Throughout the nineteenth century, auto-eroticism was viewed as a great evil, a threat to the individual and to society. At one time or another, nearly every disease which nineteenth-century doctors could not cure was blamed on self-abuse. Summing up the relationship between masturbation and illness, French doctor Eugene Beckland wrote in 1842, “Many physicians of high authority have maintained that two-thirds of the diseases to which the human race is liable have had their origins in certain solitary practices ….” As to the impact of masturbation on society, Dr. Révéillé Parisé observed in 1828,

Since 1953, when René Spitz published his important article on the subject, a number of scholars have tried to explain the intense concern with masturbation in the nineteenth century. Spitz argued that the heightened interest in self-abuse reflected the shift to Protestant culture with its emphasis on individual responsibility for sin. More recently, John and Robin Haller used similar arguments to explain it. Other writers such as E. H. Hare and Edward Shorter have argued that one reason why fear of masturbation increased was that people began indulging in the solitary vice to a greater extent than ever before. Men and women were masturbating more—and if they read medical journals on the subject—enjoying it less. Hare speculated that this was because of fear of venereal disease caused by intercourse, a great concern in the nineteenth century. Masturbation was safer. Shorter, who saw masturbation as part of a general increase in sexual appetite, asserted that it was “unlikely that masturbation … was practiced on a wide scale before the premarital sexual revolution.” It is not likely that historians will uncover reliable data on incidence of self-abuse to prove or disprove this hypothesis.

This article discusses the impact of declining British power and increasing Commonwealth immigration on religion in England after the Second World War. It argues that a diminishing sense of Britain's greatness undermined the belief that England was a Christian nation, a belief common among Britain's elites, especially members of the Conservative party, and one that had long undergirded Christian faith and practice in the country. The language of Christian nationhood became toxic as it became associated with unpopular white settler governments in southern Africa. Moreover, the debates over the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act show how the migration of non-Christian religious groups to England had created a situation in which those who wished to continue to speak of the country as Christian would be accused of racism, a charge with fresh bite at that time. The article argues that international contexts deserve greater attention in the study of religious change.

The most important contribution made by Archbishop James Ussher to the ecclesiastical developments of the Interregnum and Restoration periods was his short tract The Reduction of Episcopacy Unto the Form of Synodical Government. Printed only after his death in 1656, its combination of ministerial synods with episcopal rule was seen as a basis for presbyterian-episcopal reconciliation over the next three decades. The tract was printed in five editions during the later 1650s, and came out in two more editions in 1679, when the Popish Plot and the calling of a new Parliament revived hopes that dissenters could be comprehended within the Church of England. It was printed once more in 1689, in Edinburgh, when “comprehension” was again being hotly debated in both England and Scotland. By that time Ussher's name had come to symbolize such “limited” or “primitive” episcopacy, and indeed it has continued to do so among twentieth-century historians.

The fame of the Reduction rests upon its content and authorship. Although the tract was only one of many such compromises offered during the Interregnum, it was the most radical to come from the royalist and Anglican side during that period. Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of all Ireland, Ussher was admired and respected by radical puritans and major Laudian spokesmen such as Henry Hammond and Bishop John Bramhall. The power of Ussher's name in this context was shown in 1685, when the nonconformist divine and politician Richard Baxter was on trial for allegedly making a printed attack against the king and the bishops. When Baxter's attorney, Sir Henry Pollexfen, sought to introduce as evidence one of Baxter's own printed compromises between episcopal and presbyterian government, Lord Chief Justice George Jeffreys replied, “I will see none of his books; it is for primitive Episcopacy, I will warrant you — a bishop in every parish.” In replying “Nay, my lord, it is the same with Archbishop Usher's,” Pollexfen indicated both the radical nature of the Reduction and the legitimacy that Ussher's name lent to other compromises of this kind.

Contemporary society has discovered—or in some cases been forced to discover—the worth of women. Historians have provided valuable insights into the social, cultural, and legal status of women in an effort to highlight the roots of attitudes that have excluded women from positions of power in the western world. Much of this research has focused upon new ways of viewing history, and the fine series of monographs Women in Culture and Society being published by the University of Chicago Press provides a prime example of the new awareness of the distaff side of history. Yet, little attention has been paid to some of the most basic assumptions of past generations of medieval historians about women and society. The claim that male chauvinist attitudes are founded in the primative Germanic concept of a warrior fraternity from which women were physiologically excluded from membership was already hoary when Fritz Kern published his classic account of medieval law and society in 1914. The comitatus band of Tacitus has been seen as a central component of the leitmotiv that produced chivalry. The chivalric love ethic has, of course, received great attention from women's historians, but the chivalric orders into which such views were distilled have been largely ignored.

The traditional view of the chivalric orders as fossilized parodies of the values they espoused so eloquently advocated by Johan Huizinga's The Waning of the Middle Ages still holds the field. Only in the last year have the chivalric orders been rehabilitated as genuine expressions of the human values of their age. The position of women within the tradition of the chivalric orders is worth a look for the intrinsic interest of the subject and for the insights that the investigation provides into the shifts in attitudes toward females over the centuries. The chivalric orders, and the Arthurian legends that inspired them, placed a high value on women, much higher than the earlier chansons de geste. While it is true that this tradition tended to place the lady upon a pedestal from which her daughters have fought to climb down, the greatest and longest lasting of these late-medieval chivalric fraternities, the Order of the Garter, also gave women a role in its celebrations.

