Focusing on the period 1940–1942, this thesis investigates the nature of the relationship between the Vichy regime and Jews of French citizenship who found themselves under its control. Despite Vichy’s implication in the Holocaust, this study examines the possibility for convergence, however partial and temporary, between Vichy’s plans for regeneration and Jewish ambitions to participate in the New Order. This investigation aims to explain the seemingly contradictory circumstances in which a French Jew could be at once persecuted under Vichy’s anti-Semitic legislation, and rewarded for the promotion of certain French values by the government’s programme of National Revolution. This unstudied dilemma is explored in this thesis through an examination of French Jewish youth. An analysis of this social category provides a point of entry into the ambivalences of Vichy’s policies. While Vichy enacted legislation in order to marginalise Jewish participation in the national community, the regime was also emphatically in favour of French Jewish youth contributing to the National Revolution. Methodologically this study moves away from the long-established categories of resistance, rescue and persecution. Rather than merely examining Jewish youth’s activities during the establishment of the Vichy regime as a period of formation and preparation for later resistance or rescue activity, this study seeks to investigate the ways in which, from 1940–1942, the Vichy regime and French Jewish youth sought to coexist. This aspect of the war years has almost entirely disappeared from France’s collective memory and from the historiographical debates over Vichy and the Jews.

This thesis investigates legal and political authority in mid-Tudor England, using the operation of the legal system in Oxfordshire and Berkshire in the period from 1540 to 1570 as a case study through which to give context and content to more abstract forms of contemporary political thought. It seeks to address the broad question: how did people experience the civil—as opposed to the criminal—legal system, and what does this tell us about their understanding of authority? In so doing, it aims to shed light on mid-Tudor attitudes towards legality, limited government and the rule of law. The argument of the thesis is built up piece by piece. First, people in the Thames Valley engaged in a remarkable, and increasing, amount of litigation over the period in question, much of which was based on antecedent commercial transactions. Encountering the law, whether in its litigious or transactional forms, was thus a very common social experience. Second, despite their frequent interaction with the legal system, ordinary people perhaps knew less about the technical law than some historians have suggested. Third, even if technical legal knowledge was not widespread among the population, the complicated map of overlapping jurisdictions and rival legal institutions meant that ordinary people nonetheless cultivated a detailed mental map of their legal world. Boundaries mattered because jurisdiction and legal authority mattered. Fourth, partly because of their own lack of detailed technical knowledge, and partly because of the complicated legal landscape which they had to navigate, people sought out legal advice from professional advisers. Fifth, even if people frequently sought out professional legal advice, many people’s experience of the law (and of lawyers) was far more negative than their desire to seek out such advice might suggest. Seen in this light, the social utility of legal institutions was quite separate from their ability to provide an idealised standard of abstract justice.

By May 1945, most major German cities lay in ruins, and a largely demoralised population struggled for subsistence in many areas. National Socialist remnants, Christian faith and communist ideology met in the rubble of the Third Reich. The Protestant and Catholic Churches attempted to ‘re-Christianise’ the Volk and reverse secularisation, while the German communists sought to inspire dynamism for their socialist project in Eastern Germany. This thesis recreates the religious world of Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia in the Soviet zone, 1945-9, and analyses ‘religio-politics’ (the interactions between the secular authorities and the Churches), the affairs of the priesthood/pastorate, and the behaviours, mentalities and emotions of ‘ordinary people’ amongst the pews. After the American withdrawal in July 1945, the Soviet authorities occupied the entirety of Thuringia and Saxony-Anhalt, and they proclaimed a ‘freedom of religion’. The realities of this policy were different in each state, and the resolution or non-resolution of local-level disputes often determined Church and State relations. At the grassroots, though, many people engaged in a latent social revolt against all forms of authority. The Churches’ hopes of ‘re-Christianisation’ in 1945 were dashed by 1949, despite a brief and ultimately superficial ‘revival’. The majority of people did not attend church services regularly, many allegedly practiced ‘immorality’, and refused to adopt ‘Christian neighbourly love’ in helping often-destitute refugees. ‘Re-Christianisation’ also did not incur comprehensive denazification or a unified pastorate, and there was even a continuation of the Third Reich Kirchenkampf in some areas. Christian ideas of guilt for a popular turning from God, much less for Nazism and its crimes, rarely resonated amongst the population and some sections of the pastorate. This mentality encapsulated the popular rejection of authority, whether spiritual or political, that endured up to and beyond the foundation of the German Democratic Republic in October 1949.

