This chapter is a reading of the second rock-water episode (Numbers 20) and the manna episode (Exodus 16). It also addresses the question of why Moses dies in the wilderness. The two episodes are part of a new version of the wilderness narrative that is emplotted like an Assyrian annal as a vision for the Israelites’ triumphant return from exile, a story parallel to the one told in poetic form in Second Isaiah. The second rock-water episode blames exile on royal disobedience and writes human kingship out of the story. Moses dies in the wilderness because kingship is dead, and God is now depicted as Israel’s only king. The manna episode reinvents human leadership as Moses is reimagined as a priest who mediates divine blessing by teaching torah.

Antigone is the only character in Sophocles who explicitly purports to value philia above hatred. She does so in the course of a short dialogue, central to the play, which turns on the nature of philia and enmity.

Chapter 3 covers the crisis that eventually led to the people’s insistence on having a king, the arguments for and against that development, how a king might be appointed, God’s involvement in the process of his appointment, and how Saul might go about being a king.

The period between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries was a phase of profound political and economic mutation for the Iberian Peninsula, in the context of which the confluence of expansionist processes dictated the emergence and reconfiguration of different political maps. This chapter seeks to trace the general evolution of the different political models that took shape in the Iberian Peninsula throughout this period, as well as to characterize the action of the institutions responsible for defining the foundations of an economic policy. To this end, the chapter is divided into two parts. The first one focuses on the evolution of the space controlled by the Muslims, looking at transversal aspects of economic policy and the implications deriving from the development of the territory. The second part focuses on the study of Christian institutions, on the construction of the Iberian kingdoms, and highlights the role of the monarchies and political institutions in the establishment of the economy and on the transition from a war-based economy to an economy where the market and trade assume a growing importance.

Chapter 1 describes what might be called a Qajar imperial vision – the written, visual, and auditory ways that Qajar kingship and political authority were articulated, as well the structure and institutions of Qajar government. It draws on early Qajar chronicles, political ethical literature (andarznāma), art, and architecture, among other sources, to argue that Aqa Muhammad Khan and Fath-ʿAli Shah self-consciously presented themselves as heirs to a long tradition of Iranian kingship, but especially made claims to have resuscitated a model of imperial rule. The chapter helps frame the remainder of the book’s focus on early Qajar political practices.

Chapter 9 finally turns to the results of litigation in the courts of royal justice. Analysing the well-preserved books of orders and decrees made by the Court of Requests, this chapter asks how far this tribunal’s determinations met the expectations of petitioners, acknowledged the arguments of defendants, and subscribed to existing legal norms. It first surveys the changing circles of men who passed judgment in Requests, and considers the extent of their legal and judicial expertise. It then sets out the general formula of decrees recorded in this period, and what they can reveal about the processes of decision-making in this Court, the evidence it examined, and the awards within its gift. Finally, the chapter turns to the longer-term significance of rulings made within this burgeoning jurisdiction: assessing the signs of increasing caution about the scope of Requests’ powers, on the one hand, and the future utility of written royal decrees once they were in the hands of winning parties, on the other. In all, this chapter demonstrates that making the extraordinary powers of the Crown more ordinary meant balancing litigants’ demands with practical limitations.

Chapter 7 turns to the recipients of petitions for royal justice and their initiation of litigation. The chapter begins by weighing up the evidence for direct royal involvement in these judicial processes, with particular attention paid to a set of documents signed by Henry VII and Henry VIII personally. Otherwise, based on a survey of the signatures and annotations scattered across the Court of Requests’ early Tudor archive, this chapter identifies the men who delivered justice in this tribunal day to day. Mapping onto the evolutionary trajectory set out in Chapter 3, the overall impression is of transition from a diverse and changeable group of bill handlers within the royal household under Henry VII, followed by a spell in which the household clergy oversaw all business in Requests, and culminating in a smaller quorum of legally trained judges and Masters of Requests by the end of the period. The chapter then spells out the procedures followed once a petition was in the hands of this frontline personnel, and the measures they took to preserve the traditional prioritisation of the poor litigant.

Chapter 1 establishes the intellectual and cultural backdrop for royal justice in late fifteenth and early sixteenth-century England. It explores what justice meant for the wider populace of this period, drawing from a range of elite and non-elite sources: coronation oaths and proclamations issued by the Crown; sermons and speeches made by the chief ministers of the realm in Parliament and Council; and bills of complaints, popular poetry, rebel petitions, and commonplace books produced by humbler people. Surveying this range of differing perspectives, the principle of justice supplied by the king proves to have been deeply ingrained across society. Yet how, exactly, it might be put into practice proved a more contentious topic, and one that opened even the existing royal courts up to criticism. This nebulous ideal, with its cognate concepts of mercy, pity, and charity, was already at odds with the law of the land by the middle of the fifteenth century. These fragmentations help to explain why a more extraordinary kind of royal justice was in demand, and to show the expectations that weighed upon it.

