council of the social and fiscal benefits of his scheme, he failed to persuade the Hertfordshire gentry. This case study in the formulation of crown economic policy, and in ‘Stuart paternalism’, draws upon Morrell's own detailed, unpublished treatise, as well as conventional political sources, and shows how the combination of ‘commonwealth’ rhetoric and progressive economic thinking could sway crown policy-making. It also demonstrates once again the limits of conciliar authority in early Stuart England. In the face of sustained provincial non-compliance, the privy council had neither the machinery nor the stomach to force the Hertfordshire elite to implement government policy and give meaningful support to a government-backed projector. And despite their inability to deal with growing rural unemployment, the Hertfordshire magistrates were unwilling to experiment with rural industry as a solution.

The nationwide campaign to erect railed altars in the 1630s has always been seen as a central feature of the Laudian reformation of the Church. Recently some scholars have denied its close association with Laud and Arminian sacramentalism, and have proposed that the policy originated with Charles I, to be reluctantly endorsed by his archbishop. As for its enforcement, Julian Davies has identified at least five variants which were implemented in the dioceses. This article argues instead that Archbishops Neile and Laud were centrally involved in the introduction of the railed altar, and that they oversaw the imposition of a single altar policy, with only Williams of Lincoln briefly championing a variation on it. Differences did emerge, however, over where communicants should receive, since this had not been prescribed by authority. Charles I, on this reading, was not the driving force for change, although he clearly came to support it.

This article explores changing responses among late Georgian Scots towards Greek history in general and classical Athens in particular. Tracing the early study of Greece through some of the more innovative Scottish Enlightenment scholars, it argues that Periclean Athens long remained a difficult and controversial topic, mainly because eighteenth-century authors found it hard to offer a fully sympathetic treatment of a historical subject strongly associated with radical political democracy. With the defeat of Napoleon, however, and as new ways were sought to celebrate Scotland's own recent imperial, economic, and intellectual achievements, Athenianism gained in credibility, assisted by the rising tide of cultural Hellenism and political Hellenophilia throughout Britain. Plans were laid for a national monument in Edinburgh, modelled on the Athenian Parthenon. Nevertheless, insufficient support was forthcoming and by 1830 the project had stalled. Not least among the causes of this debacle – popularly known as ‘Scotland's Disgrace’ – were the contradictions involved in Athenian symbolism: the abandoned monument ultimately served to represent only the failings of Scotland's tory establishment.

This article examines the influence of a distinct Irish Protestant faction on parliamentarian policy-making in the mid-1640s – the Irish Independents. These men were not merely clients of parliament’s lord lieutenant, Viscount Lisle, but formed a group with consistent personnel and policies, which can be traced back to the ‘Boyle group’ in the Irish council of the 1620s and 1630s. In the 1640s they came into an alliance with the English Independents, based on common hostility to the Presbyterian party, the Scots, and the supporters of Ormond and Inchiquin in Ireland. This coalition was, however, inherently unstable. Faced with equivocation at Westminster, where Ireland had always been low on the list of priorities, from December 1646 the Irish Independents were forced to take charge of parliament’s Irish policy, and many of the initiatives previously attributed to Lisle in 1646–7 can more properly be laid at their door. In conclusion, it is suggested that the Irish Independents represent a radical strain in Irish Protestantism, which supported Ireland’s closer integration into an ‘English Empire’, and which would see its fulfilment in the unionist agenda developed in the 1650s.

This article contributes to the debate over the value of petitions for the recovery of ‘public opinion’ in early modern England. It argues for a greater attentiveness to the politics and processes in their production. An analysis of a hitherto unknown draft Essex ‘prayer book’ petition explores the construction of contrasting royalist and parliamentarian confessional politics. A reading of the content of the petitions offers evidence of the popular response to the Laudian ceremonialism; a reconstruction of the politics of its production provides evidence of the attempt to construct a political alliance in support of the crown around defence of the prayer book; a reconstruction of the occasion for the petition – the capture of the Essex grand jury by the godly and well affected – suggests a very different, and ultimately more successful, confessional parliamentarian politics. In identifying the critical role played by the middling sort – translating their role in the politics of the parish to the politics of the state – the article argues that a marriage of the research strategy of the social historian with the agenda of a ‘new political history’ will help to establish the enlarged social depth to the public sphere in early modern England.

