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The Glorious Revolution of 1688 represented a crucial turning point in modern British history by decisively shifting political power from the monarchy to Parliament. In this cogent study, first published in 1972, Stuart Prall offers a well-balanced account of the Revolution, its roots, and its consequences. The events of 1688, Prall argues, cannot be viewed in isolation. Examining the tempestuous half-century that preceded and precipitated William and Mary’s accession, he provides a comprehensive overview of the Revolution’s context and of its historical meaning.

“[Prall] insists that the Revolution of 1688 was the culmination of a long crisis begun back in 1640, and the revolution settlement was the resolution of problems which the Puritan Revolution and the Restoration had left unsolved.  This is an admirable combination of analysis, commentary upon views of historians, and chronological narrative, starting with the Restoration in 1660 and continuing through the Act of Settlement in 1701.”—Choice

The Community of St. Cuthbert in the Late Tenth Century: The Chester-le-Street Additions to Durham Cathedral Library A.IV.19 reveals the dynamic role a seemingly marginalized community played during a defining period for the emergence of English religious identity. Based on her new critical edition of additions made to Durham Cathedral Library A.IV.19 and by questioning the purpose of those late tenth-century additions, Karen Louise Jolly is able to uncover much about the Chester-le-Street scribes and their tumultuous time, rife as it was with various political tensions, from Vikings and local Northumbrian nobles to an increasingly dominant West Saxon monarchy.

Why, for instance, would a priest laboriously insert an Old English gloss above every Latin word in a collection of prayers intended to be performed in Latin? What motivated the same English scribe to include Irish-derived Christian materials in the manuscript, including prayers invoking the archangel Panchiel to clear birds from a field?

The Complete Story of a Legendary Weapon

"Spendidly enthusiastic. . . . Soar's book is indispensable."—Bernard Cornwell

"A fascinating study of a forgotten weapon. . . . For centuries the longbow dominated battle, affecting the fates of nations" —Wall Street Journal

On a clear July morning in 1346, a small force approached the walls of Caen for battle. The attackers rode to the field on horseback, banners and pennants fluttering in the light breeze. Behind them marched bowmen in tightly ranked units. At the sound of a crisp battle horn, they halted. A twinge of apprehension rippled through the thousands of Norman defenders as they looked down at the opposing army, for precision archery formation had long since disappeared as a military concept in medieval France. Here was not the expected rabble of unrated bucolics cowed by the might of France; confronting them was a quietly determined group of trained soldiers armed not with the familiar arbalest but with a new and strange weapon of great length. The defenders of Caen were about to meet the English war bow and its deadly battle shaft. For the next 100 years, this weapon, the "crooked stick," would command continental battlefields, etching its fearsome reputation at Crécy, Poitiers, Agincourt, and Verneuil, while establishing England as an international power for the first time.

Although the longbow is best known for its deployment during the Hundred Years' War, its origins lie with ancient Saxon seafighters and Welsh craftsmen, while today the bow is a vibrant part of the traditional archery scene. In The Crooked Stick: A History of the Longbow, historian Hugh D. H. Soar pulls together all of these strings, presenting the engaging story of this most charismatic standoff weapon. After a careful consideration of Neolithic bows and arrows, the author describes the bow's use in the medieval hunt and its associated customs. The longbow made its deepest mark in warfare, however, and the author follows the weapon's development and tactical deployment from the hand-bow of William the Conqueror's campaigns to the continental set-piece battles between England and France. Although soldiers reluctantly gave up the longbow for firearms, its recreational use became immensely popular, particularly during the Regency and Victorian periods. In the twentieth century it appeared as if the longbow would disappear into the fog of legend, but a new interest in traditional craft and expertise gained hold, and the pleasure of using this ancient instrument is now firmly part of archery around the world.

Through a remarkable command of manuscript and printed sources and a judicious use of material evidence, including his own important collection of rare longbows, Hugh Soar establishes the deep connections of this bow to England, Scotland, and Wales. Figures in the past like William Wallace, Edward III, and Henry V appear alongside detailed descriptions of bows, strings, arrows, and arrowheads, while the rise of institutions and craftsmen devoted to the longbow are presented to show how knowledge of this weapon was carried forward across the centuries. Today, those in the sport of archery and military historians will find that The Crooked Stick will enhance their own interests in a weapon of legendary status.

The Culture of Christina Rossetti explores a “new” Christina Rossetti as she emerges from the scrutiny of the particular historical and cultural context in which she lived and wrote. The essays in this collection demonstrate how the recluse, saint, and renunciatory spinster of former studies was in fact an active participant in her society’s attempt to grapple with new developments in aesthetics, theology, science, economics, and politics.

The volume examines Rossetti’s poetry, fiction, and nonfiction from a variety of theoretical and critical perspectives in order to reevaluate her place in the Victorian world of art, literature, and ideas. The essays offer a radical rethinking of her best-known poems, retrieve neglected works, establish the diversity of her writing, and reposition Rossetti within a canon continually under formation.

Contributing to the ongoing retrieval of the nineteenth-century woman poet, The Culture of Christina Rossetti highlights Rossetti’s responses to both male and female literary traditions and explores her incorporation and revision of literary influences from medieval Italian sources to contemporary writers.

The English middle class in the late nineteenth century enjoyed an increase in the availability and variety of material goods. With that, the visual markers of class membership and manly behavior underwent a radical change. In The Cut of His Coat: Men, Dress, and Consumer Culture in Britain, 1860–1914, Brent Shannon examines familiar novels by authors such as George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hughes, and H. G. Wells, as well as previously unexamined etiquette manuals, period advertisements, and fashion monthlies, to trace how new ideologies emerged as mass-produced clothes, sartorial markers, and consumer culture began to change.

While Victorian literature traditionally portrayed women as having sole control of class representations through dress and manners, Shannon argues that middle-class men participated vigorously in fashion. Public displays of their newly acquired mannerisms, hairstyles, clothing, and consumer goods redefined masculinity and class status for the Victorian era and beyond.

The Cut of His Coat probes the Victorian disavowal of men’s interest in fashion and shopping to recover men’s significant role in the representation of class through self-presentation and consumer practices.

SHERLOCK HOLMES DISAPPEARS, POLICE SUSPECT FAMED DETECTIVE IN KIDNAPPING AND MURDER reads a New York headline. So begins the fifth mystery in Larry Millett’s series.

A letter, written in a secret cipher he recognizes all too well, reveals that an old foe of Holmes—a murderer he once captured after an incredible duel of wits—is back, has kidnapped his previous victim’s widow, and is now impersonating Holmes himself. Holmes must once again match wits with a particularly cunning adversary, one whose hatred of Holmes has seemingly become the killer’s single greatest obsession.

Chasing the kidnapper from London to New York to Chicago, Holmes and Watson race to keep up. Every move Holmes makes is expected; every trap proves elusive. Only with the assistance of his American cohort, the saloonkeeper Shadwell Rafferty, can Holmes hope to settle the score once and for all—or be framed for the crime himself.

This book discusses the figure of the unchaste woman in a wide range of fiction written between 1835 and 1880; serious novels by Dickens, Mrs. Gaskell, Meredith, and George Eliot; popular novels that provided light reading for middle-class women (including books by Dinah Craik, Rhoda Broughton, and Ouida); sensational fiction; propaganda for social reform; and stories in cheap periodicals such as the Family Herald and the London Journal, which reached a different and far wider audience than either serious or popular novels.