Architects, this article emphasises, follow discernible procedures when designing their buildings, and these include identifiable methods of imitation, which are inextricably linked to the meanings they intend their buildings to impart. With these precepts explained, they are then explored in relation to the architect Andrea Palladio (1508–80), because his design methods and his buildings’ meanings changed so markedly at certain critical moments of his career. Although chronicled in much detail, Palladio’s career has been little elucidated in its development. The differing creative methods Palladio followed at different times have never been properly identified, and the momentous changes he made to them at certain junctures have remained largely unrecognised. Through considering his methods, it becomes possible to understand how these changes related to him formulating new career objectives and why he felt the need to do so. Thus, the change he effected around 1550 was linked to a dissatisfaction with his previous practice coupled with an ambition to seek out commissions from prominent Venetians for the designs of new villas; and the one he subsequently made around 1560 was precipitated by his realisation that he now needed to broaden his horizons, and by his concomitant determination to take advantage of opportunities, never previously presented, of devising schemes for churches. As a result, it becomes easy to see how the design principles he followed in his later years were the ones he embraced in his architectural treatise, the Quattro libri (1570), and then understand how the treatise would affect the methods followed by those later architects who took note of it, and the meanings they expected their own buildings to convey.

This essay presents the first comprehensive analysis of a series of land deeds prepared by the Laraos of Yauyos, Peru, during the First General Land Inspection to secure title to farm- and pasturelands. Scholars have shown the centrality of this first general inspection for the country’s agrarian history, but almost invariably reducing it to the appropriation of native lands and the formation of colonial rural estates. Many works have explored the mechanisms by which Spanish actors secured title to formerly indigenous lands during the Inspection, the start of a process that has been recently termed “the great dispossession.” Much less attention has been placed, however, on the strategies of native Andean commoner groups that not only used the Land Inspection to protect their holdings but also relied on it to break away from their original villages, acquire new lands, establish new settlements, and accrue recognition as independent communities. Through the analysis of the Laraos primordial titles, I show that, key in this process was the collection of narratives and the performance of walkabouts that, when committed to writing in the form of title-maps and witness testimonies, gave communities-in-the-making the necessary tools to succeed in these self-directed projects of commoner colonization.

The letter written by Archbishop Manasses I of Reims (c. 1069–1080) to papal legate Hugh of Die in early 1080, first published by Jean Mabillon in 1687 and traditionally known as the Apologia, offers a vigorous defense of archiepiscopal prerogative against legatine authority during the pontificate of Gregory VII. Long thought to be the original letter sent to Hugh, the Mabillon text is, in fact, a later, expanded recension of the archbishop’s letter created to support resistance to Gregory VII’s reform agenda. The original, shorter version of Manasses’s letter survives uniquely in a little-studied, sixteenth-century copy at Wolfenbüttel. The expanded recension was likely compiled as part of a legal dossier assembled to defend ecclesiastical traditions and clerical privileges, including marriage, in the church province of Reims. Through a textual analysis and comparison of the versions of Manasses’s letter, what once was seen as a singular protest emerges as a strategic text within a broader regional pushback against Rome and reveals how local clerical networks harnessed legal tools to challenge papal reform. The history of the letter’s preservation and reproduction, from Mabillon to modern editors, in turn demonstrates the necessity of querying the manuscript and printed evidence of sources from the eleventh-century reform period to better understand how they were deployed and how modern editorial choices have shaped our reception, and hence our assumptions, about the texts.

By considering reaction to revolution in Europe during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in relation to the rise of the Gothic Revival, this article offers a bold assessment of the interplay between responses to the Middle Ages and political culture. It examines the Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie (1801–05) at the Vaccheria of the royal site of San Leucio, Caserta, in southern Italy, with a view to exploring the reciprocity between what can be seen as a neo-Gothic ’revolution’, wider political and industrial upheaval, and the historic ties between southern Italy and Sicily within the Mezzogiorno. In focusing on this neglected church, which was commissioned by Ferdinand IV of Naples and III of Sicily, the article aims to transcend the tendency in modern scholarship to discount the Gothic Revival in Italy as merely a superficial matter of taste. Recognising revivalism’s political agency, it is argued that Santa Maria delle Grazie bore witness to a profound stylistic crisis as classicism’s absolutist hegemony waned amid the epochal crisis of monarchical absolutism during the period. In tracing architectural and urban experimentation with respect to reactionism, proto-industrialism and medievalism in southern Italy, both before and after late eighteenth-century revolutionary activity, the Gothic Revival is situated within its proper revolutionary context. By extending considerations to Sicily and situating Santa Maria delle Grazie within the Mezzogiorno — through resonances with its medieval histories, including Norman and Swabian rule, and with contemporary ambitions for cohesion between the Kingdoms of Naples and Sicily — the article argues for the reactionary yet transnational visual and political dimensions of neo-medievalism. In so doing, it elucidates a symbiosis between architecture and medievalism as a formidable conduit for expressing and enacting power in the Age of Revolutions.

The Imperial War Graves Commission (IWGC) was established in 1917 to build and maintain memorial sites for soldiers of the British Empire who lost their lives to the First (and later Second) World War. Part of this charge was a distinct ‘Indian’ project, arising from the Indian Army’s notable participation in the war and the colonial state’s politics of ‘non-interference’ and performative benevolence. This article investigates the early years of this engagement, primarily based on records held at the archive of the (now) Commonwealth War Graves Commission and a field visit to the Neuve Chapelle Memorial in France. It examines the IWGC’s initial deliberations on the funerary treatment of Indians, the bureaucratic development of connected commemorative policy in Egypt and France, and the building of the Commission’s first two Indian memorials at Port Tewfik, Egypt, and Neuve Chapelle, France. Tracing architecture, politics and policy as interrelated concerns, the article addresses a major historiographic gap and attempts to break from the Eurocentric and siloing tendencies of current scholarship. While it continues from recent research on inequalities in the IWGC’s work, it asserts that the organisation’s ‘other’ engagements need to be examined not only in view of differences, but in terms of their own histories as well. In so doing, it begins to relocate the global and imperial in the history of the IWGC.