Chancellors,Presidents and Speakers: Presiding Officers in the Scottish Parliament before the Restoration*

As a unicameral assembly for most of its history, the Scottish parliament was presided over by the chief officer of state, the chancellor. Before 1603, he presided in the presence of the monarch, who was an active participant in parliaments, in contrast to the custom in England. After the union of the crowns, the chancellor presided in the presence of the monarch's representative, the king's commissioner. As with the Speaker and the lord chancellor in the English parliament, it was customary for him to operate as an agent of the crown. He also presided over the drafting committee, the lords of the articles. During parliamentary sessions, there were also semi-formal deliberative meetings of the individual estates (prelates, nobles, burgesses and, from 1592, ‘barons’, that is, lairds sitting as commissioners of the shires), each presided over by one of their own number. The Covenanting revolution of 1638 led to radical procedural reform. This included replacing the chancellor with an elected ‘president’ (Latin preses), chosen by the membership at the beginning of each session. With separate meetings of the estates becoming a formal part of parliament's procedures, there was an elected president for each estate, sometimes referred to as ‘Speakers’ for they would speak for their estates in plenary sessions of parliament.     

The ‘Little Palaces’ of St James's: Ladies,Lords, and Political Association under the later Stuarts

Clubs, coffee houses, and taverns, the most widely studied sites of political gathering in later Stuart London, largely excluded women. This essay argues that places of ‘intermixed conversation’ which existed alongside them should also be taken into account, and considers several examples of regular, semi-private assemblies, chiefly hosted by elite women (including duchesse de Mazarin, Lady Pulteney, and Barbara Villiers, Lady Fitzhardinge) and frequented by both sexes for the overt purpose of card playing, which were also significant places of political association at this period.     

‘’Tis Not in the Power of Words to Tell What My Heart Feels in Favour of You’; or,What the Ossulston Diary Does Not Reveal

Charles Bennet, 2nd Baron Ossulston is largely known through his diary of his daily social encounters, which was first analysed for its political import by Clyve Jones. A further set of documents in the Bennet family papers deepens our understanding of Ossulston's life and his social milieu among the aristocracy under Queen Anne. The love letters sent to him from a Mrs Sarah Sidney throughout 1710 reveal much about life in the aristocratic hothouse of St James's Square. They also show how the ‘ministerial revolution’ of that year was seen by two politically conversant figures at the margins of the royal court. This relationship was long-lasting and has been a hitherto unknown aspect of Ossulston's life, which may help explain some of his attitudes.     

The Culture of Fasting in Early Stuart Parliaments*

The fasts, proposed and observed by parliament in the first half of the 17th century, have always been defined as opportunities for propaganda. This article focuses, instead, on their cultural and religious meanings: why MPs believed that the act of fasting itself was important and what they hoped it would achieve. It argues that fasts were proposed for two reasons: to forge unity between parliament and the king at a time of growing division, with the aim of making parliamentary sessions more productive and successful, and to provide more direct resolution to the nation's problems by invoking divine intervention. Fast motions commanded widespread support across parliament because they were rooted in the dominant theory of causation – divine providence – and reflected the gradual conventionalisation of fasting in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. However, this consensus seemed to wane in the early 1640s as divisions between Charles I and some of his most vocal MPs widened, while the fast day observed on 17 November 1640 was used by some MPs to express their opposition to Charles's religious policy, especially regarding the siting of the communion table/altar and the position from where the service was to be read. The article concludes by reflecting on how a study of parliamentary fasting can contribute to wider debates on commensality and abstinence.     

Treason,sodomy, and the fate of Adenolfo IV,count of Acerra

The article recounts the charges brought against Adenolfo IV, count of Acerra, a magnate of the Regno in the reigns of Charles I and Charles II, and his execution for sodomy in 1293. This is one of the earliest, if not the earliest, known cases of the death penalty being exacted for sodomy in Europe. Behind it lies a trial in which Adenolfo was convicted of treason but received a royal pardon five years later. The story casts light on relations between the rulers of the Regno and their overlords the popes, on the judicial methods employed in the Regno, and on the government of Charles II.     

The history and philosophy of social science

Carlo Ginzburg is best known as the author of a popular and widely commented work of microstoria Il formaggio e i vermi, published in 1976. Rather than focusing on Ginzburg's contributions to the genre of microstoria, or on the development of his long and very productive scholarly career, my aim in this article is to reflect on a set of themes that recur, with impressive persistence, in his work, from his earliest publications in the mid-1960s, to his most recent works. Above all, I suggest that two elements recur in his work, and that these, jointly, impart upon it its defining character. They are the concern with epistemological issues of knowing, and the ethical conception of the historian's work, which Ginzburg expressess and defends with urelenting rigour.     

Arthur Schopenhauer: Manuscript remains,volume IV; The manuscript books of 1830–1852 and the last manuscripts

This article presents and compares aspects of Charles Taylor's and Hans Blumenberg's seemingly opposing views about agency and epistemology, setting them in the context of the tradition in German ideas called ‘philosophical anthropology’, with which both align their thinking. It presents key strands of this tradition, from their inception in the late eighteenth century in the writings of Herder, Schiller and others associated with anthropology to their articulation by thinkers such as Max Scheler, Arnold Gehlen and Karl Löwith in the early twentieth century. The main issues here are: man's status as part of nature or as ‘radically divorced’ from nature; the possibility of objective knowledge of man versus the epistemological status of human ‘meaning’; the view of knowledge as abstraction versus ‘concrete’ or ‘lived’ experience. Within these parameters the article contrasts Taylor's emphasis on ‘engaged’ agency, embedded in discourses, bodies and predispositions, with Blumenberg's sense of our ‘indirect’ relation to reality: ‘delayed, selective, and above all “metaphorical”’. It concludes that each position may be traced back to a key strand in philosophical anthropology: the one emphasising man's unique freedom, the other that sees man's grasp of reality as uniquely interwoven with a background of meanings.     

Missionaries,Healing and Sorcery in Melanesia: A Scottish Evangelist in Ambrym Island,Vanuatu

Melanesian people have recently become highly occupied with history as an arena for moral scrutiny and causal explanations for contemporary failures. On the island of Ambrym in Vanuatu, this form of ontological worry goes back to the first missionaries on the island, the Murray brothers. This article takes us back to events in the 1880s when the missionaries were active on Ambrym, and searches into their social position. Drawing on the diary of Charles Murray, the main argument unfolds around his involvement in the realm of men's ritual powers, how he himself played his part as a highly knowledgeable magician and how his downfall came about by challenging a manly realm of knowledge and power and his wider inclusion of women and lesser men in his church.     

God and the illegal alien: United States immigration law and a theology of politics

This essay considers the marks of authentic Christian prophecy in Fra Anton Montesino's 1511 sermon in Hispaniola, in its political and cultural context, arguing that these marks are witness, courage, discernment and a concrete, contextual focus. It then reflects on the ways in which these marks of authentic prophecy might be displayed in our own very different context, drawing a characterization of that context from Charles Taylor's A Secular Age. It concludes with reflections on the foundation of prophecy in prayer and hope, and with critical discussion of Luke Bretherton's use of the motif of “exile in Babylon” (Jeremiah 29) as a Biblical image for Christian prophetic presence in liberal, secular societies.