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This thesis is an interdisciplinary examination of the place of the Virgin Mary in the English reformations of the sixteenth century. Situated at the crossroads of cultural and social history, it engages with the post-revisionist debate within Reformation studies. It seeks to move post-revisionism forward by suggesting that the versatility and vitality of late medieval Mariology enabled reformers, Catholic and Protestant, to select and reject from a basket of possibilities. Consequently it contends that the fissures that had opened up by the time of the Elizabethan settlement had essentially developed along pre-existing fault lines. The first chapter explores the place of the Virgin in the late medieval context. It examines her theological significance, the way ordinary people related to her and, consequently, how they represented her in English parishes. It argues that the Virgin occupied a position which supported both affective and effective piety. The second chapter considers specific ways in which existing Mariological tropes were unsettled by the critiques of Catholic evangelicals, Renaissance humanists and Lollards. It demonstrates that the Virgin was a fluid symbol and suggests some possible trajectories that may have been followed had it not been for the rupture of the Reformation. It contends that the key focus of those advocating reform was the spiritual integrity of devotees. The third chapter investigates developing evangelical Mariology and the subsequent attempts at magisterial reform under Henry VIII and Edward VI. It explores the impact of iconoclasm on parish piety and the transformation of the Virgin into an ordinary woman. It argues for important continuities in the Protestant re-imagination of the Virgin. The final chapter looks at the policies of Mary Tudor and considers how the Virgin was re-imagined in a restored Catholic context. It contributes to the debate on the nature of Mary’s religious programme and assesses the appropriation of Mariological tropes to endorse England’s first Queen regnant. It contends that the reign’s legacy enabled the Elizabethan settlement to reject aspects of the Virgin as foreign, reshaping English identity.

This thesis examines the complex links between morality and leadership, by using adultery as a window through which to reassess the position of the aristocracy in late Georgian England. It analyses the construction and performance of aristocratic roles, and illustrates how various literary representations played an active part in manipulating public attitudes and creating change. It charts ways in which narratives of adultery were exploited for commercial and political motives, undermining the traditional basis of hereditary power by questioning moral fitness to rule, and ultimately contributing to the fundamental re-imagining of social structure expressed in the 1832 Reform Act. The old ‘aristocratic political history’ is reassessed through the lens of new cultural history by re-integrating literary evidence, to contribute new perspectives on the social and cultural position of the aristocracy. A key argument is that aristocratic roles were constructed over time through the interaction of successive layers of performance in everyday life and literature. This theory is intended as a fresh contribution to wider current debates on how readers interpret and respond to texts, by exploring notions of representation, self-representation and the role of literature in shaping both. The two concepts underpinning this work are the notion of theatre as a metaphor for life in which people enact a variety of roles, and the belief that literature has an active influence on attitudes and behaviours. By focussing on adultery as a social act, it investigates the consequences of infidelity for public life, and its profound implications for the meaning of aristocracy sited within overlapping public and private spheres. It questions stereotypes of aristocratic vice popularised by commercial print culture, and compares these representations with personal narratives. This thesis argues that stories of adultery are significant cultural material artefacts which must be integrated with traditional social and political histories, to provide a full understanding of the performative nature of identity.

A database containing information on over 35,000 coins from sites in southern Britain was established. This was used to investigate chronological and geographical distributions of fourth century Roman coinage in Britain, and the role of coins in archaeological dating. The regularity of finds supports a view of official supply policy as the principal determinant of the coins used, deposited and subsequently recovered. Throughout the fourth century, Britain received supplies of bronze from up to three mints of which one was always the primary source. One or two secondary sources supplemented this, particularly at times of major new issues. The few finds from other mints represent material that arrived through circulation and exchange. The only clear geographical variation Was after 388AD when new issues failed to circulate extensively beyond the towns. Variations between sites are related to differences in coin using and depositing practices. Three groups of sites were recognised: towns and larger settlements, villas and rural buildings, and temples. Differences between these are most apparent after 350AD when circulation and use underwent significant changes in the rural areas. Typical excavations of rural buildings produce few coins, probably representing accidental losses. On some sites casual loss accounts for only a small proportion of the recovered material. Here, votive deposition, rubbish disposal and non-recovery of hoards are the major sources of finds. A study of the stratified material reinforces the need for caution in using coins for dating, and has important implications for the use of coins in archaeological dating. Residuality and lengthy circulation severely limit inferences about the dates of deposition of the contexts in which coins are found. Throughout the fourth century, and probably also earlier, most coins were deposited within a few decades of their issue. Unfortunately for the archaeologist in search of a date for a deposit, examples of primary deposition are greatly outnumbered by residual and re-deposited material.

