Royal Historical Society (RHS)

Royal Historical Society

Studies in History Series

The Royal Historical Society's series Studies in History, founded by Sir Geoffrey Elton in 1975 and re-launched in 1995, has established itself as one of the leading outlets for specialist historical monographs. They are almost always based on doctoral dissertations that have been extensively developed and extended so that the wider significance of their findings are brought out, while at the same time they are leaner and fitter so as to come within a rigorous word limit of 90,000 words. The series takes a deliberately inclusive approach, covering all periods from early medieval to the recent history, and while most of the titles have been on British and Continental European History, submissions relating to any part of the world are welcomed. The series also seeks to embrace all approaches to historical research, requiring only that work should be of the highest quality. In conjunction with the publishers, Boydell and Brewer, the series maintains the very highest standard of publication. Work submitted is read by an expert appointed by the Board. Of particular importance is the close guidance and specialist advice given to authors by the relevant member of the editorial board and by the series' Executive Editor, Mrs Christine Linehan, who has held that position since the inception of the series and who has helped over 150 authors, many now very senior members of the profession, to take pride in their first books. All this, together with the work of the publishers, ensures the highest quality of both scholarship and presentation.

Studies in History Editorial Board

Professor John Morrill, University of Cambridge (Convenor) - early modern British and Irish history

Dr Jon Lawrence, University of Cambridge - modern British history

Dr Hannah Barker, University of Manchester - eighteenth and nineteenth-century British history

Professor Arthur Burns, King's College London (Literary Director, Royal Historical Society) - modern British history

Professor Nigel Goose, University of Hertfordshire - economic and social history

Dr Rachel Hammersley, University of Newcastle - seventeenth to nineteenth-century European history (including British history)

Professor Colin Kidd, University of Glasgow - intellectual history

Professor Daniel Power, Swansea University - medieval British and European history

Dr Bernhard Rieger, University College London - nineteenth to twentieth century European history (including British history)

Submission of proposals

The Editorial Board is always willing to advise potential series authors on the submission of proposals. Normally material to be submitted for a proposal would comprise a copy of the author's doctoral dissertation (where this is relevant), a full outline of proposed revisions, and ideally two sample revised chapters; note that the established length for books in the series is no greater than 90,000 words, including footnotes and bibliography. Advice from at least one and usually two experts in the field will then be taken in the usual way.

All proposals are submitted to formal meetings of the Editorial Board, which take place at regular intervals throughout the year. Books are normally published within a year of the delivery of the final manuscript to the publisher. Currently seven volumes per year are published.

In the first instance typescripts should be sent to the Executive Secretary at the Royal Historical Society. The Society will not consider any work which is simultaneously being considered by another publisher, in the UK or elsewhere; not does it undertake co-publishing.

Forthcoming volumes in 2010-2011

Anna Groundwater, The Scottish Middle March, 1573 to 1625

The Scottish Borders experienced dramatic change on the succession of James VI to the throne of England. Where in the past, the usually hostile Anglo-Scottish relations had encouraged cross-border raiding, James was to prosecute a newly consistent pacification of crime in the region. This book explores his actions in the Middle March, the shires of Roxburgh, Peebles and Selkirk, examining governmental processes and structures of power there both before and after Union.

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Mark Nixon, Samuel Rawson Gardiner and the Idea of History

Samuel Rawson Gardiner (1829-1902) is the colossus of seventeenth-century historiography. His twenty-volume history of Britain from 1603 to 1656 and his many editions of key texts still serve to underpin almost all study of the Civil Wars and of the Commonwealth and Protectorate. This book seeks to challenge the prevailing inadequate view of him and his work, offering a rich contextualisation by locating his writings within a wide range of literary and philosophical milieux, British and continental European.

Matthew Shaw , Time and the French Revolution: the Republican Calendar, 1789 to Year XI

The French Republican Calendar was perhaps the boldest of all the reforms undertaken in Revolutionary France. Introduced in 1793 and used until 1806, the Calendar not only reformed the weeks and months of the year, but decimalised the hours of the day and dated the year from the beginning of the French Republic. This book not only provides a history of the Calendar but places it in the context of eighteenth-century time-consciousness. The creation of the Calendar is seen not just as an aspect of the broader republican programme of social, political and cultural reform, but as a reflection of a broader interest in time and the culmination of several generations' concern with how society should be policed.

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Forthcoming Volumes in 2009-2010

Carole Hill , Women and Religion in Late Medieval Norwich

This book uses an interdisciplinary approach to access the religious attachments and charitable activity of women in and around late medieval Norwich, demonstrating how links with continental Europe enriched female life. Norwich women's special attraction to aspects of incarnational piety is demonstrated by their devotion to the Body of Christ and to his earthly family, exemplified by the popular cults of St Anne and her daughter, the Virgin Mary. This is a richly illustrated, vivid and challenging account of the nature and significance of intense female spirituality, both re-interpreting and re-contextualising Julian of Norwich and Marjorie Kempe and establishing a much richer sense of the religious life of a major city and of women's contribution to it.

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Paul Mulvey, The Political Life of Josiah C Wedgwood: Land, Liberty and Empire, 1872-1943

From 1906 until 1943 'Josh' Wedgwood was one of Britain's most outspoken Radical politicians. Instead of the collectivism of socialists or social imperialists, Wedgwood advocated a Radical vision of Victorian individualism as the solution to problems both at home and abroad, that Britain faced in the first half of the twentieth century. Wedgwood's ideas came to seem dated in his own lifetime, but he fought for them with vigour and passion in a career of more than forty years that saw him established as one of Britain's best-known politicians. This book throws new life upon some of the defining ideological and policy issues of the most turbulent period of modern British history.

Jonathan Jarrett, Social Relations and Political Control in Frontier Catalonia before 1000

This book takes a new approach to the sources for medieval social history, using charters to find traces of social networks in the connections between the people to whom they refer, building up a picture of how power was negotiated from ruler to subject in the counties that would become Catalonia between the late ninth and early eleventh centuries. A frontier both between Christianity and Islam and between 'France' and 'Spain', this edge of the Carolingian empire was at the forefront of Christian Europe's demographic and cultural expansion: Jarrett shows those in power mobilised connections and used intermediaries to establish pathways of power, to circumvent their opponents and to secure friendship and co-operation.

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Recently published Second Series volumes