This study examines Reformed identity as an aspect of religious identity formation during the early Reformation period. It contributes towards an understanding of the character of the English Reformation by examining the reception of Swiss theology. The research is principally focussed upon the theological concept of covenant which blossomed in a distinctively bilateral and conditional form in early Reformation Switzerland. Patterns of thought discerned in English theology are related to this Swiss pattern, thereby assisting the process of identifying individual reformers according to continental models and elucidating an important theological development of the period. The concept of covenant had implications for contemporary discourses regarding the doctrines of justification and sanctification. It also made an impact upon sacramental theology in the way that sacraments were viewed as covenant signs. Despite the essential uniformity of the Swiss Reformed concept of covenant, three distinct emphases arose in Swiss Reformed sacramental theology with regard to the efficacy of the sacraments as means of grace. Having identified cases of English reception of the Swiss concept of covenant, their specific influences are determined using patterns of sacramental theology. Chapter one considers the problems involved in discerning different forms of religious identity in this period. Evidence for Reformed identity in England from the 1520s to the 1550s is surveyed from various different angles. The transmission of Swiss ideas through the Low Countries is considered, and alternative explanations for the failure of English Lutheranism are evaluated, particularly Lollardy and humanism. Chapter two demonstrates the essential consistency of the concepts of covenant espoused by leading Swiss reformers. Chapter three examines the concepts of covenant of four English reformers. Chapter four highlights different patterns in Swiss sacramental theology, and chapter five analyses English cases in light of those Swiss models.

Protestant Dissenters launched a campaign for Test Act repeal in 1786 that encountered strong opposition. Half a century later a second campaign inconspicuously secured repeal whilst the established Church was preoccupied with the problem of Catholic emancipation. Historians have examined the political narrative of both campaigns and the theories of toleration propounded by some Dissenters. However, little attention has been paid to the symbolic importance of the Test Acts, which Dissenters considered as badges of their exclusion from national citizenship. This thesis will examine the language of the repeal campaigns as a window into wider notions of citizenship and national identity. The resultant picture of Dissenters' identities and the larger national identities that they contested makes it possible to problematise and refine Linda Colley's Britons: Forging the Nation, which expounds a pan-Protestant, anti-Catholic, British national identity. Protestantism and anti-Catholicism were indeed central to the language of the debate, but this language marginalised Dissenters as often as it included them. Several Dissenters therefore united with a parallel Catholic campaign for toleration, whilst very few united with their fellow-Protestant Churchmen against the Catholic threat. The Dissenters' strategies reveal the ambiguity of their relationship to the nation: they were usually seen by Churchmen as marginalised or subordinate though less so than the Catholics. Moreover, overlooked divisions between evangelical and old Dissent, and between Trinitarian and Unitarian Dissent, led different sections of Dissent to pursue different strategies according to their perception amongst Churchmen. Notions of national identity and citizenship were changing in this period, particularly as a result of the French Revolution and wars. Both Test Act repeal and Catholic emancipation may be situated within long-term processes of state-building and nation-building. Older notions of national identity endured to a greater extent than has been recognised, but adapted to these processes by becoming more inclusive and assimilative. Though Test Act repeal and Catholic emancipation granted Dissenters and Catholics similar rights, because of the enduring importance of Protestantism to British national identity Test Act repeal signified Dissent's integration into the nation in a way that Catholic emancipation did not for Catholics.

A clash of generations occurred in the 1960s Probation Service when increasing numbers of university graduates entered the profession. They have been described as permissive by historians because they prioritised the welfare of the offender. This was in contrast to their older, and relatively untrained, colleagues for whom a reform project was premised on the disciplining of character. Due to a lack of sources, however, it remains unclear how these two generations differed in their attempts to persuade magistrates over sentencing outcomes. Fortuitously, a rare cache of over 2,000 Social Enquiry Reports (SERs) survives in the records of the City’s Justice Rooms. Written by probation officers from across the Metropolitan London area, the reports represent a cross section of the capital’s diverse population. Using a number of techniques including oral and secondary sources, this thesis identifies members of both generations and examines the way that they persuaded magistrates. Sorting the SERs into types of offender, the thesis shows that both generations ultimately persuaded magistrates by subtly indicating in reports whether or not the offender and their families conformed to conventional gender norms. The main reason why SERs by the permissive university graduates closely resembled those written by their older colleagues was due to their common perception of magistrates as being socially conservative. Regardless of how liberal or not Britain became in the sixties, the courtroom was not considered to be a place where a rethink of morality had occurred. The university graduates therefore invoked normative character ideals in SERs because they believed it was likely to be the best way to achieve the desired outcome in court. Finally, as responses to offending were shaped by gender ideologies rather than the nature of the offence or previous convictions, the concept of the probation officer as ‘the burglar’s mate’ is rendered problematic.

