Notices of Records, Texts, and Reference Works, mainly of 2014
The following section provides short descriptive accounts of published volumes of edited primary sources, texts, calendars, translations and other works of reference which have been received by the editors. These are items which do not always lend themselves to full critical review, but are nonetheless significant scholarly works likely to be of considerable interest to practising historians, students, and other readers of English Historical Review.
Quelle: http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/130/547/1623?rss=1
Ideology, Careerism and Civic Consciousness: The Crusade against Basel, 1482-1485
The abstract for your paper is included below. This will appear online only. In December 1482 Pope Sixtus IV gave his legate Angelo Geraldini the faculty to preach a crusade against the people of Basel for refusing to hand over the person of the Croatian Dominican Andrija Jamometić, whose appeal for a council had plunged Sixtus’s reign into crisis. This essay compares the various threads of thought and action which prompted the Pope to resort to the crusade and led Geraldini to make use of the faculty. It is argued that Jamometić’s rebellion was probably triggered by his acute discontent with the way Sixtus had managed the crusade against the Turks, most recently his duplicitous response to their landing at Otranto. A combination of triumphalist emphasis on papal authority and anxiety about a revival of conciliarism caused Sixtus to include crusade as one of the options given to Geraldini. The legate faced resistance at Basel but he was also frustrated by Sixtus’s practice of dispersing his delegated authority among a number of agents in the field; using the crusade faculty became the only way that Geraldini could assert his primacy and advance his own prospects. Basel’s opposition stemmed in part from the awareness of its ruling elite that Frederick III would have to shield it from the Pope and his agents in order to defend dynastic and imperial interests in south-western Germany. But it also sprang from growing coolness towards Rome, and this was evidenced by the undemanding terms imposed on Basel as the price for its readmission to the Catholic community in 1485.
Quelle: http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/130/547/1392?rss=1
Taxation riots and the culture of popular protest in Ireland, 1714-1740
This article explores the connection that existed between government attempts to increase taxation yields in Ireland during the 1720s and 1730s and the rise in the number of violent protests. It challenges the generally-held view that rural popular violence was uncommon in early eighteenth-century Ireland. The first part of the article examines government measures to tackle illicit trade and challenge corrupt revenue officers. The extra revenue gained by these measures was used to pay for 12,000 British soldiers on the Irish establishment and a network of new barracks in Ireland. The article assesses the impact that the tax-raising measures had, not just on the ability of tax collectors to gather revenue but also on the relationships that existed between law enforcers and the public, and more generally rulers and the ruled. A study of reported cases of ‘riot and rescue’, which have been extracted from newspapers and the relatively under-used revenue commissioners’ minute books, explains more fully the causes, composition and character of resistance to taxation. Other aspects of taxation riots and government responses to the disorder are also explored. The restrained nature of the violence between rioters and law enforcers and the popular antipathy to informers points to a moral compass being used during conflict, on both sides. Finally, an examination of the nature of violence also helps to define the limits of the power of authorities and of mobs in early eighteenth-century Ireland.
Quelle: http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/130/547/1418?rss=1
Alice Perrers and the Goldsmiths Mistery: New Evidence Concerning the Identity of the Mistress of Edward III
In the last ten years, Mark Ormrod has published two articles in which he revealed the discovery of new evidence regarding the origins of Alice Perrers, the notorious mistress of Edward III during the final years of his life. From this research two new facts emerged: first, that Alice had a brother named John Salisbury, and second, that before her relationship with the king she was married to a man named Janyn Perrers. However, many questions remained unanswered. This article now reveals further discoveries from the collections of the London Metropolitan Archives and the Goldsmiths’ Company, which shed new light on the identities of John and Janyn and the wider questions surrounding Alice’s birth and early life. Through a detailed study of Alice’s later life, it examines the consequences of these findings in terms of Alice’s relationship with the king, her commercial activity and property acquisitions, ultimately establishing a clear context for the behaviour for which she would be condemned as the mistress of Edward III.
Quelle: http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/130/547/1361?rss=1
‚The Curse of the Co-ops: Co-operation, the Mass Press and the Market in Interwar Britain
Though it continues to be neglected by historians, the British Co-operative movement had 6.5 million members in the early 1930s. The movement’s phenomenal success inevitably brought it into conflict with both private capitalists and government, who sought to contain co-operators’ ambitions. The movement’s ideologues proclaimed that the great lesson of the Depression was that markets ought to be regulated by the democratic will of the people and that co-operative success proved that this was both practicable and possible. This article assesses the threat that co-operation posed to economic and business elites in this period, highlighting particularly co-operators’ critique of the myth of the ‘free’ market and their fears concerning the rapid post-war growth of combines and syndicates. It explores co-operators’ thwarted attempt to regulate markets in the interest of working-class shoppers by means of the Consumers’ Council Bill after 1929 and then goes on to discuss the ‘penal’ taxation imposed on the Co-operative movement as a kind of disciplinary measure by the National Government in 1933. The role of the mass-circulation press provides a vital thread in the story throughout, for the anti-co-operative ‘crusade’ was fervently taken up by the press barons, Lord Beaverbrook and Lord Rothermere, who used all the powers at their disposal to try to extinguish the largest democratic movement of consumers Britain had ever had.
Quelle: http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/130/547/1479?rss=1