Using a unique source on offenders' place of birth, in combination with trial reports and newspapers, this article offers the first systematic analysis of how the Irish were treated by the English criminal justice system when they came as witnesses, prosecutors and accused. Although the Irish were massively over-represented amongst the accused, in the vast majority of Old Bailey cases – i.e. those involving property crime – they were no more likely to be convicted than other groups and overall the sentences they received were slightly less severe. However, doubts about their evidence and their reputation for violence meant that they were less successful as prosecutors and were more heavily punished when they were accused of violent offences. Thus the Irish were on the receiving end of both justice and prejudice and their treatment was intimately linked to contemporary English discourses about the Irish.

Art historians and cultural historians have noted what appears to be a puzzle in eighteenth-century history, a puzzle which emerges from an apparent conflict of the following trend: as English country houses became more and more classical, the gardens around them became less so. That is, as architecture progressively conformed to the principles of universal order and mathematical geometry embodied in the Palladian ideal, gardens seemed to repudiate those same principles, embracing irregularity and particularity. Another apparently contradictory trend is noteworthy: as country houses became smaller through the eighteenth century, the gardens around them became larger. By the later eighteenth century people of means seem to have preferred smallish houses in acres of parkland, rather than enormous houses in small, formal gardens.

There are two possible ways of approaching this problem. The first is simply to ignore the contradiction and accept the houses and gardens as products of separate traditions. Most art historians have done this, fitting the houses and gardens respectively into the classical and romantic traditions. The houses are said to be classical in style because they were intended to appeal to the reasoning faculties of the Enlightenment mind, while the gardens are called romantic because they were designed to appeal principally to the subjective and non-rational faculties, the senses and the emotions. The puzzle of classical houses in romantic gardens simply does not arise when an author such as Hussey, for example, examines the history of gardens, or when Summerson writes about the classical country house.

It seems impossible to begin an article these days without invoking, either as saint or devil, the shade of Sir Lewis Namier. Those who inhabit regions remote from the classic years around 1760 are absolved from acquiring more than a general understanding of the reversionary interest, the Court and Treasury party, and the rest of the Namierite stock in trade. Yet the merits and limitations of the methodology must concern and fascinate scholars who reassess the traditional interpretations of other periods of English history. They should not, as the Master of Peterhouse has warned, swallow the Namier method whole. But used with due caution, it may offer valuable insights for other centuries besides the eighteenth. The rigorous compilation and analysis of biographical data, the penetration of ideological smokescreens to the deeper motives behind them, the ruthless discarding of outworn shibboleths like “party,” the careful use of sociological criteria: at their best the Namierites have much to offer historians of other periods. Sir John Neale has applied the method, with modifications, to the reign of Elizabeth I, Norman Gash has carried it into the age of Peel, while the authentic members of the school proceed with their task of cleaning up the eighteenth century.

The winds of Namierite change have begun to blow only fitfully, however, in the seventeenth century. One reason for this, perhaps, is that historians of the Stuart period have generally been absorbed in destroying each other on the gentry battlefield, or attempting in more constructive ways to solve the politico-economic problems of the “Century of Revolution”; there has been less effort applied to the details of parliamentary affairs.

Calls for a renewed sense of “good citizenship” in the early twentieth century were loud and persistent. Especially important in the citizenship quest was the creation of healthy and efficient children, cured of urban maladies and loyal to a wide notion of community. Such attributes were seen as vital in an economically and militarily competitive world. Historians have already examined the sorts of political and bodily education that arose from these concerns. This article instead looks at how the focus on the body and citizenship was realized in the actual processes of school building. From the medical discourses that underpinned the design of heating, lighting, and ventilation systems, to the emerging focus on the sensory environment of the classroom, the materiality of the school was essential to creating the “good citizen”—physically fit, economically productive, and loyal to the nation.

The British Liberal Party underwent a succession of crises in the years 1886-1905 which nearly destroyed it as a coherent political entity. Perhaps the most critical divisions in the 1890s were those concerning the leadership struggle, so well described by Peter Stansky in his Ambitions and Strategies, and the search for a domestic policy which would qualify the party as the major force for reform in the face of the emerging Labour alternative. But both of these problems and the divisions which stemmed from them were linked with the perennial and highly visible divisions over foreign and imperial policy. Stansky has shown how the imperial question was tied to the Harcourt-Rosebery struggle for the leadership in succession to Gladstone and how concentration on this issue detracted from attention to the more pressing question of finding a viable and attractive domestic program. Jeffrey Butler, Bernard Semmel, and Bernard Porter have illustrated other aspects of the problem of imperial policy.

