This open university reader is a wide-ranging interdisciplinary collection of material from primary sources, illustrating the relationship between cultural change and religious belief in sixteenth-century Europe. It contains more than eighty extracts drawn from a variety of genres including political, religious, philosophical and legal writing, diaries, letters, plays, poems and fiction. Some have never previously been published, others have not been reprinted since their original appearance in the sixteenth century, and a number are translated into modern English for the first time. `Culture and Belief in Europe 1450 - 1600' includes writing from such renowned thinkers as Erasmus, Luther, Machiavelli, and Sir Thomas More, besides that of lesser-known authors. Works of literature also feature extensively, and writings from Cervantes, Rabelais, Edmund Spenser, and Sir Philip Sidney amongst many others are all to be found here. A general introduction describes the anthology's central aim - to explore aspects of the interrelationship between the politics, religion and writing of the period. The book is divided into eight thematic sections. Spelling in the extracts has been sensitively modernized throughout, and the editors provide a headnote and appropriate explanatory annotation for each item.

This book examines the development of social science and social research in Victorian and Edwardian Britain. The organising concepts of social investigation in the nineteenth century are problematical, its intellectual context is unclear and its methodological base uncertain. This collection of essays by leading scholars sets out to identify the problems and pitfalls in our current approaches and indicate how we can solve the former and avoid the latter. The essays enable the reader to see the work of Charles Booth in terms of motivation, method and meaning; to relate his work and that of his many associates to the contemporary social, intellectual and political milieu, and to compare his work with that of other social investigators of the period - such as Mayhew, the Webbs and Rowntree. They indicate some of the ways in which these retrieved archival riches may be re-worked by modern scholars to achieve a deeper understanding of Victorian society. An introduction skillfully places Charles Booth within the context of social investigation as a whole and enables both student and teacher to employ their reading of the volume to further their study of Victorian social science and society.

A collection of documents and of excerpts from books, with brief comments. Pp. 91-94 contain documents showing evidence of antisemitic sentiments in London's East End vaunted against Jewish landlords. Ch. 8 (pp. 247-312), "The Jewish Question", deals with antisemitism and anti-alienism in Britain in the late 19th-early 20th centuries. Pp. 261-271 present excerpts from Arnold White's antisemitic book "The Modern Jew". Pp. 281-297 deal with the anti-Jewish disturbances in Limerick (Ireland) in 1904, in Tredegar (Wales) in 1911, in Leeds and in Bethnal Green (London) in 1917, and with press reactions to them. Pp. 347-349 give an example of antisemitism in the British Army in 1919 in Palestine.