This thesis seeks to illuminate a blind spot in the scholarship of the later Cromwellian Protectorate by focusing on an intriguing innovation in the parliamentary constitution of 1657 – the creation of an upper chamber or "Other House". The Other House may have filled the void left vacant by the defunct House of Lords, but it did not necessarily mean that the Protectorate was backsliding its way towards the ancient constitution of King, Lords and Commons. Although many aspects of ceremony and procedure remained exactly the same as its predecessor, its functions were reformulated and its membership was significantly different. The life peers nominated by Oliver Cromwell to sit there were politically, religiously, socially and geographically diverse. Yet, Cromwell's attempt to nominate a chamber that would please all sides ultimately ended up pleasing nobody; instead of bringing definition to the constitutional arrangement, his choices simply muddied the waters further. The resulting mood was one of apathy among civilian Cromwellian MPs in the second session of the second Protectorate Parliament towards both the Other House and the settlement as a whole. More importantly, the Other House was never a bulwark for the military Cromwellians; it did not institutionalise the army's position within the constitution. Although this posed no immediate problem under the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell, it came to the fore following the succession of his conservative-minded son Richard. When the Commons and Protector united behind an anti-military programme in April 1659, the military Cromwellians found themselves outnumbered and outmanoeuvred in the Other House. Unable to protect their interests by constitutional means, the military men turned to their ultimate source of strength – the army. In forcing the Protector to dissolve Parliament, they undermined completely the constitutional arrangement and effectively sealed the end of the Protectorate regime.

The rapid expansion in the size and effectiveness of the British fiscal-military state between 1689 and 1713 has been analysed by historians such as John Brewer and Michael Braddick as the outcome of increasingly impartial, rational and professional bureaucratic administration. Yet recent work on state formation in Britain and Europe has emphasised that effectiveness often arose from practices usually dismissed as inefficient or corrupt. This thesis provides a new paradigm by comparing fiscal-military structures to contemporary commercial enterprises, which functioned by coordinating the efforts of suppliers and buyers. Coordination was achieved in turn through mutual trust, which overcame principal-agent problems and reduced transaction costs. This thesis suggests that by analogy, those polities that could encourage cooperation and mutual trust between autonomous officials, agencies and private contractors enjoyed the greatest success as fiscal-military states. In the mercantile or financial world trust was created through kinship and friendship, as well as common religious, ethnic or national identities, which contained inbuilt informal mechanisms for policing behaviour. This thesis examines the financing and supply of the British army in Ireland and Europe between 1689 and 1713 to conclude that these elements also served to create trust within state structures, and that even political partisanship – normally dismissed as a disruptive, even destructive, influence – generated a community of shared political interests that encouraged trust and improved coordination. It also demonstrates that officials, politicians and financiers constructed politicised networks that interlocked efficiently with each other, permitting the improved coordination of public and private credit, and even informal financial intermediation intended to maintain the liquidity of the army’s fiscal structures. It therefore concludes that the success of the British fiscal-military state during this period was the product of improved informal coordination rather than institutional change and bureaucratic reform, and that political partisanship was integral to this process.

The thesis examines the relationship between reprobation fears and melancholic illness in puritan culture over a period of approximately ninety years. Reprobation formed part of the Calvinist doctrine of double predestination, by which God had chosen a few for salvation (the elect), and many for destruction (the reprobate). When a person came to believe that they were reprobate, this could give rise to symptoms of fear and despair similar to those associated with melancholy (an imbalance of black bile believed to affect the brain). The thesis shows how puritans used explanations based on melancholy in order to explain how otherwise godly people came to doubt their election. The first chapter shows how the Calvinist physician, Timothy Bright, incorporated ideas from medieval scholastic and medical texts into his Treatise of melancholie (1586), in order to explain how physiological causes could be at the root of reprobation fears. The second and third chapters examine the religious context in which Bright was writing. The second chapter shows puritan ambivalence about pronouncing a person to be reprobate through an examination of responses to the death of the apostate, Francesco Spiera. The third chapter shows how the Elizabethan puritan clergy developed a form of consolation for those suffering from despair of salvation based on the medieval idea that melancholy was the ‘devil’s bath’. The fourth and fifth chapters show the importance of physiological explanations for despair in defending the reputations of the dying. When a godly person despaired on their death-bed, or committed suicide, this was blamed on a combination of forces external to themselves – melancholy and the devil. The final chapter shows how Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy adapted puritan ideas about despair, to be more acceptable in the context of growing resistance to the preaching of double predestination in the 1620s and 30s.

This thesis addresses two key questions: First, how did those involved in the provision of public housing in twentieth-century England conceptualise the people who they were providing houses for? Second, how did their ideas change over time? These questions are important and need answering because, although there has been a great deal written about the history of public housing in England, there has up until now been very little thought given to the manner in which the council estate tenants themselves were actually identified and conceptualised as subjects in need of state-funded housing. My thesis begins to redress this imbalance by providing an overview of the changing forms and practices through which prospective tenants were conceptualised and acted upon by those in positions of power in England between 1920 and 1970. Using records from local authority archives, sociological surveys, architectural and town planning journals, central government publications, Mass Observation reports and tenant handbooks, and focusing primarily on council estates in London, Manchester and Sheffield, it shows how ideas about what prospective tenants needed from their homes changed dramatically over the course of this period, with the narrowly sanitary and biopolitical approaches of the 1920s and 1930s increasingly being challenged and complemented by a host of new ideas and discourses which placed far more emphasis upon the prospective tenant’s emotional, social and personal needs. As such, this thesis not only adds substantially to our understanding of the changes that took place in the English public housing sector between 1920 and 1970, but also adds to the burgeoning literature on questions of governmentality; contributing in the process to our understandings of modern modes of power.

