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Recent comparative fiscal federalism work has noted how the US displays a mix of substantial federal capacity and no federal fiscal rules for sub-federal units as opposed to the EU's mix of regulation and lack of capacity. The difference is explained by the lack of federal capacity in the EU case, which presumably creates a need for regulation. However, these studies are cross-sectional. This carries the obvious drawback of abstracting the actual political and historical processes that have given rise to the respective mixes of regulation and capacity in the two polities. In this article, I trace the historical process by which the specific mix of no rules and capacity became entrenched in the US in the second half of the 20th century and ask whether that political-economic history has any lessons for the EU today.

This article traces the relationship between parliament and the ordinary people of medieval England, mainly peasants but including townsmen, between about 1270 and 1450. In charting the early history of representation prior to 1270, it outlines the transition from representation of the people by the country's magnates, to the socially broader system of representation through the election of shire knights and town burgesses. Two themes emerge: the growth of the electorate, from the probable presence of freeholders among the electors in the county court under Edward I, to the enfranchisement of the 40s. freeholders by the famous statute of 1430; and the changing nature of petitions to parliament, from the complaints of individuals to those presented by the Commons on behalf of the nation. In the history of both these themes, the Black Death and subsequent plagues marked a turning point. In drastically reducing the population, the plagues brought prosperity to many of the peasant survivors – men who sought a place among the electorate in the early 15th century. And in threatening the income of the gentry through higher labour costs, the plagues fundamentally changed the attitude of the Commons in parliament towards the people. Until about 1350, the Commons had spoken up for their interests, in the face of Edward III's oppressive wartime demands; but from that time onwards, the Commons set their collective face against the rising claims of a potentially more prosperous people. The article pays special attention to the position of the villeins, whose relationship with parliament differed considerably from that of the freeholders.

Being an integral element of how humans interact with one another, violence, however disruptive, often also manifests itself as an ordering force. In this collection of essays, the contributing authors explore this particular aspect of violence from a wide variety of perspectives, in a set of studies that focus on both the ancient and medieval worlds. Case-studies in the section on Antiquity include work on such issues as domestic violence; violence and myth; violence in Greek and Roman historiography, poetry, comedy and tragedy, and art; women and violence; violence and pollution; and various studies on classical Greek and Roman perceptions of violence. The medieval section continues with papers that look into the role of violence in the saints' lives and passions, violence in the love poems of the Carmina Burana, as well as several studies that center on actual cases of violence, such as violence and women in medieval Galicia and violence at Portuguese universities during the High Middle Ages. This book is essential reading for everyone interested in how and why violence came to be embedded in the cultural practices of classical Greece, ancient Rome, and medieval Europe.

Richard I was England's king from 1189 to 1199, though he famously spent much of that time away on the Third Crusade. England's stories about Richard I's reign in absentia were textualized mainly in chronicles until the mid fourteenth century, when that textual archive was augmented: with no obvious provocation, King Richard , a Middle English verse narrative about Richard I, was written down in a manuscript book now known as the Auchinleck Manuscript (Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS Advocates' 19.2.1). King Richard has no readily recognizable precedents or analogues that survive to us, but after its appearance in Auchinleck the text was transmitted in England for another century and a half. Prompted by this sudden and then continuous retrospective engagement with Richard I that King Richard 's appearance in the fourteenth century and continued transmission thereafter evinces, this dissertation seeks to answer two related questions: first, what might explain the emergence of Richard I's reign as a site of ongoing retrospection and textual reconstruction beginning in fourteenth-century England? And second, how were narratives about the past constructed and sustained over time, across and in the spaces between manuscripts, in medieval England? Chapter 1 turns to the period between Richard I's reign and the mid fourteenth century, to interrogate Richard's relevance in England prior to the appearance of King Richard . Based on thirteenth-century legislative innovations around legal memory, I suggest a terminus post quem for later medieval England's retrospective engagement with Richard I and argue that this legislation made his reign a formal mechanism for the past's reconstruction. Chapter 2 pursues the implications of this reconstructive process to understand its effects on England's public. I find that, by the last decade of the thirteenth century, narratives of Richard's reign were being orally constructed and disseminated throughout England, especially in local courts, where, I contend, Richard I became a subject of urgent talk, gossip, and public contestation. In chapter 3, I examine this ongoing narrative and memorial reconstruction of Richard's reign from a different angle, focusing on the earliest traces of "new" stories about him, traces that are neither talk nor text, but in between: unfinished sketches in Oxford, Christ Church, MS 92, a book made for Edward III in the early fourteenth century. I show how the book's nuanced visual program harnesses and mobilizes the legally generated talk and ephemeral stories, or "gossip," about Richard to validate Edward's reign, but also how the emerging picture of Richard I is of a man on crusade: the man we have come to enshrine in our own histories. Chapter 4 tracks this emerging picture to Auchinleck's King Richard , which glosses the sketches in Edward's book, and, I argue, pointedly textualizes the gossip in circulation about Richard in an attempt at once to stabilize and politically mobilize England's collective memory of the Third Crusade. Chapter 5 traces the evolution of this "textualization of gossip" throughout King Richard 's later transmission, demonstrating how and why King Richard became a space in which collective identity and the idea of England were continuously reconstructed. This discussion then extends to our own scholarly retrospective engagement with the medieval memory of Richard I, retrospection that has been shaped primarily by the most "recent" textualized gossip: Karl Brunner's 1913 composite edition of King Richard . Through its investigative trajectory, this dissertation shows how King Richard became a space for defining the idea of England, and argues for a paradigm-shift in the way we attempt to recover the past.