This article examines the figure of Boudica (or Boadicea), with a specific focus on Thomas Thornycroft's Westminster Bridge statue, and on the work of the seventeenth-century antiquary, Edmund Bolton. By synthesizing historiography which investigates the idea of ‘historical culture’ in the modern and early modern periods, this article attempts to bridge chronological and generic divisions which exist in the study of the history of history. It argues that to fully understand the genealogy of popular historical ideas like Boudica, it is imperative that historians of such subjects take a longue-durée approach that situates individual artists and writers, and the historical-cultural works they produce, within their broader political, cultural, and social contexts while simultaneously viewing these works as part of a long, discursive process by which the past is successively reinterpreted. As a consequence, this article eschews an analysis of Boudica which labels her an ‘imperial icon’ for Victorian Britons, and argues that the relationship between contemporary context and the re-imagined past is not as straightforward as it might initially appear.

Deficit financing, revenue projections and interest rates in Spanish Naples provide the context to reflect upon the exigencies of debt resolution, the illusions of mathematical certainty and the perils of temporizing in political decision-making. ‘Creative accounting’ explores the micro-history of an equation, which provided the mathematical rationale to lower Spanish interest rates to 3·3 per cent and to resolve the controversy over the ‘just’ rate of interest. In an attempt to generate revenues during the Spanish financial crisis of the 1570s that surrounded Philip II's second bankruptcy in Castile, Philip's Castilian accountants devised a proposal to suspend the hearth census in the Kingdom of Naples for fifteen years in exchange for a prepayment at discount. An analysis of the mathematics of the discount schedule raises questions about early modern economic realities. Changes in the significance of figures and quantitative relationships, like changes in the meaning of words, reveal the mental processes used to represent economic fact and to construct solutions to economic difficulties even in the midst of crises.

At the close of World War I two schools of thought about the future conduct of international relations emerged into plain view. On the one hand, the traditionalists presumed that the principles and practices of pre-1914 diplomacy could and should be sustained. This implied a routine of continual competition among the sovereign nation states, the anarchy of which was mitigated only by the collective fear of hegemony by one state (the mechanism of the balance of power) and by a sense of belonging to a common civilization (the old Concert of Europe). Tacitly accepted as the final arbiter of vital questions was the instrument of war. On the other hand, the First World War had provided ample grounds for a swingeing critique of Realpolitik when practised in an age of mass armies and technological warfare.

A court in exile: the Stuarts in France, 1689–1718. By Edward Corp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xvi+386. ISBN 0-521-58462-0. £55.00.

Vienna and Versailles: the courts of Europe's dynastic rivals, 1550–1780. By Jeroen Duindam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xi+349. ISBN 0-521-82262-9. £60.00.

Intrigue and treason: the Tudor court, 1547–1558. By David Loades. Harlow: Pearson, 2004. Pp. x+326. ISBN 0-582-77226-5. £19.99.

Queenship in Europe, 1660–1815: the role of the consort. Edited by Clarissa Campbell Orr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xvii+419. ISBN 0-521-81422-7. £60.00.

Court culture in Dresden: from Renaissance to Baroque. By Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002. Pp. xv+310. ISBN 0-333-98448-X. £47.50.

Over the last three decades, the royal or princely court has become an established feature of the historiographical landscape of early modern Europe. The subject of a forest of monographs and theses, the theme of a plethora of university undergraduate courses, it has even gained an Anglo-American academic society (and accompanying journal) dedicated to ‘court studies’. While the first wave of Anglophone court historians, writing in the 1970s and 1980s, considered it necessary to state explicitly, as David Starkey did in his introduction to the seminal The English court, that the study of the early modern court was a legitimate historical activity, such a stance is no longer necessary. Indeed, few political historians would now omit the court from their narratives, even if their principal focus was directed elsewhere. In The English court, Starkey presented his enterprise, and that of his co-contributors, as part of a broader process of historical revisionism. But, by the late 1990s, court studies had itself become subject to its own internal forces of revisionism. The books reviewed here not only illustrate the diversity of projects undertaken by scholars of the court; they also critique the interpretations and approaches of an earlier generation of court historians.

Were the knowledge of the ablest farmers in the best-cultivated parts of the island collected, - English Agriculture would be found, at this day, to be far advanced towards perfection… In short, the art of agriculture must ever remain imperfect while it is suffered to languish in the memory, and die with the practitioner: RECORD, only, can perpetuate the art; and SYSTEM, alone, render the science comprehensive. William Marshall, The rural economy of Norfolk, 1 (London, 1787), vi–vii.