This thesis examines the interweaving metaphorical and material aspects of shipwreck in Renaissance French writing. In a period marked by proliferating transatlantic and other exploration on the one hand, and, on the other, by religious civil wars, the ship was freighted with new political and religious, as well as poetic, significance. This rich symbolism reaches its height in the moments where ships—both real and symbolic—are threatened with disaster. The thesis demonstrates that shipwreck does not function merely as an emblem or poetic motif, but as a part, or the whole, of significant modes of narrative. Shipwreck in this period is rarely, if ever, recounted as a purely aesthetic embellishment: the ethics of spectatorship and of co-operation are of constant concern. I argue that the possibility of ethical distance from shipwreck—imagined through the Lucretian suave mari magno commonplace—is constantly undermined, not least through a sustained focus on the corporeal. Examining the ways in which the ship and the body are made analogous in Renaissance shipwreck writing, I show how bodies are allegorised in nautical terms, and, conversely, how ships themselves become animalised and humanised. Secondly, in many of the texts in my corpus it is shown or anticipated that the description, narration and dramatisation of shipwreck has an impact not only on the bodies of its victims, but on those of spectators, listeners, and readers, too. This insistence on the physicality of shipwreck is also reflected in the dynamic of bricolage that, I argue, informs the production of shipwreck texts in the Renaissance. The dramatic potential of both the disaster and the processes of rebuilding is exploited throughout the century, culminating, as I show, in a shipwreck tragedy. By the late Renaissance, shipwreck is not only the end of a story; it forms, more often than not, its beginning.

This thesis is the first study of 'Christian radicalism' in the Church of England between 1957 and 1970. Radicalism grew in influence from the late 1950s, and burst into the national conversation with John Robinson’s 1963 bestseller, Honest to God. Emboldened by this success, between 1963 and 1965 radical leaders hoped they might fundamentally reform the Church of England, even though they were aware of the diversity of their supporting constituency. Yet by 1970, following a controversial turn towards social justice issues in the late 1960s, the movement had largely reached the point of disintegration. The thesis offers five central arguments. First, radicalism was fundamentally driven by a narrative of epochal transition, which understood British society in the late 1950s and early 1960s to be undergoing a seismic upheaval, comparable to the transition between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Secondly, this led radicals to exaggerate many of the social changes occurring in the period, and to imagine the emergence of a new social order. Radicals interpreted affluence as an era of unlimited technology, limited church decline as the arrival of a profoundly secular age, and limited sexual shifts as evidence of a sexual revolution. They effectively created the idea of the ‘secular society’, which became widely accepted once it was adopted by the Anglican hierarchy. Third, radical treatment of these themes was part of a tradition that went back to the 1940s; radicals anticipated many of the themes of the secular culture of the 1960s, not the other way round. Fourth, far from slavishly adopting secular intellectual frameworks, radical arguments were often framed using theological concepts, such as Christian eschatology. Finally, for all these reasons, Christian radicals made an original and influential contribution to the elite re-imagination of British society which occurred in the 1960s.

The writings of John Aubrey (1626-1697) cover a variety of subjects, including natural philosophy, mathematics, educational theory, biography, and magic, among others. His principal scholarly interest, however, was antiquarianism, the early modern discipline which embraced subjects such as archaeology, anthropology, and palaeography. This thesis is a study of Aubrey’s antiquarian writings within the context of the European Republic of Letters. It begins with a revisionary survey of antiquarianism in England, 1660-1720, and proceeds to map his personal contacts and library before studying each of his major antiquarian works in detail. Aubrey emerges from this as a product of his time, but somewhat unusual in his eclectic use of the antiquarian tradition and his blending of antiquarian and natural philosophical methodologies. He was receptive to the latest scholarship, regardless of its origin, and his antiquarian writings were never mere antiquarianism, but moved beyond technical scholarship to address wider issues concerning the origins of English culture, the evolution of religion, the antiquity of the earth, and the nature of human invention. Aubrey is now best known for his so-called Brief Lives, a series of biographies of contemporaries, and this thesis also includes a chapter studying the Lives as a form of antiquarianism. It argues that their keen observation and unconventional form are due to a mixture of antiquarian minuteness with traditions of Theophrastan character-writing and Tacitean historiography and that previous readings of them rely too heavily upon an outdated view of Aubrey as eccentric and peripheral to the larger intellectual movements of the century. This thesis concludes with a reassessment of Aubrey’s scholarship and an argument that the patterns revealed highlight the insufficiency of current theories of antiquarian development in the early modern period. It also argues for the “literary” quality of Aubrey’s work and emphasises the importance of reading his antiquarian texts within the context of early modern definitions of literature.