The commonwealth as history

The Imperial Dream: The British Commonwealth and Empire 1775–1969 by Edward Grierson. London: Collins, 1972. Pp. 320. £2.50. It is a pity that no one has troubled to read the proofs; the bibliography is peppered with spelling mistakes.

Commonwealth: A History of the British Commonwealth of Nations by H. Duncan Hall, with an introduction by Sir Robert Menzies. London, New York, Cincinnati, Toronto, Melbourne: Van Nostrand Reinhold Co., 1971. Pp. xxxvi+1015, maps, illustrations. £10.00.     

The church and Catholicism in contemporary Italy

Abstract

The constitutions of modern States may be seen somehow as a form of civil religion that is to be revered and that binds all people of a nation both ethically and legally. Reflecting on the constitutional architecture of a State means going deeper into the structure of societies, laws and mentalities. One of the foremost experts of the history of the Italian constitution and himself an interpreter of the fundamental Law of Italy, in this lecture Judge Sabino Cassese discusses the forms of constitutionalism adopted in Italy from the nineteenth-century Statuto Albertino down to contemporary debate on the ‘updating’ of the Italian constitution.     

The contemporary in post-medieval archaeology

SUMMARY: Contemporary archaeology is an emerging field of enquiry within the wider discipline associated with the questioning of temporal boundaries in what we study and why we engage with material remains of the recent past more generally. This article argues that contemporary archaeology should be broadly defined at this stage in its development and therefore can be located in Post-Medieval Archaeology through research that explicitly engages with what it is to conduct contemporary archaeology, but also through those implicitly considering how the past intrudes into the present. We believe that Post-Medieval Archaeology will continue to highlight archaeological studies of the contemporary into the future.