Syntactic reconstruction poses a unique set of challenges to comparative philologists, and this has led some authors to go so far as to claim it is impossible. This chapter begins by evaluating these challenges and how troubling they are for the enterprise of syntactic reconstruction. With this baseline established, the author turns to the specific attempts that have been made at reconstructing syntax, in particular with reference to Proto-Indo-European. Although some aspects of syntax were treated as early as the Neo-Grammarians, the earliest concerted efforts to treat Proto-Indo-European syntax on its own terms date to the latter half of the twentieth century. There have been several different approaches to syntactic reconstruction since then, which fall broadly into four categories: Typological reconstruction; Pattern-based approaches; Construction Grammar; and Minimalist reconstruction. This chapter argues that, while it is not the only viable methodology, Minimalist Reconstruction provides the most suitable means for the task of reconstructing relative clause syntax in Proto-Indo-European.

Attempts to register and control the populations of the east left a documentary record that was often extremely local. Provincial subjects proved astute readers and compilers of local documentation, which they rearranged in order to make claims of right. These claims can be mined for their underlying legal ideologies. Provincial subjects imagined law not as an abstract system, but as a running list of privileges and disabilities. Rights emerged from having the most correct or most persuasive hermeneutic for making sense of collections of documents in dialogue with officials, through the process of generating legal paperwork. Archives were not merely repositories of external facts about the world: they were collections of arguments that could be made. Law emerged from the collaborative process of claiming such rights.

This chapter explores the period between Thomas Becket’s expulsion from Pontigny and his return to Canterbury.

The chapter provides an annotated translation of Historia Silense (HS) the misleadingly named composite historical miscellany whose main claim upon the attention of historians has been that it includes the principal narrative account of the Leonese monarchy between 1037 and 1072. The author suggests that there is a strong probability that the work was composed by a member of the religious community of San Isidoro in the city of León, at a date certainly after 1109 and probably before 1118.

This introduction provides background and context for the four principal narrative sources for the history of the Spanish kingdom of León-Castile during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. They are Historia Silense, Chronicon Regum Legionensium by Bishop Pelayo of Oviedo, Historia Roderici and Chronica Adefonsi Imperatoris. Chronica Adefonsi Imperatoris is a biography of the hero Rodrigo Díaz, better remembered as El Cid.