This thesis proceeds with a number of simple, but bold, contentions: that the work of Roy Fisher and Lee Harwood represents a considerable achievement in British poetry; that its merits have been obscured by the persistence of the Movement orthodoxy which established itself in the 1950s; that it formed part of a still-largely unrecognised poetry renaissance or revival, from 1960 onwards; and that there is a particular, common poetics inherent in their work <which can also be found in the works of some other poets of the " revival" ) . In the first chapter, "The Persistence of the Movement", the dominant tradition in British poetry is examined from the point of view of the claims and work of its major representative anthologies. Chapter 2, "Counter-Movements", is largely an historical account of the British Poetry Revival, supplemented by an examination of the fate of modernism as regards the two schools of poetry; and the presentation of the tenets of a postmodern world view, emphasising the role of indeterminacy and discontinuity. "A Note on Rhyth~' isolates questions of rhythmical indeterminacy and serves to begin to focus upon the works of Fisher and Harwood. The following two chapters are sequential readings of the two poets' works, concentrating on the development of their working poetics. The conclusion relates these poetics, combines them, and suggests a specific poetics which may apply also to other writers discussed in passing in Chapter 2.

Bonds of manrent were familiar and commonplace documents in late-fifteenth and sixteenth century Scottish society. They recorded the obligation of allegiance and service by men to their lords, obligations entered into, with few exceptions, for life, or passed on to their heirs. Some bonds described the obligation in very general terms; most gave a detailed account of what it involved, the main promises being to accompany the lord, to help and support him in all his actions and disputes, to give him counsel when he asked it and keep secret any counsel which he offered, and to warn him of harm and prevent it as for as possible. The making of these bonds was restricted almost entirely to men of power and wealth, the magnates and the lairds; and they brought under the obligation not only the individual but his kin, his friends and his followers. There are some 700 bonds still surviving, the primary source for this thesis, and these are listed in Appendix A. Their name, 'manrent', was the middle Scots form of a rare Anglo-Saxon word 'mannraedan', later 'manred', meaning allegiance or dependences literally, the state of being a man to a lord. The word was therefore etymologically the same as 'homage'; and it was the oath of homage, which by the fifteenth century had lost its binding force and was little used, that manrent replaced. The development of the lord-man relationship from the feudal to the non feudal form, culminating in the widespread use of the bond of manrent after c.1440, is the main theme of the first part of this thesis. There were features of the bonds which would have been familiar in the period of the feudal contract, but there were also changes of emphasis. The main change was that while bonds were sometimes given for land or money, the personal nature of the contract, which to an extont had been lost sight of, was once again paramount. Man no longer gave services primarily for material reward; they gave it for good lordship and protection, and at they normally received in return was a bond of maintenance. The second part of this thesis discusses the reasons why bonds were made and the effect they had. Their main importance lay not in national events but in local affairs. They were used by the magnates to bring under their control men of influence in the localities; for the lairds they offered the advantage of protection against attack, or redress possessions. The forming of large affinities dependent on a magnate whose power was thereby increased has traditionally been regarded as a principal factor in creating disorder and lawlessness in late-Mediaeval Scotland. But it is not axiomatic that the use of magnete power in Scotland was always sinister. On the contrary, one important element in the making of bonds was their place in maintaining law and order. It is clear that there was a strong survival of justice outrith the courts, based on the obligations of kinship; and the bond, as a means of imposing on those who were not of the lord's kin-group the same obligations which bound those who were, had an important place in settling dispute rather than creating it. In general, the nature of Scottish society was such that, while there wars abuses in the practice of bonding,, there was far more that was of positive benefit. And the crown itself, so often regarded as having feared and disliked the making of personal alliances,, in fact saw the advantages of these alliances and encouraged them.

