A foundational three-volume study (originally published 1874-8) of the medieval roots of English political institutions.

This book traces the transformation of history from a Romantic literary pursuit into a modern academic discipline during the second half of the nineteenth century, and shows how this change inspired Victorians to reconsider what it meant to be a historian. This reconceptualization of the ‘historian’ lies at the heart of this book as it explores how historians strove to forge themselves a collective scholarly persona that reflected and legitimised their new disciplinary status and gave them authority to speak on behalf of the past. The author argues that historians used the persona as a replacement for missing institutional structures, and converted book parts to a sphere where they could mould and perform their persona. By ascribing agency to titles, footnotes, running heads, typography, cover design, size, and other paratexts, the book makes an important shift in the way we perceive the formation of modern disciplines. By combining the persona and paratexts, it offers a novel approach to themes that have enjoyed great interest in the history of science. It examines, for example, the role which epistemic and moral virtues held in the Victorian society and scholarly culture, the social organization and hierarchies of scholarly communities, the management of scholarly reputations, the commercialization of knowledge, and the relationship between the persona and the underpinning social, political, economic, and cultural structures and hierarchies. Making a significant contribution to persona studies, it provides new insights for scholars interested in the history of humanities, science, and knowledge; book history; and Victorian culture.

In the Victorian and Edwardian era, history was one of the most prized forms of cultural and intellectual activity: it was, quite simply, the lens through which most of the educated population understood human society. Historians and the Church of England uncovers for the first time the extent to which this historical understanding was conditioned by religious ideas and institutions. Rejecting the traditional chronology of intellectual secularization, itcontends that the Church of England in particular remained an active force in the development of scholarship, leaving a deep impression on history just as it was becoming a modern discipline. It thereforechallenges readers to revise their understanding of the history of both historiography and religion in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.

In the common law world, Albert Venn Dicey (1835–1922) is known as the high priest of orthodox constitutional theory, as an ideological and nationalistic positivist. In his analytical coldness, his celebration of sovereign power, and his incessant drive to organize and codify legal rules separate from moral values or political realities, Dicey is an uncanny figure. This book challenges this received view of Dicey. Through a re-examination of his life and his 1885 book Law of the Constitution, the high priest Dicey is defrocked and a more human Dicey steps forward to offer alternative ways of reading his canonical text, who struggled to appreciate law as a form of reasoned discourse that integrates values of legality and authority through methods of ordinary legal interpretation. The result is a unique common law constitutional discourse through which assertions of sovereign power are conditioned by moral aspirations associated with the rule of law.

Originally published in 1971, The Royal Demesne in English History shows how Norman and Angevin kings were able to regard the whole of their English kingdom as their royal demesne in the continental medieval sense. The book argues that only through the later loss of their continental possessions were they compelled to show interest in creating special royal estates within their English kingdom, and then only for the members of their families. The power of medieval English kings as landowners provides a constant theme of the highest political importance in the dispensation of royal patronage, but not in the history of government finance. The book discusses how in the later stages of the cumulative creation of the royal family estates, did the idea gain currency in England, that an endowed and inalienable royal landed estate ought to form the basis of monarchical stability and financial solvency. This book forms an interesting and detailed look at the development of the medieval monarchy in terms of land and ownership.