Historians have long recognized the seriousness of the crisis in the party during the Boer War, when divisions of opinion concerning the war and general imperial policy were formalized in competing organizations, and Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman fought a frustrating campaign to consolidate his leadership and maintain the party as a functioning unit. Most of the attention, however, has centered on the leaders of the party and on the organization — the Liberal League, which grew out of the Imperial Liberal Council in 1902 — which represented the Liberal Imperialist wing inspired by Lord Rosebery.

Marriage, for the nineteenth-century woman, was perhaps the single most profound and far-reaching institution that would affect the course of her life. For the woman who did not marry, whether by choice or by chance, spinsterhood marked her as one of society's unfortunates, cast aside from the common lot of the sex. For the woman who did enter wedlock, marriage spelled, simultaneously, a loss of freedom in both political and financial matters, perhaps domestic drudgery and frequent pregnancy, but undoubtedly a clear elevation in social status. Class position aside, marriage had a far greater effect on the lives of women than of men, and the pressures for women to marry were correspondingly far greater than those brought to bear upon men.

The meaning and significance of marriage in Victorian England represented a central pressure point in the lives of all women. It was undoubtedly one of the major agencies of socialization to which women were exposed; the pressures it imposed were enormously persuasive and difficult to resist. Family expectation and even self-esteem competed with the public assessment of women on the basis of their marital status. For women, marriage and its effects permeated every aspect of their daily existence and shifted the focus of their emotional and social contacts—what Patricia Jalland has dubbed their “bedroom-bathroom intimacy”—from their own families to those of their husbands.

The growing demographic imbalance between the sexes during the course of the nineteenth century was viewed with alarm by contemporary commentators who feared that the changing ratio of men to women would increase the numbers of unmarried women.

Men and women who wish to uphold the interests of the textile trade should “make fashion follow the trade, and not trade the fashion,” declared Daniel Defoe in 1705. But long before this time the East India Company had discovered that the exploitation of fashion for profit is a more artful business than a mere dictatorship exercised by the “trade.” After 1660 the Company's policy regarding the import of cotton textiles was particularly concerned to influence the type and design of goods produced in India to make them serve current English needs and trends in taste. Striking success was achieved by the end of the century, but thereafter the flow of cotton manufactures was impeded by serious difficulties, chiefly the restrictions imposed on the trade by prohibition acts in 1701 and 1721, together with the competitive development of domestic calico-printing.

The English had of course been familiar with cotton for several centuries before 1660, although the acquaintance brought little opportunity to build up technological skill in the processing of pure cotton goods from the raw state to the finished piece. Imports had included raw “cotton-wool” from the Levant for use in stuffing and quilting and fustians of European manufacture containing cotton. But probably it was not until the sixteenth century that a cotton weft was used in the production of domestic fustians, and not until the seventeenth that cotton was brought into linen and smallwares manufacturing. The early history of pure cotton fabrics in England is debatable ground, partly because of confusing terminology; so-called “cottons,” for instance, were produced in England before 1660, but the term is descriptive of the finishing process, or “cottoning,” rather than of content.

In recent years a great deal of scholarly energy has been expended in attempts to identify differing religious parties and movements in Elizabethan and early Stuart England. On the one hand, J.F.H. New has described the actions of Anglicans and Puritans as “teleological acts – attempts to make practice conform to preconceived philosophies.” He believes that Anglican and Puritan doctrines derived from quite different conceptions of human moral capacity, conceptions which were distinct from their sixteenth-century origins and which grew more so as time passed. On the other hand, Charles and Katherine George have insisted that we can at best talk about minor differences of emphasis and of degree within a doctrinally unified “English Protestant mind” before 1640. There were, so this thesis goes, no really significant Anglican-Puritan ideological distinctions, and therefore religious differences had nothing to do with the coming of the English Civil War. The effect of these efforts has been to make historians aware that defining the terms “Anglican” and “Puritan” is a much more difficult enterprise than used to be thought. Despite the Georges' book, the terms are still being used; but New's argument about their meaning has not gone uncriticized.

It would be impossible in a short article to deal with all of the points raised in this extensive debate. The present purpose is to concentrate upon only two of many points of difference between writers traditionally identified as Anglicans and Puritans by means of their activities, attitudes, and associates.

In his seminal work, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England 1500-1800, Lawrence Stone cites legal change as part of the evidence for his claim that a new sort of family marked the eighteenth century. Property law especially is pointed to as proof that the patriarchal family had given way to what has come to be known as the affective family. It was, of course, natural to seek a basis in law for a theory of family development. Law at any time tells us much about family life. It is certainly fundamental to changes that are said to mark the affective family. Because of an increase in affect (or in another word, love) it is claimed that the new family type saw an increase in the independence of children, and an increase in the status and property of women. Indeed, recognizing the importance of law, Stone has found each of his three stages in family history to be paralleled in property law. The discussion of law does not occupy much space; but it occupies strategic space. Law is the first, or almost the first, thing discussed in each of the stages of the family. The legal arrangements governing property are not just a part of the evidence for the theory; they are a most important part. They can be seen to provide the framework, the hard structure, on which the theory is built. “The hardest evidence”—Stone's words—for the great change he sees in the eighteenth century he finds in law.