Kingship and good lordship in practice in late medieval England: Henry VII,the earl of Oxford and the case of John Hale, 1487

This article opens up a neglected source-base for the study of late medieval England: royal writs under the privy seal to the chief justice of the King’s Bench ordering a halt to legal proceedings. These writs gave the king a greater degree of flexibility than simply pardoning someone, including allowing him the option of reopening cases. This article demonstrates the value of this neglected instrument of royal power by placing one example in a broader context. The case study focuses on a writ sent by Henry VII to his chief justice halting the case against John Hale, a yeoman, who was in the contingent of John de Vere, earl of Oxford, in the lead up to the Battle of Stoke. It illuminates the nature of kingship and good lordship in late medieval England, showing how the two ideas could interact for the benefit of king, lord and servant.     

Glaze-paints,technological knowledge,and ceramic specialization in the fourteenth-century Pueblo Southwest

The advent of glaze-painted ceramics by Ancestral Pueblo peoples in the US Southwest occurred during an important period of cultural change. In east-central Arizona, potters used glaze-paints to decorate a striking, representational-style pottery during the early fourteenth-century AD. We evaluate the possibility that these vessels were manufactured by emergent specialists who possessed crafting-knowledge that was not widely shared with others in their communities. Time of flight-laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (TOF-LA-ICP-MS) was used to characterize the composition of a large sample of red ware sherds from sites in the Silver Creek area. This analytical approach precisely measures the chemical composition of paints, which can then be used to model ancient technological “recipes.” Our study highlights the complexities of craft production in small-scale societies and the utility of practice-based versus typological approaches to specialization.     

A pretext for plunder? Environmental change and state‐led redevelopment in the Peruvian Amazon

In 2014, the Peruvian federal government declared the low‐income neighbourhood of Pueblo Libre de Belén in the Amazonian city of Iquitos to be in a state of emergency. A federal decree stated that ‘constant inundation’ from the Itaya River had put residents and their homes in jeopardy. Following this declaration, the federal government proposed to resettle residents in a planned community, 13 km outside the city. Drawing from interviews with 77 households in the neighbourhood, this article examines residents' responses to the relocation plan as well as their deep scepticism over the motivations driving it. Considering the state's plans for redeveloping the area as a tourist zone, this case study illustrates how concerns about the future impacts of environmental change – and flooding specifically – can be exploited by state actors for economic and political gain while further disenfranchising vulnerable urban populations.     

A Faithful Interpreter? Li Zibiao and the 1793 Macartney Embassy to China

Abstract

This paper is about the interpreter of the first British embassy to China. Li Zibiao was a Chinese Catholic priest who Lord Macartney recruited in Europe and brought with him to China. This account of his participation in the embassy aims to help us understand the role of the interpreter in intercultural negotiations in the late 18th century. Interpreting is something we tend to think of as invisible, but in these negotiations, where only a single interpreter was present, the interpreter had significant power. In effect, he acted as a mediator, shuttling between the two parties to enable each to accept the positions of the other so that the negotiations could come to a more or less successful conclusion. This position of power meant that the interpreter’s own institutional and personal interests could also be important to the negotiations. Thus loyalty was crucial to how interpreting worked. Li’s achievement during the negotiations was to create a situation where both Lord Macartney and the Qing officials were willing to accept him as a mediator and where he survived to tell the tale.