Political Representation Communities Ideas And Institutions In Europe C 1200 C 1690

Political Representation: Communities, Ideas and Institutions in Europe (c. 1200 - c. 1690), a scholarly collection on representation in medieval and early modern Europe, opens up the field of institutional and parliamentary history to new paradigms of representation across a wide geography and chronology – as testified by the volume’s studies on assemblies ranging from Burgundy and Brabant to Ireland and Italy. The focus is on three areas: institutional developments of representative institutions in Western Europe; the composition of these institutions concerning interest groups and individual participants; and the ideological environment of representatives in time and space. By analysing the balance between bottom-up and top-down approaches to the functioning of institutions of representation; by studying the actors behind the representative institutions linking prosopographical research with changes in political dialogue; and by exploring the ideological world of representation, this volume makes a key contribution to the historiography of pre-modern government and political culture. Contributors are María Asenjo-González, Wim Blockmans, Mario Damen, Coleman A. Dennehy, Jan Dumolyn, Marco Gentile, David Grummitt, Peter Hoppenbrouwers, Alastair J. Mann, Tim Neu, Ida Nijenhuis, Michael Penman, Graeme Small, Robert Stein and Marie Van Eeckenrode. See inside the book.

This volume investigates the history of the representative assemblies of Sweden (the Riksdag), Poland (the sejm) and Hungary (the diaeta) in the final period of the ancien régime. It concentrates on the practices and ideas of parliamentarism and constitutionalism, and examines the ideologies that motivated the members of these parliaments. Attempts at the suppression as well as the restoration of the estates’ power in all these three countries are examined, as well as, in the case of Hungary, the establishment of popular representation that eventually replaced the estates. These three early modern representative assemblies have never before been explored systematically in a comparative framework.

The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Central Europe summarizes the political, social, and cultural history of medieval Central Europe (c. 800-1600 CE), a region long considered a "forgotten" area of the European past. The 25 cutting-edge chapters present up-to-date research about the region's core medieval kingdoms -- Hungary, Poland, and Bohemia -- and their dynamic interactions with neighboring areas. From the Baltic to the Adriatic, the handbook includes reflections on modern conceptions and uses of the region's shared medieval traditions. The volume's thematic organization reveals rarely compared knowledge about the region's medieval resources: its peoples and structures of power; its social life and economy; its religion and culture; and images of its past.

This comprehensive Handbook takes a multidisciplinary approach to the study of parliaments, offering novel insights into the key aspects of legislatures, legislative institutions and legislative politics. Connecting rich and diverse fields of inquiry, it illuminates how the study of parliaments has shaped a wider understanding surrounding politics and society over the past decades.

Illuminates how the ceremonial dimension of death and the succession reflected both Scottish royal identity and a broader culture of ceremony. To date, scholarly attention to royal ceremony in Scotland from the Middle Ages into the early modern period has been rather haphazard, with few attempts to explore how these crucial moments for the representation of royal authority. This monograph provides a long durée analysis of the ceremonial cycle of death and succession associated with Scottish kingship from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, including the final century of the Canmore dynasty, the crisis of the Bruce-Balliol conflict, and the emergence and consolidation of the Stewart family up to the funeral of last monarch buried in Scotland, James V, in 1543. Using a broad range of primary sources, including financial records and material culture, many of them previously untapped, it addresses key questions about kingship and power, the function of ceremony in legitimising royal authority, its significance in relation to the practical exercising of power, and evidence for Scottish similarities and distinctiveness within wider European contexts.

Of all the sub-periods in which European medieval history has been divided over time, the later middle ages is possibly the one on which the burden of past and current grand narratives weighs the most. Its chronological and geopolitical boundaries are shaped by a heavy narrative of decline or transition, and consequently this period is often interpreted through the lenses of previous or following developments, becoming in turn the tail-end of the 'feudal', 'communal', 'imperial versus papal' era or the announcement of modernity. The Later Middle Ages addresses the urgent need to revise and rewrite the story of this period, forging new critical and technical vocabularies not derived from the study of other periods. By adopting a conscious approach towards temporal and spatial variety, and by breaking the traditional and unitary narrative of decline and transition into one of many changes and continuities, it charts the principal developments of late medieval Europe while opening up to different political cultures and societies, throwing new light on older concepts, and revealing analogies and differences with other geopolitical contexts. Including maps, illustrations, a detailed chronology and a rich range of reading suggestions, The Later Middle Ages aims at providing a first introduction to a very complex, dynamic, and fascinating period for Europe and beyond.

A selection of outstanding papers from the 24th British Legal History Conference, celebrating scholarship in comparative legal history.

From Sovereignty to Solidarity seeks to re-imagine human mobility in ways that are de-linked from national sovereignty. Using examples from around the world, the author examines contemporary practices of solidarity to illustrate what such a conceptualization of human mobility looks like. He suggests that urban and local scales, rather than the national scale, is a better way to frame human migration and belonging. The book ultimately proposes that solidarity, rather than sovereignty, offers an alternative approach to imagine how human mobility should, and already does, occur. This book will be relevant to upper-level undergraduate and graduate students in disciplines such as Migration Studies, Urban Studies, Human and Political Geography, and Refugee Studies. It is also relevant to researchers, development workers and human rights/environmental activists, and other intellectual practitioners.

Offering a broad exploration of the cultural history of democracy in the medieval age, this volume claims that, though not generally associated with the term, the Middle Ages deserve to be included in a general history of democracy. The term was never widely employed during this period, the dominant attitude towards democracy was outright hostility, and none of the medieval polities thought of itself as a democracy. Despite this, this study highlights a wide variety of ideas, practices, procedures, and institutions that, although different from their ancient predecessor (direct democracy) or modern successor (liberal representative democracy), played a significant role in the history of democracy. This volume covers almost 1,000 years and a wide range of territories. It deals with different political spheres (ecclesiastical and secular) and socio-political settings (courtly, urban, and rural) and examines the phenomenon from the local level up to the universal realm. This volume adopts a broad cultural approach and is structured thematically. Each chapter takes a theme as its focus: sovereignty; liberty and the rule of law; the common good; economic and social democracy; religion and the principles of political obligation; citizenship and gender; ethnicity, race, and nationalism; democratic crises, revolutions, and civil resistance; international relations; and the scalability of democracy beyond the limits of a single city. These ten themes add up to an extensive, synoptic coverage of the subject.

Over the last two centuries, Europe has developed various forms of political representation from which democratic parliamentary systems gradually emerged. This book unravels the conditions, scale and impact under which political participation of common burghers and peasants emerged. Political participation in Europe before the Revolutions moved away from the traditional focus on ‘Three Estates’ which has often blurred the interpretation of popular participation’s role in societies. This book instead examines Europe’s key political variants such as high levels of commercialization and urbanization, combined with a balance of powers between competing categories of actors in society controlling relatively independent resources which lead to political participation forming across the continent. Instead of starting from any ideal type of political participation, this book focuses on the variation through time and space, its composition and activity, helps to explain the functions particular institutional settings fulfilled. The time frame 1100–1800 sheds light on the long-term evolutions such as institutional inertia and processes of oligarchizing. To reveal a correlation of economic and demographical growth with the claim of rising social classes to voice their interests. It also points to the opposite tendency: the formation of fiscalmilitary monarchical states. This book is essential reading for those interested in the formation of Europe’s political structures and students of premodern political history.