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This article argues that the growth of a free press in nineteenth-century Germany went hand in hand with the growth of an official, government-sponsored press. The collapse of pre-publication censorship in 1848 prompted the development of increasingly sophisticated (and relatively successful) press control strategies by German governments, in the shape of official newspapers, semi-official newspapers, and indirect government press influence. Government press policy was essentially reactive. Changes in press policy were usually prompted by political events. Furthermore, government press coverage was forced to reflect shifts in public opinion in order to maximize readership of official propaganda. Government press policy focused not just on the dissemination of pro-government opinion, but also on the dissemination of pro-government information, probably the most effective form of government pres influence. News management was subtle, and targeted small circulation local newspapers, rather than high profile opposition newspapers. Consequently, historians have tended to overlook the scale of government news management.

The use of the term 'total war' with reference to pre-twentieth-century military conflicts has become a matter of some urgency and controversy amid nineteenth-century historians. It has been made all the more so for Napoleonic scholars by the recent appearance of David Bell's thought-provoking book The First Total War. The article attempts to counter and nuance some of Bell's major claims for the applicability of the term, through a discussion of its pertinence to the ideological and political conflicts of the Revolutionary-Napoleonic period, alongside the questions it evinces in technological and military terms.

In nineteenth-century France, science and religion have often been portrayed as irredeemably opposed to one another. This article seeks to revise this interpretation by showing how these apparently dissonant views intermingled in the study of hysteria. Through a survey of attitudes towards Catholicism and in their treatment of Catholic patients, the article shows how French psychiatrists and neurologists were deeply indebted to religious iconography and experience, despite their vehement anti-clericalism. Because of their hatred of the church, they focused on the treatment of female hysterics who manifested 'religious' symptoms - demonopathy, mystical states, and stigmata - in order to amass conclusive evidence of Catholic 'superstition'. Their preoccupation with such patients meant, however, that they paradoxically re-embedded Catholicism into their scientific practice by incorporating religious motifs, bodily poses, and iconography into their diagnosis of hysteria. At the same time, their disdain for the Catholic religious imagination meant that they refused to explore the fantasies of their subjects. For physicians like Jean-Martin Charcot and the more subtle Pierre Janet - a contemporary and competitor of Sigmund Freud - fantasies of bodily suffering, unearthly physical perfection, and an array of Catholic maternal fantasies associated with images of Mary and Christ were all nothing more than delusions, not the stuff from which appreciation or understanding of the 'unconscious' could emerge. The result was that French physicians offered no psychodynamic transformation or symbolic reinterpretation of their words or physical symptoms, a resistance that was one reasons among many for their hostility to psychoanalysis.

This article reconsiders Mary Tudor's victory in the succession crisis of July 1553. It challenges the traditional interpretation which accounts for Mary's unexpected triumph as the result of a 'spontaneous' rising of the East Anglian gentry. Instead it reclaims a central role for Mary's household affinity in the succession crisis and as such presents a longer-term perspective than accounts of Mary's coup d'état have provided hitherto. It concludes by pointing to the implications of the role of Mary's household for interpreting the politics and religion of her reign.

The Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner spent a fortnight in Oxford in the summer of 1922. Of his five visits to Britain in the years from 1922 to 1924, it was the Oxford Conference, ‘Spiritual Values in Education & Social Life’ (15-29 August), that is arguably the most important. It was this Conference that attracted the greatest media attention and it was widely reported. The Oxford Conference introduced Waldorf schooling to an English-speaking audience. Rudolf Steiner spoke in German and George Adams Kaufmann translated. The conference was organised by Professor Millicent Mackenzie. There were 230 attendees. Steiner presented twelve morning lectures at Manchester College (now Harris Manchester College), and fourteen conference speakers presented at nearby Keble College in the afternoons. Four Eurythmy performances, the first in Britain, were presented at Keble College by performers from the Goetheanum, Dornach, Switzerland and local school children from the Oxford Central School. An enduring legacy has been the proliferation of Waldorf schools in Britain and throughout the Anglophone world.

Five months before the battle of Aix Roads (April 1809), his successful but frustrated attack on the French Brest fleet and his last action as a Royal Navy frigate commander, Captain Thomas, Lord Cochrane was engaged in an important operation at Roses on the coast of Catalonia. The Catalonia maritime theatre is considered by some historians to have been something of a backwater for the Royal Navy during the Peninsular War, but Napoleon Bonaparte’s overall strategic vision demanded unfettered access to the Mediterranean, and the Royal Navy’s constant patrols, many based on or near Rosas, kept the French navy contained at Toulon and the French army under duress on the right flank of Bonaparte’s southern Continental theatre. This article, from original research and analysis of primary source material, much of it unpublished, sheds new light on the events surrounding the Siege of Roses in November and December 1808, particularly the strategic context of the part played by Lord Cochrane, and the strategic importance of Rosas as a rendezvous for British fleets and a beachhead for allied forces.

The early Wycliffite William Swinderby expressed some strong criticisms of excommunication. He was alarmed that churchman thought that it was their power, rather than God's power, that consigned a soul to hell. The rhetoric of sentences of excommunication in this period was indeed intended to frighten offenders into compliance with ecclesiastical judgements, but the theory and practice of excommunication was in fact far less simple that the Wycliffite criticism of it allowed. This article examines Swinderby's attitude towards ecclesiastical sanctions in light of Wyclif's own ideas, and the theory and practice of excommunication in the late medieval Church. Swinderby's links with early Wycliffism are elucidated and the relationship between Wycliffism and the Church is looked at in a new light.