L'ordine è già stato eseguito: Roma, le Fosse Ardeatine, la memoria. By Alessandro Portelli. Rome: Donzelli, 1999. Pp. vii+448. ISBN 88-7989-457-9. L.50.000.

The battle of Valle Giulia: oral history and the art of dialogue. By A. Portelli. Wisconsin: Wisconsin: University Press, 1997. Pp. xx+354. ISBN 0-299-15374-6. $21.95. [Inc. ‘The massacre at Civitella Val di Chiana (Tuscany, June 29, 1944): Myth and politics, mourning and common sense’, in The Battle of Valle Giulia, by A. Portelli, pp. 140–60.]

Operazione Via Rasella: verità e menzogna: i protagonisti raccontano. By Rosario Bentivegna (in collaboration with Cesare De Simone). Rome: Riuniti, 1996. Pp. 147. ISBN 88-359-4171-7. L.6.900.

La memoria divisa. By Giovanni Contini. Milan: Rizzoli, 1997. Pp. 275. ISBN 88-17-33027-2. L.30.000.

Anatomia di un massacro: controversia sopra una strage tedesca. By Paolo Pezzino. Bologna: Il Mulino, 1997. Pp. 243. ISBN 88-15-06054-5. L.26.000.

Processo Priebke: Le testimonianze, il memoriale. Edited by Cinzia Dal Maso. Rome: Il Mondo, 3 edn., 1996. Pp. 220. ISBN 88-8175-010-4. L.18.000.

Morte a Roma: il massacro delle Fosse Ardeatine. Nuova edizione aggiornata. By Robert Katz. Rome: Riuniti, 1996. Pp. xxiv+257. ISBN 88-359-4057-5. L.6.500.

Dossier Priebke. By Robert Katz. Milan: Rizzoli, 1996. Pp. 176. ISBN 88-17-84503-5. L.24.000.

Le radici e le ali: partigiani a Roma (and video). By Fabio Grimaldi et al. Rome: Manifestolibri, 1996. Pp. 160. ISBN 88-7285-098-3. L.29.900.

Via Rasella: leggenda e realtà della resistenza a Roma. By Aurelio Lepre. Bari: Laterza, 1996. Pp. 87. ISBN 88-420-5026-1. L.9.000.

Via Rasella, cinquant'anni di menzogne. By Pierangelo Maurizio. Rome: Maurizio edizioni, 1996. Pp. 123. L.20.000.

Storia e memoria di un massacro ordinario. Edited by Leonardo Paggi. Rome: Manifestolibri, 1996. Pp. 165. ISBN 88-7285-103-3. L.14.000.

Il linciaggio di Carretta: Roma 1944: violenza politica e ordinaria violenza. By Gabriele Ranzato. Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1997. Pp. 254. ISBN 88-428-0418-5. L.25.000.

I grandi processi. 2. Herbert Kappler. Edited by Wladimiro Settimelli. Rome: L'Unità, 1994. Pp. 191. Supplement with L'Unità.

‘Identity history is not enough’. By Eric Hobsbawm in idem, On history. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1997, pp. 266–77. ISBN 0-297-81915-1. £20.

The facts: what happened? On 23 March 1944, a column of 156 police troops from the Bolzen regiment attached to the German army were marching through the centre of occupied Rome. Between 15.45 and 15.50 a bomb exploded in the narrow street of Via Rasella killing thirty military policemen (three more were to die later) as well as at least two Italian civilians. The bomb had been placed by an official armed Gap partisan unit which had been active in Rome for some months. The German troops responded by firing indiscriminately into the houses on the street and rounding up the residents of Via Rasella. The next day, 335 people were taken to the Fosse Ardeatine Caves just outside the city and shot over a period of four and a half hours.The best account of the massacre remains that of Robert Katz, Death in Rome (London, 1967), Morte a Roma (Rome, 1996). The victims had been taken from various official and unofficial prisons, Via Rasella, and other areas. Only three had already been condemned to death (for partisan activity), 154 were under investigation by the Germany military police, and seventy-five were in custody purely because they were Jewish. Other victims were taken from Regina Coeli (Rome's prison) or selected from those picked up around Via Rasella. The next day (25 March) a German army poster appeared across Rome and in newspapers. It accused ‘criminal elements’ of planting the bomb and added that ‘The German Command … has ordered that for every German killed ten communist-Badoglian criminals will be shot. This order has already been carried out.’

