Italy

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E. P. Thompson

Thompson turned history on its head by focusing on the political agency of the people, whom historians had treated as anonymous masses.

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James Chandler

1819 was the annus mirabilis for many British Romantic writers, and the annus terribilis for demonstrators protesting the state of parliamentary representation. In 1819 Keats wrote what many consider his greatest poetry. This was the year of Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, The Cenci, and Ode to the West Wind. Wordsworth published his most widely reviewed work, Peter Bell, and the craze for Walter Scott's historical novels reached its zenith. Many of these writings explicitly engaged with the politics of representation in 1819, especially the great movement for reform that was fueled by threats of mass emigration to America and came to a head that August with an unprovoked attack on unarmed men, women, and children in St. Peter's Field, Manchester, a massacre that journalists dubbed "Peterloo.". But the year of Peterloo in British history is notable for more than just the volume, value, and topicality of its literature. Much of the writing from 1819, argues James Chandler, was acutely aware not only of its place in history, but also of its place as history - a realization of a literary "spirit of the age" that resonates strongly with the current "return to history" in literary studies. Chandler explores the ties between Romantic and contemporary historicism, such as the shared tendency to seize a single dated event as both important on its own and as a "case" testing general principles. To animate these issues, Chandler offers a series of cases of his own built around key texts from 1819.

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J.P. Ellens

This book, covering the period 1832 to 1868, describes how the so-called "church rates" controversy contributed to the rise of a secular liberal state in England and Wales. The church rate was an ancient tax required of all ratepayers, regardless of denomination, for the upkeep of parish churches of the Church of England. This meant that Dissenters and other non-Anglicans paid for the support of the established Church. In the 1830s, however, the Dissenters determined to tolerate the situation no longer. The resulting thirty-six-year struggle became the central church-state issue of the Victorian period.

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edited and translated by Cary J. Nederman

"This volume offers for the first time in English translation several important commentaries on the political scene in early fourteenth-century England. Walter de Milimete's On the Nobility, Wisdom, and Prudence of the King (1327), the two versions of William of Pagula's Mirror of King Edward III (1331 and 1332), and William of Ockham's Whether a Prince Can Receive the Goods of the Church for His Own Needs, namely, in Case of War, Even Against the Wishes of the Pope (1338). All of these treatises offer important insight into such matters as the extent of the king's power in the fourteenth century and earlier, the relationship between church and state, and the particular duties of the ruler toward various of his subjects."--BOOK JACKET.