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Review essay, "American Nineteenth Century History", March 2010

This article seeks to establish the burden of direct taxation in the city of London in the sixteenth century. Previous discussions have been confined to the yield of parliamentary subsidies which cannot give a full picture because of the way responsibility for equipping military levies was increasingly devolved on to the locality. Estimates of the costs of the various additional military levies are therefore made. Innovations in parliamentary taxation enabled the crown to levy extraordinary sums in the 1540s, but they required a level of intervention by the privy council which Elizabeth's government was not prepared to make. The subsidy performed especially badly in London in the later sixteenth century. Local military rates compensated to some extent, but tax levels in real terms were very much lower in the 1590s than the 1540s. Nevertheless taxation was becoming increasingly regressive, which helps to explain the greater level of complaint in the 1590s.

The death of Margaret of Savoy in 1574 created a momentous stir in literary and political circles. This renowned patroness of arts and protector of minorities had extended her protection to the Jews and conversos living in the realm of her husband, Emmanuel Philibert. Jews, too, lamented her demise. The purpose of this paper is to interpret the elegies written by the Jewish Italian scholar, Azariah de' Rossi, setting them in their historical and literary context. De' Rossi's extant poems in Hebrew, Aramaic and Latin are printed here in their entirety for the first time. An analysis of their content demonstrates how de' Rossi, the scholar, adopts the medium of the elegy in order to "exalt and exhort" Margaret's widower, the ruler Emannuel Philibert of Piedmont, implicitly, therefore, pleading the Jewish cause.

Translating the Scriptures into the vernacular was a primary concern of Protestant reformers. This led to worries about the precise language-form in which they should be made accessibly to lay folk. This article situates such evangelical debates within contemporary understanding of the nature and role of native tongues. Tudor and Stuart governments sometimes saw English as a tool of political control; humanists questioned the 'copiousness' of the vernacular; the Celtic tongues were readily identified with barbarity; the status of the written word might be contaminated by the use of dialect. Translators and authors sought to address these concerns, with great success in England, Lowland Scotland and Wales, but much less effectively in Gaelic-speaking Ireland and Scotland.

This article considers the conclusions that we can draw about the imperial governors of Dyrrakhion in the reign of the Emperor Alexios I Kommenos. It looks at why Dyrrakhion became increasingly important in the course of the 11th century and, above all, after Alexios' usurpation of the throne in 1081. Careful attention is paid to establishing the identity of the various individuals whom we know to have held the position of doux of the town in the period between 1081-1118, and the chronology of and context for the appointments looked at in detail. The significance of Dyrrakhion is further highlighted by drawing attention to the fact that only the very closest intimates of the Emperor - and indeed only senior members of the imperial family itself - were made governors of the town in this period. This study represents a fresh examination of Dyrrakhion, and establishes several new conclusions about the identities and careers of the imperial governors of the town in the reign of Emperor Alexios I Kommenos.

Lack of consideration of the complex European scientific scene from the late 18th century to the mid-decades of the 19th century has produced partial and often biased reconstructions of priorities, worries, implicit and explicit philosophical and at times political agendas characterizing the early debates on species. It is the purpose of this paper firstly to critically assess some significant attempts at broadening this historiographic horizon concerning the immediate context to Darwin's intellectual enterprise, and to devote the second part to arguing that a multi-faceted European debate on the transformation of life forms had already occurred in Europe around 1800. Of this debate, contrary to long cherished views, Lamarck's was only one voice, amongst many. Naturalists active in different national contexts elaborated solutions and proposed doctrines that shared several viewpoints, yet clearly stemmed from a variety of disciplinary traditions and problematic contexts.

While there has been relatively little serious analysis of colonial postcards, Malek Alloula's influential bookLe Harem colonial put forward a reading of such postcards from the early 1900s as perpetuating a harem fantasy through which French male colonists viewed North Africa. This article analyses a selection of postcards of women from France's Indochinese colonies at the same period, and suggests that Alloula's thesis does not fit them in a comparable way. The Indochinese postcards borrow frames of reference from pre-existing pictorial styles, taken sometimes from the harem but also from chinoiserie and contemporary European photographic portraiture; rather than portraying a single vision of the 'Other' they oscillate between showing the Indochinese woman as 'same' and 'different'. And these images appear to have been addressed primarily to a female collector, suggesting an intended reading rather removed from Alloula's vision of colonial postcards as pornography.

This article addresses the historiographical neglect of tory women in the early Victorian period. The existence of a vibrant culture of female conservative letters, combined with the widespread participation of women in ultra-Protestant pressure-group politics, is suggestive of the neglected contribution women made to the revival of grass-roots toryism during these years. In particular, it is suggested that a consideration of the distinctive features of premillenarian Evangelicalism enables a more discriminating approach to the impact of Evangelicalism upon contemporary women. By focusing upon the career of the prominent premillenarian Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, and her editorship of the Christian Lady's Magazine, it is argued that contemporary attitudes towards 'female politicians' were far more flexible, variable, and contingent than is frequently assumed. The associational activities with which many premillenarians were involved, combined with their attention to Old Testament models of publicly active women and the sense of urgency that distinguished their theology, frequently led its adherents to problematize and critique existing formulations of women's roles.