The earliest Romanesque towers of Lincolnshire constitute one of the most remarkable groupings of architectural remains at parish level, of the era of the Norman conquest of England. Forming west towers to a series of ordinary parish churches rather than parts of cathedrals or great monastic institutions, they are a distinctive feature of a number of the county's towns and villages. They have been variously described - as a group or individually - as Late Anglo-Saxon, Norman, or overlap in period. The fieldwork on which this study was based was undertaken as part of the British Academy's Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture series. Given their late date, however, (all the sculptural material post-dated, and was probably stylistically derived from, work on the new Lincoln Cathedral of 1073 onwards) it was recognised that the value of the Lincolnshire material, and the way to extract a rich understanding from it, lay in treating the architecture of the towers as a whole, rather than soley cataloguing items of sculpture. The present book, while fully reporting on the sculptural details, also addresses the towers as whole architectural artefacts. It seeks an understanding of the social context in which late 11-Century buildings were erected, and explores the role of towers in the contemporary liturgy.

"This is a social history of religion in a rural district in Lincolnshire during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. It explores the entire range of religious phenomena -- popular superstition and magic as well as the Church of England and Methodism -- and attempts to recover their social meaning and social context. It concludes that both the heightening of religious activity in the early part of the period and its later decline had their origins in social change : the triumph of agricultural capitalism, the breakdown of the traditional village order, and the uneven emergence of a society of classes, each with its distinctive outlook and religious style." -- Front inside flap of dust jacket.

The militia was a key institution in Georgian England, and arguably one that was very characteristic of its age. A 'militia' is an informal military organisation made up of part-time civilians rather than professionals. As an island, Britain had historically relied on forces of this type for home defence, but threats of a French invasion during the Seven Years War (1756-63) highlighted that the militia had fallen into disrepair and prompted calls for its revival. In this important new study, Matthew McCormack re-examines the debates on the militia, and argues that this military reform was informed and driven by concerns about politics, nationalism, and gender. The militia tells us a great deal about the political culture of the eighteenth century, which was suspicious of professional armies and executive power, and which placed great emphasis on the liberties and masculine attributes of the ordinary citizen. Its advocates even suggested that mass military service would prompt a reinvigoration of English masculinity. The Militia Act passed into law in 1757. From this date until the New Militia's slow demise after the Napoleonic Wars, Embodying the Militia in Georgian England considers civilian men's experience of military service. How was the militia 'embodied' - both in the contemporary sense of assembling for service, and also as a gendered bodily experience? Chapters explore questions such as physical training, masculine honour, material culture, self-identity, and citizenship. As such, the volume's interdisciplinary approaches offer new perspectives on the history of war.