The main argument of this thesis is that racism exists in the National Health Service and that it is experienced by black people as consumers and as employees of that service. The concept 'racism' has been widely used since the early '70s as describing prejudice allied to the power to perpetuate and institutionalise such prejudice, and there is now a growing awareness of the pervasiveness of racism within British society. But that awareness is not reflected in the kinds of reasons given to explain the experiences of Black people in the National Health Service in particular or within British society in general. The aim of this thesis is to evaluate to what extent such explanations conceal the racism experienced by black people in the National Health Service. Our work has revealed that at the consumer level the cultural framework has been extensively employed to explain conditions such as rickets, infant mortality and mental illness among racial minorities. Such explanations coming, as they do, from professional experts claiming to base their pronouncements on scientific objectivity carry considerable weight and thus support racism. They look back from the present to the historical development (or un- or under-development) of peoples and justify what has sedimented to 'common-sense' which all white Britons have about black people in general. We have argued in this thesis that the cultural issue serves as a decoy away from the central issue of black health provision, namely racism. This racism is again reflected very starkly in the response of the NationalHealth Service to sickle cell disease, a specific condition virtually exclusive to black people. Using Liverpool as an area of reflection we have argued that although social, political and economic factors disadvantage working class communities in both incidence of illness and access to health services, black people are even more disadvantaged because of racism. In the field of employment the traditional image of black nurses as 'immigrants' has persisted and is reflected in cultural explanations for their lack of advancement within the profession. We have argued that such nonadvancement as seen in difficulty of access to qualification and poor chances of promotion has a great deal to do with the fact of being black in a racist institution which does not see blacks as having roles in positions of authority and power. Racism here, however, operates through hidden mechanisms which are used to perpetuate discrimination. Our aim in the . section dealing with this area has been to analyse the ways in which such mechanisms work. Our research has revealed that racism at this level remains for the most part covert, operating through the institutional power conferred on persons In positions of authority. Decisions taken by such persons are not subject to open scrutiny, thus black nurses can be disadvantaged through institutional devices which conceal information

This thesis is divided into four chapters which examine the principal areas of British and Italian economic and diplomatic relations in the 1 930s. Chapter One provides an outline history of Britain's financial dealings with Italy from the mid 1920s until 1939, in particular the role of the Bank of England in helping to reform Italy's financial system through, for example, the encouragement of a stable, gold-based Italian currency and the establishment of a respected and independent central bank, the Banca d'Italia. It examines the attitude of British clearing and merchant banks to the financial crisis in Italy immediately prior to the Italian attack on Abyssinia/Ethiopia in 1935, and explains their opposition to the granting of any sizeable loan to Italy. Finally, it details the policies of successive British governments to Italy's financial position, especially prior to, during and after the Italo-Abyssinian war, 193 5-1936. Chapter Two provides an outline history of Italy's important coal trade with Britain up to the early 1930s and charts and explains the loss of Britain's Italian market to Germany and other competitors. It examines the impact of League of Nations sanctions on the coal trade and reveals that this impact has been exaggerated since colliery owners were faced with large Italian debts and long delays in payment and had already begun to lose faith in Italian buyers. Additionally, it demonstrates that the colliery owners' efforts to lift sanctions and recapture the Italian market were weak and ineffectual. Chapter Three confirms that the major oil companies, including the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (later British Petroleum) and Royal Dutch Shell, were operating a global pricefixing and shipping cartel throughout the 1930s. It describes and analyses these companies' commercial activities in Fascist Italy, especially during the period of League sanctions against Italy. It confirms the vital significance of petrol and oil to the Italian economy and war effort and analyses some of the British government's motives in not introducing petrol sanctions. Chapter Four is concerned with British-Italian diplomatic relations mainly during the Abyssinian crisis. It examines the political divisions in the British and Italian governments over how to respond to the international crisis generated by the Italo-Abyssinian war. It demonstrates that the British government helped produce a sanctions policy which gave the appearance of severity when it was, in truth, only a legitimation of an effective commercial and financial embargo which British banks and companies had already imposed. The analysis of British-Italian diplomacy concludes that the Abyssinian crisis could have been handled very differently by Britain and contained both Italian and German aggression

published_or_final_version / Public Administration / Master / Master of Social Sciences

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