Beethoven the revolutionary is fading from history. Ossified by the Romantic tradition and, under the pressure of recent revision, reconsidered as conservative and prone to power worship, Beethoven's music has been drained of its radical essence. Yet his compositions also evoked the sonic impact of revolution – its aesthetic of natural violence and terrifying sublime – and so created an aural image of revolutionary action. Through stylistic appropriations of Luigi Cherubini and others, Beethoven imported the rhetorical tropes of French revolutionary composition to the more culturally conservative environment of Vienna. But where the music of revolutionary Paris accompanied concerted political action, the Viennese music that echoed its exhortative rhetoric played to audiences that remained politically mute. This inertia was the result of both a Viennese mode of listening that encouraged a solely internalized indulgence in revolution, and a Beethovenian musical rhetoric that both goaded and satisfied latent political radicalism. Far from rallying the public to the figurative barricades, then, the radical content of Beethoven's music actually helped satiate – and thereby stymie – the outward expression of rebellion in Vienna. This article is a bid to reaffirm the revolutionary in Beethoven.

In recent scholarship, the problem of violence has dominated work on the 1641 Irish rebellion. Unfortunately, no scholarship has addressed the means by which victims of the war survived this conflict. This article uses microhistorical evidence from the 1641 depositions for county Cavan to reconstruct the range of possible survival strategies. Philip MacMulmore O'Reilly, a member of the Irish gentry and kinsman to the Cavan rebels, balanced support for the rebellion with attempts to assist endangered Anglo-Protestant settlers. Although deponents questioned O'Reilly's motives, they agreed that he was instrumental in protecting settlers. George Creichton, a Scottish minister and planter, provides a distinctly different example. Despite his religious views and politics, Creichton forged strong ties to neighbouring Irish before the rising. Although in danger, Creichton mobilized a network of friends, kin, and sympathetic neighbours to protect himself and to assist less fortunate Anglo-Protestant neighbours. These two examples reveal the wider existence of early seventeenth-century social relationships that crossed ethnic and religious lines. In the midst of the chaos of 1641, a significant number of settlers benefited from fragmentation in the rebel ranks and often built their survival strategies upon the social relationships that they had forged in more stable times.

This article examines the role which education played in church/state relations during the Occupation. It begins with an evaluation of catholic reactions to the defeat and explains why so many church leaders were quick to blame military collapse on the laïcité of the republican educational system. It then investigates the policies which the church wanted to see pursued in regard to schools and assesses how these were received by the Vichy government. Analysis of these issues reveals that Vichy was not as pro-clerical as is sometimes believed. Although initially sympathetic to church requests, by 1942 the regime had become reluctant to introduce any measure that might provoke religious division. At the same time, the article illustrates that French Catholicism was not a monolithic bloc. Arguments over education served only to intensify divisions already present within the church and soon led to catholic disenchantment with the Vichy regime.

With a formal colour bar on British championships operating until 1948, boxing had long been a site of racial discrimination. The abolition of the sport's colour bar was recognition of the wrongness of racial exclusion and it was followed by a celebration of black fighters as local and national heroes. The sport became a rare space where black men could be spoken about, discussed, and celebrated without primary reference to their colour. However, race was never irrelevant, especially as the number of black boxers rose with wider patterns of migration. Race was thus widely discussed in boxing, although there was rarely open discussion of racism. This absence, along with black successes in the ring, masked deep levels of both structural and interpersonal prejudice. Racial differences remained accepted as common sense by white Britons. Indeed, immigration intensified racism in Britain, changing the perceived position of people of colour from exotic novelties to threats to society. Boxing is thus a reminder of the contradictory dynamics of race. Formal mechanisms of exclusion could be removed, while informal mechanisms intensified. Individuals could be celebrated, while people of colour as a group were looked down upon. Black achievements could simultaneously reinforce ideas of black inferiority.

Tolls were not only fundamental to the operation of early modern English markets, but also had the capacity to generate tensions that belied their seemingly unremarkable role in contemporary economic affairs. Yet, tolls and toll disputes have received little attention in studies of market regulation and have also been neglected in studies of the politics of grain supply and marketing. This article revives tolls as an object of enquiry and suggests that they occupied an ambiguous position within early modern English economic culture. Tolls raised complex questions about how self-interest operated in a society that conceptualized bargaining primarily in communal terms and emphasized the social and moral obligations that should underpin it. While this was arguably true of tolls on all goods, it was especially true of tolls on grain – a commodity that occupied a singular place in contemporary socio-economic relations. By examining how competing parties in toll disputes articulated and sought to defend their interests, and how their respective tactics changed over time, this article sheds new light on the dynamics involved in England’s transition from one way of thinking about economic activity to another.