Despite England’s growing international trading wealth, an expanding secondary sector, and more productive agriculture the mid-seventeenth century state with its outdated tax system was politically and militarily weak. Civil war and its aftermath created the urgent and protracted supply need which instigated the creation and honing of radically new effective tax forms and processes which proved indispensable during the Restoration and beyond. Drawing on Kent, London and Bristol case studies this thesis explores how the land tax became a mainstay of an increasingly powerful early modern English state by considering its administration, processes and tax mechanics from its 1643 inception to the excise crisis. Economic development offered fiscal opportunity and whilst the excise exploited product supply chains, the land tax targeted rent and income generated from agricultural, commercial and domestic real estate. Occupiers and landlords shared immediate fiscal burdens. Land taxes exploited cashflows around financial and seasonal production cycles, particularly in the more commercialised South and East, where fresh attempts were made to value and tax land. Effective local governors had for decades bolstered their own authority by delivering national initiatives and now worked in partnership with legislators to nurture the new tax and create resilience. The state’s bargain was that parliament would determine deadlines and fixed tax amounts from each locale, but local governors had immediate process ownership to determine its detailed application. Continued fiscal success required fresh waves of innovation, adaption and involvement including: empowerment, delegation, the deployment of more experienced officials, simplification, and improved stakeholder oversight. As post-Revolutionary conflict drove fiscal burdens higher, land taxes became a permanent fiscal implement of the state, despite regular outbreaks of political angst at the tax’s power. The resulting coordinated collective commitment of tens of thousands of officials, across county, city and country, was the great fiscal achievement of the age; a picture long obscured by institutionalised state narratives.

The cultural venue of European exhibitions in the late-nineteenth century enabled the promotion of the modern nationhoods of imperial powers. This study examines the official attempts of Britain to project its imperial power and modern nationhood through exhibits of colonial Indian “tradition” in London. It traces the historical dynamics of such Indian displays in three exhibitions: the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition, the 1908 Franco-British Exhibition, and the 1924 Empire Exhibition. The juxtaposition of Indian “tradition” and British “modernity” at the exhibitions denoted India’s inferior “difference” from Britain, and thus the necessity of imperial rule in India. The exhibitions also evidenced the tensions of such notions with those of Indian modernity, especially by the inter-war period. Chapter One examines how the spatial and architectural landscapes of the exhibitions made visible the hierarchies of British imperial rule in India. Chapter Two discusses exhibits of India’s supposedly pre-industrial socioeconomic conditions. Chapter Three assesses the ethnography of the exhibitions, and how they denoted the racial inferiority of Indian “natives” at the same time that they recognized the political power of Indian princes and middle-class elites.

This thesis examines political culture in London, 1500–1550, by looking at different forms of political communication between the civic government and the city’s inhabitants, and at how these acts were situated within the urban environment. Based on the records of the civic government, the body of the work is divided into two halves addressing those acts conducted by the authorities – proclamations, processions, public punishments – and those directed towards the civic government by others, such as petitions, libels, and seditious talk. The study of these acts reveals two important things: first, that they were not only pragmatic attempts to communicate information, but also performances designed either to construct or contest particular images of authority; secondly, that these performances were spatially structured and that the urban environment was an integral aspect of the city’s political culture. It is then demonstrated that, just as political communication was inherently performative and spatial, so the urban environment was itself a medium of political communication. These observations highlight the importance of political communication to an understanding of the city’s political culture as depicted in the historiography of early modern London. At the same time, recent scholarship on the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries has identified an increasingly distinctive culture in towns typified by attitudes to political authority as communal and contingent, and to social identity as performative and self-fashioned. In London in particular, historians have pointed to a radical transformation in the city’s political culture in reaction to dramatic urban growth after 1550. The spatial aspect of this, however, has been neglected. It is argued here that the inherently political nature of urban space and its communicative potential, already in existence, was integral to changing urban values and part of what made rapid change in London after 1550 a politically traumatic and transformative process.

Social history has been much criticised over the past thirty years. This criticism and the consequent turn to cultural history have brought many advances, developing our understanding of the language, discourse, ritual and culture. However, it has also led to a neglect of structural factors and a turn away from the study of collectivities. This has meant that many subjects that class used to explain (social difference, social relationships and collective actions) are often ignored or undertheorized in current historical scholarship. This thesis examines one of these issues: how should historians understand and analyse the process of social-group formation? It does this through a case study of propertied society in Birmingham between 1780 and 1832. Propertied society is a loose category that does not have the connotations of concepts such as ‘middle class’. This thesis suggests that there were many different types of social group and that historians need to differentiate between them when analysing past societies. The most important distinction is between groups who shared attributes and groups that acted together. However, there was no simple relationship between attributes and actions; individuals who shared attributes did not necessarily act in the same way. The first part of the thesis (chapters 1-3) discusses who was included within the category of propertied society and the social and geographical understandings of those individuals. The second part of the thesis (chapters 4-6) moves from the general material and cultural structures of propertied society to consider three case studies that examine a number of processes by which individuals came together to form groups focused on particular discourses, institutions and events. The three case studies discuss the family and the transfer of social knowledge (chapter 4), local government and the nature of elites (chapter 5), and the process of politicization through examining membership of the Birmingham Political Union (chapter 6).

