The customary schedule of papers read at the Society's meetings is supplemented by papers from our regional meetings and symposia, comprising Peter Borsay's paper given at the symposium at the University of Glamorgan on ‘Visualising the Seaside’ in November 2011, Phil Withington's paper given at the University of Sheffield in April 2012 and two papers by Ian Talbot and Harshan Kumarasingham given at a regional visit to the University of Southampton in October 2012. We are also delighted to include the essay by Levi Roach, the winner of the Alexander Prize.

This paper examines female libertinism in eighteenth-century France, highlighting the hybrid identity of actress, courtesan and prostitute of female performers at the Paris Opéra. The main focus is on the celebrated singer, Sophie Arnould. She and others like her achieved celebrity by moving seamlessly between these three facets of their identity. Their celebrity also allowed them to circulate within the highest social circles. Feminists of the 1790s such as Olympe de Gouges and Théroigne de Méricourt had pre-Revolutionary careers that were very similar to those of Arnould. It is suggested that understanding this kind of individual in Ancien Régime France can help us to identify a neglected libertine strand within Enlightenment culture, that merged into proto-feminism in the French Revolution. The paper offers a new approach to some of the origins of modern French feminism.

Although there had been substantial donations to the church in the course of the last two centuries of the Roman Empire, the amount of property transferred to the episcopal church and to monasteries in the following two and a half centuries would seem to have been immense. Probably rather more than 30 per cent of the Frankish kingdom was given to ecclesiastical institutions; although the Anglo-Saxon church was only established after 597, it also acquired huge amounts of land, as did the churches of Spain and Italy, although the extent conveyed in the two peninsulas is harder to estimate. The scale of endowments helps explain the occasional criticisms of the extent of church property, and also the secularisations and reallocation of church land, and indeed suggest that the transfer of property out of the control of the church in Francia and England in the eighth century may have been greater than is often assumed. The transfer of land should probably also be seen as something other than a simple change of ownership. Church property provided the economic basis for cult, for the maintenance of clergy, who were unquestionably numerous, and for the poor. In social and economic, as well as religious terms, this marked a major break with the Classical World.

There has been much controversy over the role of apocalyptic thought at the court of Otto III of Germany (983–1002). This is in no small part a product of modern scholarship discussing the subject almost exclusively with reference to the so-called ‘terrors of the year 1000’, the result being highly polarised ‘all or nothing’ arguments, which run the risk of underestimating both the complexity and dynamism of eschatological expectation in this period. In contrast, the following paper argues that apocalyptic thought played an important part in politics under Otto III, but one which cannot be explained by the proximity of the first millennium alone.

Folklore experts have shown that for a legend to be remembered it is important that it is historicised. Focusing on three case-studies from early modern Germany and the Netherlands, this article explores how the historicisation of mythical narratives operated in early modern Europe, and argues that memory practices played a crucial role in the interplay between myth and history. The application of new criteria for historical evidence did not result in the decline of myths. By declaring such stories mythical, and by using the existence of memory practices as evidence for this, scholars could continue to take them seriously.

This paper begins to consider the meanings of a word that was ubiquitous in early modern culture, but which has been surprisingly neglected by historians. Focusing on printed sources and taking advantage of recent advances in digital technology, it outlines the changing uses of ‘peace’ between 1500 and 1700 and its predominant meanings at particular moments in time. The paper suggests that while these meanings were clearly derived from Christian and civic republican sources, the political conflicts of the seventeenth century saw the term politicised, appropriated and popularised in new and unexpected ways. It also argues that the semantic confusion which often attended ‘peace’ – most evident, perhaps, in its capacity to legitimise and sanction violence after 1640 – stemmed from its simultaneous role as a descriptor of society and self, and of spiritual and civil life. As a result, who should define, police and enforce peace became deeply contested issues of the course of the period. In tracing the semantics of the term in this way, the article serves as a contribution to the burgeoning historical literature on the paradigmatic vocabularies of the early modern era. It also illuminates the complicated relationship between words and concepts and the importance of both in motivating and legitimising social and political action.

What is pain? This article argues that it is useful to think of pain as a ‘kind of event’ or a way of being-in-the-world. Pain-events are unstable; they are historically constituted and reconstituted in relation to language systems, social and environmental interactions and bodily comportment. The historical question becomes: how has pain been done and what ideological work do acts of being-in-pain seek to achieve? By what mechanisms do these types of events change? Who decides the content of any particular, historically specific and geographically situated ontology?

The expansion in consumption that marked the British economy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was based not only on a growth in material goods, but also of experientially and culturally rich products such as leisure and tourism. Underpinning the latter of these, and of key importance in the rise of the seaside resort, was the process of visualisation. The ‘tourist gaze’ became a commodity in its own right, geared around environmental and social subjects, and facilitated by a transformation in the content and reproductive potential of visual culture and an engineering of resorts to deliver views.

A month into his viceroyalty, Lord Mountbatten took time out from sounding Indian political opinion about independence to discuss the future security of British residents with his provincial governors. By this stage, the concerns stemmed from fears of a general breakdown in law and order and Hindu–Muslim conflict rather than nationalist assault. Detailed plans were developed for a sea-borne evacuation. In the event, the only Britons who were evacuated were those airlifted from Srinagar in November 1947 as they were in the path of an invasion of the disputed Kashmir territory by Pakhtun tribesmen from Pakistan. Despite numerous articles on the British departure from India and the aftermath of Partition, little has been written about either the airlift or the broader strategic planning for European evacuation. The paper will focus on this neglected corner of the history of the transfer of power. It argues that while anti-British sentiment declined from a peak around the time of the Indian National Army trials, of 1945–6, the memories of the wartime chaotic flight from Burma and Malaya and the irreparable damage this had done to British prestige in Asia coloured the safety first approach adopted in 1947.

The paper examines the reasons that India, Pakistan and Ceylon chose to become Dominions within the Commonwealth instead of becoming republics on independence as many expected. Each of these South Asian states had different motives that compelled them to take on a form of government more associated in areas where the British had settled in significant numbers. The ‘Tropical Dominions’ differed from the settler cases and tested this vague British concept. The British and South Asians had to compromise their wishes in order to satisfy their wants. India is characterised here as the ‘Expedient Dominion’, Pakistan the ‘Siege Dominion’ and Ceylon the ‘Imitation Dominion’. This paper focuses on the years immediately prior to independence to understand the various objectives of the South Asian elites that negotiated with the British for their sovereignty and how they varied from each other and from the Dominion ideal.