Catholicism in the Second Spanish Republic : religion and politics in Salamanca, 1930-1936
The research for this thesis has been confined in space and time in order to facilitate an investigation of the Church at several levels: the study is as concerned with the faith and the faithful as with the official presence of the hierarchy. It examines questions of religious identity in an area of high Catholic practice, conservative politics and, eventually, genuine popular support for the Nationalist rising. The province of Salamanca, in the north west of Spain, is a particularly appropriate focus for such a study. Part of the Castilian heartland of traditional Spain, it was the home province of Jose Maria Gil Robles and a major area of strength for the parliamentary Catholic right, which mobilised here before anywhere else in Spain. This has led to Salamanca receiving some attention from historians. Scholars such as Paul Preston and Juan Jose Castillo use it to provide examples of the Catholic right's techniques and rhetoric, arguing that the innate conservatism of the Castilian smallholders was manipulated by the great landlords. However, perhaps the most interesting feature of the history of the province in the 1930s is how its story differed from that laid out in Madrid. The historiography of the Second Republic has concentrated - perhaps inevitably - on political and parliamentary struggles. While issues such as disestablishment and the fate of the religious orders were of crucial importance at institutional and governmental level, the impact they had outside the professional circles of church and state is far less certain. This study has moved outside the administrative world of the capital to investigate the impact of the Republic on ordinary Catholic citizens. The minutiae of church/ state relations and the undoubted injustice of the treatment of the religious orders may have outraged the Catholic deputies representing Salamanca in the Cortes, but their Catholic constituents had different concerns. By examining these concerns, this thesis throws new light on the process of breakdown of the Second Republic.
The reign of Christ over the nation: The Basque question in the Spanish Republic, 1931–1936
The debate on the Basque Statute during the Spanish Republic (1931–39) became an exceptional political myth in contemporary Basque politics. According to current political narratives of Basque identity, the traditional will to self-government of the Basque people was expressed during those years in a broad demand for autonomy and collective identity. This article outlines the social complexity of the autonomy project, more related to religion than to ethnic conflict. This approach suggests that present concerns with Basque identity narratives undermine the historical parameters operative in the past, disabling our understanding of the history of the Basques.
Bodies Politic : Disease , Death and Doctors in Britain , 1650-1900
In spite of its intellectual, literary and comic brilliance, this book contains a dark and disturbing, but revealing, message. In some ways, my melancholy reading of Bodies Politic has inevitably been shaped by Roy's recent untimely death. Roy Porter was without doubt the finest social historian of medicine this country, or indeed the world, has produced. Expansive, humorous, intelligent, and incisive, his broad range of historical works has excited and educated several generations of students of history over the past thirty years. His death leaves an unfillable void within the global history of medicine. At the same time, however, this book itself, completed well before his death, is haunted by elements of despair and uncertainty that should make us carefully reconsider not only the purpose and direction of our professional inquiries but also our own mortality.