Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 

About: Transactions of the Royal Historical Society is an academic journal published by Cambridge University Press. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Politics & Empire. It has an ISSN identifier of 0080-4401. Over the lifetime, 1088 publications have been published receiving 15411 citations. The journal is also known as: Royal Historical Society transactions & Transactions of the Historical Society.

The Oculus Sacerdotis and Some Other Works of William of Pagula

Abstract: One of the results of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 was a heightening of interest in the cure of souls, and the years that followed the Council saw a generous effort on the part of prelates to provide, in accordance with the Lateran directives, a better–educated clergy who could bring the laity to a reasonable understanding of the essentials of Christian belief and practice. In England, during the reign of Henry III, nearly every diocese contributed to the movement for reform, chiefly by statutes modelled upon or deriving from decrees of Innocent III's great council. The Council of Oxford in 1222, the Council and Constitutions of the Legate Otto at London in 1237 and of the Legate Ottobono at London in 1268, catered in varying degrees for the Church in England as a whole.

Against ‘Englishness’: English Culture and the Limits to Rural Nostalgia, 1850–1940

Abstract: OVER the last fifteen years, a substantial literature has welled up, practically from nowhere, purporting to anatomise ‘Englishness’. ‘Englishness’, this literature suggests, is not a true estimate of national character, an enduring national essence, but rather a historical construct that was developed towards the end of the nineteenth century by the ‘dominant classes’ in British society in order to tame or thwart the tendencies of their day towards modernism, urbanism and democracy that might otherwise have overwhelmed elite culture. These aspirations for social control determined the lineaments of the new ‘Englishness’. Nostalgic, deferential and rural, ‘Englishness’ identified the squire-archical village of Southern or ‘Deep’ England as the template on which the national character had been formed and thus the ideal towards which it must inevitably return. Purveyed by the ‘dominant classes’ to the wider culture by means of a potent array of educational and political instruments—ranging from the magazine Country Life to the folk-song fad to the National Trust to Stanley Baldwin's radio broadcasts—‘Englishness’ reversed the modernising thrust of the Indus-trial Revolution and has condemned late twentieth-century Britain to economic decline, cultural stagnation and social division.

Commerce in the Dark Ages: A Critique of the Evidence

Abstract: When Pirenne contributed an article entitled ‘Mahomet et Charlemagne’ to the first issue of the Revue Belge de Philologie et d'Histoire in 1922, he can have little realized how the ideas he there put forward were to be developed. His paper was designed as a protest against the traditional and deep-rooted conviction of western scholars that Latin Christendom was the direct and almost the sole heir of classical antiquity. Its argument was the now familiar one that Greco-Roman society survived with little change the shock of the Germanic invasions, and that it was only the appearance of Islam upon the scene that pushed the centre of Latin Christendom away from the Mediterranean and made possible the emergence of a new cultural unit based upon the land mass of western Europe. Medieval Christendom was not a continuation of the Roman world but something new, and Muhammed was a necessary precursor of Charlemagne

The Uses of Literacy in Anglo-Saxon England and its Neighbours

Abstract: As the recent lament over falling standards by the Secretary-General of the United Nations reminds us, universal literacy is today considered a necessary feature of civilized society. This may be one reason why the problem of medieval literacy, of a society where the ability to read and write was apparently confined to a clerical elite has so intrigued modern historians. In this paper, I wish to reconsider the extent of lay literacy in England before the Conquest. But first we must be clear what we mean by literacy. The ability to read does not necessarily imply the ability to write. To take only the most famous medieval example, Charlemagne could speak Latin, and enjoy the City of God , but he never learnt to write. What Parkes calls ‘pragmatic literacy’ may extend from the capacity to recognize, if not sign, one's own name, to the ability to write a formal document in Latin. What might be called ‘cultured literacy’ could range from reading free prose in the vernacular to composing Latin in the classical tradition. The more advanced types of pragmatic literacy might well overlap with the more basic cultured levels. But it is obvious that we cannot deduce a widespread ability to read any-thing from the fact that the names of owners or makers were some-times engraved upon Anglo-Saxon coins, weapons or memorials; or a generally high standard of lay culture from the fact that there were documents in the vernacular. If we are to describe early English society as literate in a sense that would satisfy the ancient, or later medieval, historian, we must show that the proportion of laymen able to read at least a vernacular writ or poem was socially, if not statistically, significant.

The Idea of ‘Character’ in Victorian Political Thought

Abstract: When in the summer of 1902 Helen Bosanquet published a book called The Strength of the People she sent a copy to Alfred Marshall. On the face of it, this might seem a rather unpromising thing to have done. Mrs Bosanquet, an active exponent of the Charity Organisation Society's ‘casework’ approach to social problems, had frequently expressed her dissatisfaction with what she regarded as the misleading abstractions of orthodox economics, and in her book she had even ventured a direct criticism of a point in Marshall's Principles. Marshall, then Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge and at the peak of his reputation as the most authoritative exponent of neo-classical economics in Britain, was, to say the least, sensitive to criticism, and he had, moreover, publicly taken issue with the C.O.S. on several previous occasions. But perhaps Mrs Bosanquet knew what she was about after all. In her book she had taken her text from the early nineteenth-century Evangelical Thomas Chalmers on the way in which character determines circumstances rather than vice versa, and, as the historian of the C.O.S. justly remarks, her book ‘is a long sermon on the importance of character in making one family rich and another poor’. Although Marshall can hardly have welcomed the general strictures on economics, he was able to reassure Mrs Bosanquet that ‘in the main’ he agreed with her: ‘I have always held’, he wrote to her, ‘that poverty and pain, disease and death are evils of greatly less importance than they appear, except in so far as they lead to weakness of life and character’.