Diplomatic documents which record the relationship between France and the court of the bey of Tunis from the late seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century offer a unique source to understand the way in which cultures with very different assumptions meet and adapt to each other. The ceremonies of submission and reverence had to be adapted to meet European understandings of the state and nation while taking account of Muslim attitudes to infidels. The French Revolution introduced new criteria and new tensions which continued to vex relations into the nineteenth century. This double mirror of ‘Otherness’ raises interesting questions about the nature of culture and how cultures prove to be very flexible in practice. In spite of the dichotomization of the Others as strangers, there was agreement on common norms governing social situations where actors effectively interacted.

This article looks at one of the less frequently examined contests in the parliamentary borough of Westminster – the election of 1796, in which Charles James Fox, Admiral Allan Gardner, and John Horne Tooke vied for the borough's two seats. This election offers an opportunity to investigate the patriotic discourses, representational strategies, and styles of political leadership available to loyalism and popular radicalism in the early years of the war with Revolutionary France. The period of the election spanned the second anniversary of Admiral Richard Howe's victory of 1 June 1794, creating significant opportunities for links to be made between Gardner's naval position and the necessity of electing a loyalist candidate. The article investigates electoral politics with an eye towards reconstructing some important features of Westminster political culture in the 1790s. While Gardner's electoral posture is revealed to depend on a series of stereotypes operating around the image of the ‘political’ admiral, Tooke's is shown to have been heavily informed by his philological studies. Given the long history of admirals serving as MPs for Westminster and the persistent presence of naval officers as members of parliament between 1790 and 1820, the article concludes by suggesting that political admiralship played a role in the development of nineteenth-century styles of political candidacy and leadership.

Andrew Marvell's famous polemical pamphlets against Samuel Parker, the two parts of The rehearsal transpros'd, are packed with references and allusions to other books, some very esoteric. We think we have discovered where Marvell did his reading – in the library of Arthur Annesley, first earl of Anglesey, who also protected Marvell and his bookseller from the licenser and the Stationers' Company. In this, he collaborated with the earl of Shaftesbury, the then Lord Chancellor. The implications of these discoveries go well beyond even the new bibliography, suggesting that Marvell wrote his responses to Parker under the patronage of Anglesey, and that his connections with Shaftesbury began earlier than supposed; but they also show us how one efficient and intelligent reader responded to the task of detailed controversy, by doing focused and rapid research. Would that our own had equally witty results!

This article argues that the development of teaching as a profession for women in England has often been written using an anachronistic and gendered conception of the term ‘profession’. A closer examination of the work of middle-class schoolmistresses in the first part of the nineteenth century reveals that the image of the amateurish governess was in part a fiction, which concealed the commitment and expertise of many women teachers. The mid-century reformers drew on this earlier tradition of feminine pedagogy and did not simply adopt the standards of boys’ education and their male peers. On the contrary, they contributed to the ongoing process by which teachers of both sexes sought to claim the status and authority of the ‘learned professions’. However, by the 1870s, the pressure to conform to the dominant model in boys’ education meant that this independent strand in education had largely been eclipsed.

The article examines the use of seditious libel and blasphemy as instruments of control during the era of Tory hegemony. It argues that the law of libel was a formidable instrument of repression, but one which was all but abandoned by the legal authorities because it proved to be too unreliable. On the one hand, it placed the writers and vendors of radical literature under the constant threat of prosecution. They could be perpetually threatened by ex-officio informations; they paid all legal costs accruing from their cases; and, if put to trial, they often faced a hostile judge and a packed jury. On the other hand, a great deal of arguably seditious literature circulated freely because the Home Office lacked the institutional means to embark on a policy of wholesale prosecution; enforcement of the libel laws was scattershot at best; and defendants ultimately managed to undermine the government's prosecutorial strategy by exploiting the flexibility of language to win acquittal in some well-publicized cases. Thus the profound uncertainty of libel proceedings made them double-edged weapons which often damaged the government and the accused at the same time.