The present study focuses on the activity of the Young Communist League (Komsomol) to promote the communist project during the so-called Thaw period in the Soviet Union (1953-1964). The term ‘communist project’ describes the complex temporal triangle in which the relevance of the present was rooted in its relationship to the heroic past and the bright future. Young people were supposed to emulate the heroism of previous generations while fighting remnants of the undesired past. This was presented as a precondition for achieving the communist future. The structure of this study reflects the chronology of the communist project. It analyzes the rhetoric used by the Young Communist League to promote the communist project and explores the strategies used to mobilize youth for building communism. The first chapter focuses on the organizational structure of the Komsomol and assesses its readiness for this task. Despite attempts to strengthen horizontal communication and control, streamline administration and reorganize its structure, the Komsomol remained hierarchal and bureaucratic. The second chapter explores the promotion of past heroism in rituals, social practices and the use of public space. The third chapter is also concerned with the past; it describes the Komsomol’s fight against ‘remnants of the past’, primarily religion and deviant behaviour such as hooliganism, heavy drinking and laziness. The final chapter focuses on the Komsomol’s attempts during the Thaw to bring about the future: its efforts in the economy, moral, political and cultural education, and the realm of leisure.

This thesis investigates cognition and knowledge in a rich selection of late medieval Florentine commonplace books (zibaldoni) and diaries (ricordanze) with a special focus on Giovanni Rucellai’s Zibaldone Quaresimale. In Chapter Two a new methodology, named Mental Model Framework in History (MMFH), is elaborated. By studying mental processes such as categorisation and decision making, MMFH enables us to study cognition in historical documents. The dissertation is based on a computer-assisted analysis described in Chapter Three . This has brought together a number of technologies (Natural Language Processing, Semantic Web, Text Encoding Initiative) and used them according to the interpretative goals of the MMFH. Chapter Four investigates the knowledge-constructing practice of late medieval Florentines, and concludes that commonplace books and diaries were tools of information management and knowledge transmission. The core chapters study four domains of thinking: space, time, agency and perception. Chapter Five analyses social recognition and judgement in Renaissance Florence and reveals how a new ethical thought took shape, one that prepared the transition to capitalism. By applying decision and game theory, Chapter Six examines horizontal friendship, a bond that functioned as an informal but risky social insurance in Florence. Chapter Seven studies how Florentines used superlatives to construct a hierarchy of the world, with Florence on the top. This was the manifestation of a fierce competition within and outside the walls of Florence, competition that strongly influenced the social and physical environment of the city. By studying selection, periodisation and causal reasoning, Chapter Eight pinpoints the gradual secularisation of the conception of time. The thesis concludes that the late medieval revolution in information culture marked by the gradual transition from an overwhelmingly oral culture to an increasingly literate culture produced quantitative and qualitative changes in human thought. This largely contributed to the birth of modern thought, and to the late medieval transformation of the social and physical environment.

The research is a study of the context of the life and work of John Hooper, Bishop of Gloucester and Worcester, 1551-1555. It charts the nature of his relationships with friends, patrons, mentors, colleagues, and lay and clerical supporters and opponents in England and on the Continent, through the study of ecclesiastical, political, business and economic, intellectual, official and judicial, kinship and social networks in which he was involved. Its purpose is to reveal the complex mix of societal and confessional pressures influencing Hooper's approach and constraining his freedom of manoeuvre, and to a large extent determining how successful he was at achieving change. The study reveals key determinants of the nature and direction of the Reformation in England. It shows that the pressure to change doctrinal allegiances and to accommodate reformed church practices challenged not only personal confessional loyalties but also the very framework of society; that is, familial and social ties, economic, business and judicial groupings, educational affiliations, and ruling oligarchies. Within these societal networks there existed the momentum for, and resistance to, religious change. Confessional allegiances were just part of a complex mix of political and social pressures that included the exercise of patronage and protection, the use of conflict and compromise, the practise of different obligations, allegiances and loyalties, the employment of status and kinship, and the accommodation of various alliances and means of association. All of these influenced Hooper's approach and scope for action. As such, the research provides insight into why and how, in the development of the newly-reformed church in England, thoroughgoing religious change was resisted and contained.