Household knights,chamber knights and king’s knights: the development of the royal knight in fourteenth-century England

The fourteenth century witnessed a considerable change in the way in which knights were retained in royal service in England. The system of retaining ‘household knights’, which had been in operation since at least the twelfth century, gave way to a new system based around the retaining of ‘chamber knights’ and ‘king’s knights’. These new ranks were retained in different ways to the household knights and often performed different functions. Consequently, the place they occupied in fourteenth-century kingship was markedly different. Despite the significance of this development, the scholarship on it has been limited and often contradictory. This article offers a detailed reassessment of how and why this development occurred and what its impacts were for the fourteenth-century polity.     

An abbot between two cultures: Maiolus of Cluny considers the Muslims of La Garde‐Freinet

In July 972, Muslim raiders from the citadel of Fraxinetum (modern La Garde‐Freinet) abducted Abbot Maiolus of Cluny and his entourage as they crossed the Great Saint Bernard Pass (Mons Iovis) in the western Alps. This article analyses a little‐known letter that Maiolus sent to his Cluniac brethren to secure payment for his release. Interwoven with biblical passages drawn from the Book of Samuel and the Psalter, the abbot's ransom letter provides the rare opportunity to examine how one of the most influential Christian leaders of the tenth century perceived his Muslim captors and their religion.     

Connecting ontological (in)securities and generation through the everyday and emotional geopolitics of Falkland Islanders*

Abstract

Debates about the security of British Overseas Territories (OTs) like the Falkland Islands are typically framed through the discourses of formal and practical geopolitics in ways that overlook the perspectives of their citizens. This paper focuses on the voices of two generations of citizens from the Falkland Islands, born before and after the 1982 war, to show how they perceive geopolitics and (in)security in different ways. It uses these empirical insights to show how theorisations of ontological (in)security might become more sensitive to the lived experiences of diverse generational groups within states and OTs like the Falklands. The paper reflects on the complex experiences of citizens living in a postcolonial OT that still relies heavily on the UK Government and electorate for assurances of security, in the face of diplomatic pressure from Argentina. While Islander youth reflected on how their views about geopolitics and security might be considered marginal, relative to those who directly experienced geopolitical events in the Falklands during the second half of the twentieth century, the paper illustrates the multiple ways they can act as agents of (in)security.     

The Fictions of Autonomous Invention: Accumulation by Dispossession,Commodification and Life Patents in Canada

Abstract: In 2002 the Canadian Supreme Court ruled to deny Harvard College a whole organism patent over the oncomouse. In 2004, the same court ruled that Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser had violated Monsanto patents covering GM canola. Both decisions rejected whole organism patents, running counter to US precedents. Yet both, nevertheless, consolidate private claims to life as patentable inventions, and critics claim, with some support from Justices in the Schmeiser case, that patents over genes amount to de facto patents over whole organisms. In this paper I argue these cases are broadly consistent with the notion of accumulation by dispossession as a means to expand the scale and scope of capital accumulation via so‐called ‘extra‐economic’ means. As such, I examine the cases as privatizations, but also as relational moments in the commodification of nature. However, in hoping to unpack and fill out this notion of the extra‐economic, as well as to critically examine the necessarily incomplete character of commodification as a tendency, I look to the ways in which judges and interested activists deliberate over the economic, legal, ecological, ethical, and even metaphysical arguments and representations required to uphold discrete genes, processes, and whole organisms as inventions.