This article examines the exodus down the Rhine in 1816 and 1817 of tens of thousands of German migrants, who attempted to reach the United States after the Napoleonic Wars. It establishes the episode as an important link between the mass-migration periods of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which saw more Germans land in North America than any other European group. The article focuses on the active commercial, logistical, social, and religious networks, produced in the eighteenth century, which made the exodus possible, and how it in turn changed future migration patterns. This integrates the exodus into an evolving German Atlantic movement, where previous historiography has treated it as an isolated episode, produced by extraordinary post-war conditions.

Historians have in recent years used several approaches to explain the first Reform Act. Michael Brock's elegant account sets the whole Reform crisis in its political context. D. C. Moore has attempted a ‘sociological’ explanation of ministers’ intentions, while John Milton-Smith has offered a more traditional analysis of their private papers. This emphasis on the men who framed and steered the measure through parliament perhaps obscures the role of the ordinary members in whose hands its fate rested. Like the ministers, the backbenchers also suffered intense periods of indecision, soul-searching and calculation based on a confused mixture of pragmatism and principle. This is especially true of the moderates, the men of the parliamentary centre, who provided the vital votes for the government's hair-breadth majority on the second reading in February 1831, but who deserted them to support General Gascoyne's motion a few days later. Only fifteen M.P.s voted both for the Bill and for Gascoyne's motion, thus locating themselves - at least temporarily - at the very centre of the political spectrum.

The causes and consequences of the quarrels between Louis XV and the parlements in the third quarter of the eighteenth century continue to provoke a lively debate amongst historians. In France, the traditional thesis of a reforming monarchy confronted by the selfish obstructionism of the judiciary has many adherents. However, few Anglo-American scholars favour such an interpretation and some have gone as far as to reject the existence of a crisis altogether. Research is also concentrated upon the consequences of these disputes, and their importance to the development not only of parlementaire constitutionalism, but even of a new political culture. In order to contest these conflicting interpretations, this article takes afresh look at the Besançon affair of 1757–1761. In one of the most heated political battles of the reign, thirty judges were exiled from the parlements of Besançon, provoking a lively response from the other parlements, headed by that of Paris. By examining the origins of the dispute in Franche-Comté, and the subsequent reaction of both the government and the Parisian magistrates, this article offers a new picture of the causes of crisis and of how judicial politics actually worked.

Recent work on the Enlightenment continues to bear out the importance of context in shaping both what is written and how it is read. In the case of the French Revolution, largely thanks to the work of Robert Darnton, studies have come to focus on how, if at all, different layers and styles of dissidence helped to bring down the French monarchy. But not all writing has, or need be suspected of, such an obvious or immediate outcome. This period, for instance, sees the birth of ‘philosophical’ history, as John Pocock and others have made us aware. Here again, contexts and individual experience shape what is studied and written, but it is clear that the project common to the best-selling work of, for instance, Gibbon, Hume and Robertson was to explain how civil society emerged and thrived. This inquiry, and what it says about the separate states and common principles of Europe then and now, is unfinished business; so, too, is determining what historical knowing is, and cannot be. What the eighteenth century undeniably saw, even from the slightly educated, was a growing appetite for understanding and for improvement: these have proved necessary, if not sufficient, conditions for modernity.

It has been said that the Civil War was won by committees. Recent writers on this subject have begun to show how parliamentary policy and its execution was forged in the committee chambers rather than on the crowded floor of the House of Commons. This article is concerned with the personnel of these committees, in particular with those men who were not famous for their political activities and attitudes. Obviously, a core of leaders was needed in order to direct the business of the committees, to give continuity to their proceedings and to ensure that their work was in accord with the policy of the Commons. But the political ‘parties’ were relatively small, and with all the enthusiasm in the world their members could not attend personally to all aspects of government, civil and military. This study is concerned with the men who had no known political views but who contributed a great deal of time and effort to the running of parliamentary affairs. Because of their relative obscurity in the House it will be useful to ask why they were chosen to serve on certain committees, how their background and activity compared with that of their more ‘political’ colleagues, and how they reacted to situations where they were required to take a political stand. Above all, it will be possible to judge whether these men formed a coherent group rather than a random collection of individuals. These men owed their positions to their administrative skill rather than to their political affiliations. As administrators they were responsible to the legislature, and during a time of intensified state intervention, they became analogous to a non-political civil service, ready to execute the policy decisions of the party leaders.

Counter-revolution: the second Civil War and its origins, 1646–48. By Robert Ashton. London: Yale University Press, 1994. Pp. xxi+521. £35.

Sir Matthew Hale 1609–76. By Alan Cromartie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp. x+264. £40.

The old service: royalist regimental colonels and the English Civil War, 1642–46. By P. R. Newman. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994. Pp. ix+324. £40.

Constitutional royalism and the search for settlement, c. 1640–1649. By David L. Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. xvi+371. £35.

Loyalty and locality: popular allegiance in Devon during the English Civil War. By Mark Stoyle. Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1994. Pp. xvi+330. £30.

Of all the professions none has proved more resistant to the inclusion of women than the Christian ministry; no branch of the church stemming from the Reformation has been firmer in asserting the ‘disability of sex’ for ordained ministers than has the Church of England. The contemporary struggle to open the priesthood to women is the latest phase in a long movement of church feminism which permeated the Church of England from the very last years of Victoria's reign, a movement which, by 1930, had succeeded in considerably increasing women's influence and even ministry in the English Establishment although it had failed in its more radical aims. As they battled for the right to vote for (and sit on) elective church councils, as they sought equality of ministry with male laity, as they searched for vocationally fulfilling modes of pastoral care and evangelism which respected the ban against ordination, and as they assaulted that ban itself, able and ambitious church feminists have been continually frustrated by sexist prejudice, clerical exclusiveness, and entrenched religious tradition.