Not much is generally known about the career of Sir George Sydenham Clarke as first secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence other than his arrival at Whitehall in 1904 and his departure under something of a cloud three years later. Yet Clarke's career is in many respects worthy of study. He can lay strong claim to being the first defence ‘bureaucrat’, and as such his career served to establish a pattern into which his successors had to fit themselves. His activities during his three years of office do much to illuminate the methods by which strategic decisions were reached and demonstrate the obstructions that beset the professional civil servant in such a milieu. The influence of the committee which he served has been the subject of considerable analysis and comment; Clarke's personal disposition helps to explain die remark of one scholar that, for a body occupying its influential position, the CID achieved relatively little.1 Finally, the manner of Clarke's going illustrates the political strength of the navalist lobby and of Sir John Fisher at a crucial time in the making of defence policy.

This article examines the major role that newspapers played in Colombia, as central components of its political system, between 1830 and 1930. After some introductory remarks, the first section offers a general characterization of the Colombian press during the period, underlining its volatile existence, its national significance despite limited readership levels, and its overwhelming political nature in the hands of partisan editors. The second section analyses the political role of the press, by focusing on the crucial electoral functions performed by newspapers in launching candidates and providing them with platforms, serving as party organs, and measuring the amount of public support for candidates and parties. The article also explores the extent to which the press played a wider democratic role in supporting the suffrage, in instructing voters about rights and duties, and, by doing so, in forming an enduring sense of citizenship.

When parliament abolished episcopacy, cathedrals, and the Book of Common Prayer, what was left of the Church of England? Indeed, as contemporaries asked between 1646 and 1660, ‘Where is the Church of England?’ The episcopalian clergy could not agree. Some thought the remaining national framework of parishes and congregations was ‘the Church of England’, though now deformed, and worked within it. Others thought that only those ministers and parish congregations who remained loyal in heart to the church as it had been qualified as ‘the church’: most of them continued to serve a parish church and tried to keep the old practices going. A third category of hard-liners thought ‘the Church of England’ was now restricted to a recusant community that worshipped with the Prayer Book in secret and rejected the new national profession. The fundamental issue was the nature of a church: was it a society of believers, however organized, or a hierarchical institution following rules prescribed by God? The question caused tensions and distrust among the clergy, and the rigorists thought of the rest as time-servers and traitors. Disagreements continued to divide the clergy after the Restoration, and were reflected in attitudes towards concessions to dissenters.

The 1939 Option Agreement between Italy and Germany concerning South Tyrol was the first population transfer agreement in western European history. Its analysis offers a unique opportunity to shift the focus of the historiography on interwar minority questions from eastern to western Europe, thus challenging the lingering view of eastern Europe as a land of endemic ethnic heterogeneity and conflict. Furthermore, the 1939 Option illuminates a form of ‘consistent ambivalence’ that problematizes dominant analytical frameworks concerning the management of ethnic differences. Italian fascists consistently affirmed the inevitable assimilation, and therefore inclusion, of minorities within the Italian nation, but they also deeply distrusted them. As this ambivalent attitude reached a climax in the 1939 Option, in order to understand fascist behaviour during the implementation of the agreement we need to consider the longer history of fascist attempts to homogenize the new provinces. Three features structured these attempts: a belief that the assimilation of these minorities would be inevitable; the absence of means to carry out radical solutions; and a deep-seated distrust of the minorities. Fascist policy during the Option was simultaneously more ambivalent than the current historiography suggests and more consistent with the regime's interwar homogenization policies.

This article examines the origins of the ‘Parry Report’ (1965), the implementation of which led to the massive expansion of Latin American Studies in the United Kingdom. Drawing on material from several archives, the article argues that the Report was the product of a peculiar geopolitical conjuncture – decolonization, the 1959 Cuban Revolution, Britain's rejection from the European Economic Community – that prompted the Foreign Office to convene a group of academics (and selected others) from institutions then in the process of formalizing links with US-based private foundations. It seeks to show how extramural and intramural factors, geopolitics and academic politics, combined to generate an interdisciplinary area study that survived long after the conditions that had given rise to its genesis had disappeared.