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Stories of plots, sham plots, and the citizen-informers who discovered them are at the center of Rachel Weil's compelling study of the turbulent decade following the Revolution of 1688. Most studies of the Glorious Revolution focus on its causes or long-term effects, but Weil instead zeroes in on the early years when the survival of the new regime was in doubt. By encouraging informers, imposing loyalty oaths, suspendinghabeas corpus, and delaying the long-promised reform of treason trial procedure, the Williamite regime protected itself from enemies and cemented its bonds with supporters, but also put its own credibility at risk.

It was during the Civil War that political allegiance came to be conceived of as a problem or category in its own right, distinct if not divorced from confessional identity. This paper uses the narratives offered by ‘delinquents’ to the Committee for Compounding with Delinquents to interrogate discourses of allegiance in the civil war. Rather than try to determine the ‘true allegiance’ of individuals, this paper explores the claims within these narratives about inner conviction, outward behaviour, and financial circumstances to elucidate what contemporaries thought allegiance was, and how they thought it could be known. The problem of defining and determining allegiance itself has a history, and factors ranging from religious mentalités to the financial needs of the state determined how allegiance could be narrated at particular historical moments.

This essay shows how the roles of Isabella and Cornelia in John Webster's tragedy, The White Devil, express a 'precarious value' comparable to that which Marina Warner finds in old wives' tales. Although mocked as 'Furies' by contemptuous male characters, these women nevertheless resemble their prototypes in helping to bring disaster upon those who corrupt family relationships. Using fragmented, shadowy allusions suited to their tenuous roles, Webster links them with powerful old wives from classical legends such as Juno and Hecuba. To suggest the barbarity of Renaissance Rome, he also evokes the tale of the wolf who nursed Romulus and Remus.

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In particular, those of us who teach liberal-arts subjects need to be able to explain more convincingly the benefits of doing something adequately. Because day in and day out in the college classroom, we are asking our students to do things at which they may never excel. Just as there is a huge difference for me between hearing music performed by someone else and knowing it from the inside as part of a choir, there is a huge difference between learning history from the History Channel and learning it as historians do, by working with evidence. [...]did we make interesting intellectual music together?