By way of a firm case study for the new system of royal justice in action, Chapter 3 provides the first history of the Court of Requests from its initial entry in the historical records in 1483 through to its settlement at Westminster by the end of Henry VIII’s reign. The origin of this tribunal is located in the practice of receiving petitions during royal progresses, particularly in the reign of Richard III. Thereafter, Requests was part of the itinerant household, following Henry VII and Henry VIII as they travelled around their dominions. It only acquired a more defined timetable, judiciary, and seat at Westminster in the 1530s, when it became subject to ministerial reform programmes. Importantly, this evolution to courthood was neither smooth nor linear: its business levels peaked and troughed, it could seemingly always revert to acting on the road, and it was rarely referred to by the name ‘Court of Requests’. With these interpretive challenges in mind, this chapter argues that, contrary to administrative historians’ tendencies to identify positive development in improved bureaucracy, Requests’ flexibility and proximity to the king’s person was advantageous to petitioners.

Scottish constitutional history has become a subject of much interest in recent decades. Since the Union came into force in May 1707, Scotland has been one component of a complex and dynamic state. The Union itself has been described as an ‘enigma’ that defies easy or conventional definitions.1 Britain is simultaneously ‘unitary’, in the sense that sovereign power, to this day, rests with the ‘crown-in-parliament’ at Westminster, and ‘pluralistic’, because the Treaty continues to guarantee Scotland (more than Wales and Northern Ireland) considerable autonomy in civil affairs.2 In this respect, the establishment of a Scottish parliament in 1999 is simply the belated democratisation of what has always been a distinct ‘national’ politics. It has also (re)kindled debates on Scotland’s possible constitutional futures and this has included reflection on Scotland’s pre-Union heritage. These debates were aided by the creation of an accessible online edition of the records of the Scottish parliament to 1707.3 The renewed interest in Scottish parliamentary history has complemented endeavours in the field of political thought, where attention has focused on the centrality of kingship to Renaissance and early modern discourses. Certain questions have been thrown into sharper relief as a consequence of these inter-related developments. How did abstracted conceptualisations of the political community inform the ways in which people engaged with its governing and representative institutions? How were the boundaries of legitimate political action negotiated and renegotiated over time? To what principles were political actors expected to conform and what happened when those principles were challenged?

The main questions concerning English governance addressed by medieval theorists were: (a) the division of authority between the Church, headed by the Pope, and the king; (b) the extent to which the king was bound by law and custom; (c) whether he was bound to act with the counsel and consent of his magnates; and (d) whether he could legitimately be resisted or even deposed for violating moral, religious, customary or legal constraints.

It is time to put God back into readings of the British constitution. Writings about that constitution since 1945 have often focused on technicalities and processes of the constitutional order – whether the law, Parliament, or territorial politics – rather than the constitution as a lived idea. Yet states, beneath the daily reality of their role as legal entities claiming monopolies of violence over the territories they purportedly control, are fundamentally ideas.

The thirteenth-century kingdom of England was a political, jurisdictional and administrative unit consisting of thirty-nine contiguous counties which the Norman and Angevin kings of England had in large part inherited from their Anglo-Saxon predecessors – although two of those counties (Cheshire and Durham) had by the thirteenth century come to enjoy an enhanced degree of autonomy, which for many, if not all, purposes placed them outside direct royal control. The kings of England also possessed a limited degree of control over the marcher lordships of Wales which had been conquered from native Welsh rulers by ‘English’ lords and constituted a barrier between England and the kingdoms of Wales. The rest of Wales remained under the control of native Welsh rulers until Edward I in successive campaigns in the 1270s and 1280s destroyed the last remaining native princes and their independence. He did not annex the conquered Welsh lands to the kingdom of England or dispossess all the conquered Welsh, but he established a separate principality of Wales in the north and west of Wales under English control and in 1301 the king’s eldest son became ‘prince’ of Wales. Edward also imposed a version of English law and of the English local administrative system on this area through the Statute of Wales of 1284.1

Kingship and messianic language and ideologies pervade the Apocalypse; however, readers rarely appreciate the extent to which this rhetoric shapes the text. The Introduction explores how and why these lenses have been relegated or ignored altogether in modern scholarship.

Perhaps most influential was F.C. Baur’s notion of the decisive victory of “Pauline” Christianity over “Petrine” Christianity, whereby the “primitive Jewish” conceptions of a coming Messiah of the latter were replaced with “universal” non-Jewish Christologies of the former. This degradation of Jewish messianism in Paul paved the way for future commentators to make even further-reaching claims. For example, Wrede argued that Jesus own self-understanding was non-messianic, while Bousset claimed that gentile Christian communities appropriated Jewish messianic claims, but divested them of their erstwhile Jewish connotations and eventually replaced them altogether.

The so-called Postwar Turn identified the anti-Jewish underpinnings of this trajectory, recognizing both the extent and importance of messianic ideologies throughout New Testament Christologies, including especially in Pauline epistles and Gospel texts.