A defence of witchcraft belief

This book addresses a perennial question of the English Reformation: to what extent, if any, the late medieval dissenters known as lollards influenced the Protestant Reformation in England. To answer this question, this book looks at the appropriation of the lollards by evangelicals such as William Tyndale, John Bale, and especially John Foxe, and through them by their seventeenth-century successors. Because Foxe included the lollards in his influential tome, Acts and Monuments (1563), he was the most important conduit for their individual stories, including that of John Wyclif (d. 1384), and lollard beliefs and ecclesiology. Foxe’s reorientation of the lollards from heretics and traitors to martyrs and model subjects portrayed them as Protestants’ spiritual forebears. Scholars have argued that to accomplish this, Foxe heavily edited radical lollard views on episcopacy, baptism, preaching, conventicles, tithes, and oaths, either omitting them from his book or moulding them into forms compatible with a magisterial Reformation. This book shows that Foxe in fact made no systematic attempt to downplay radical lollard beliefs, and that much non-mainstream material exists in the text. These views, legitimised by Foxe’s inclusion of them in his book, allowed for later dissenters to appropriate the lollards as historical validation of their theological and ecclesiological positions. The book traces the ensuing struggle for the lollard, and indeed the Foxean, legacy between conformists and nonconformists, arguing that the same lollards that Foxe used to bolster the English church in the sixteenth century would play a role in its fragmentation in the seventeenth.

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, the crusade against sugar rose to prominence as an urgent societal problem about which something needed to be done. Sugar was transformed into the common enemy in a revived ‘war on obesity’ levelled at ‘unhealthy’ foods and the people who enjoy them. Are the evils of sugar based on purely scientific fact, or are other forces at play? Sugar rush explores the social life of sugar in its rise to infamy. The book reveals how competing understandings of the ‘problem’ of sugar are smoothed over through appeals to science and the demonisation of fatness, with politics and popular culture preying on our anxieties about what we eat. Drawing on journalism, government policy, public health campaigns, self-help books, autobiographies and documentaries, the book argues that this rush to blame sugar is a phenomenon of its time, finding fertile ground in the era of austerity and its attendant inequalities. Inviting readers to resist the comforting certainties of the attack on sugar, Sugar rush shows how this actually represents a politics of despair, entrenching rather than disrupting the inequality-riddled status quo.

A Progressive Education? argues that concepts of both childhood and adolescence were transformed in English and Welsh primary and secondary modern schools between 1918 and 1979, and that, by putting childhood at the centre of the history of education, we can challenge the stories we tell about how and why schooling itself changed. A ‘progressive’ or ‘child-centred’ education began to emerge theoretically in the United States and Western Europe from the late nineteenth century, claiming to rewrite curriculums to suit children and young people’s needs, wants and abilities. Existing work suggests that progressivism both rose and retreated in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s, when a right-wing backlash against permissive teaching and the deschooling movement led to the imposition of central state control over education. However, the child-centred pedagogies that became mainstream in English and Welsh schools after 1945 rested on a fundamentally different vision of childhood. Unlike utopian deschoolers, post-war child-centred educationalists assumed that the achievements of mass democracy and the welfare state must be carefully preserved. Children needed to be socialised by adult educators to ensure that they acquired the necessary physical, intellectual, social and emotional maturity to become full citizens. Teachers, far from enthusiastically advocating child-centred methods, perceived them as a profound challenge to their authority in the classroom, and implemented them partially and reluctantly. Child-centred education, in alliance with developmental psychology, thus promoted a much more restrictive and pessimistic image of childhood and youth as it came to dominate mainstream schooling after the Second World War.