This chapter approaches the question of eighteenth-century discussions of the freedom of speech from the angle of the truth, and the argument for the freedom of speech based on the need to be free to seek the truth, as defended for example by Milton. It begins in England after the ‘Glorious Revolution’ and the lapsing of the Licensing Act in 1695; this led, in the context of debates about censorship and toleration, to criticism of subversive and irreligious pamphlets, together with arguments for free speech based on the right to seek the truth. Across the Channel, the lack of censorship in England was admired, and writers like Voltaire defended freedom for philosophers to publish the truth, on the basis that their writings had no effect on the mass of the people. Thus the defence of free speech founded on the need to seek the truth entails its limitation to those who are capable of exercising their reason in this search, which excludes the mass of the population. There was also discussion of scurrilous or untruthful works, which should not be published with impunity. This chapter brings out the underlying tension between arguments about the freedom to seek the truth and recognition that certain opinions cannot be circulated without restrictions and must be punished. It is to a large extent the commitment to the truth which is behind these limitations. The few defences of completely unrestricted freedom of the press abandon the argument based on the need for the individual to seek the truth and ground it in rights and the interest of the state. And despite certain claims that the truth can be recognised by all, there remains the unresolved question of who can decide on the truth when it is contested.

There is a potentially bewildering array of sources for historical material culture research – this chapter explains in detail the potentials and the pitfalls of using different kinds of repositories and also where to locate material in a range of environments including museums, galleries, historic houses and institutions. The chapter provides a step-by-step guide to using museum documentation to locate relevant collections and also discusses online catalogues, which are commonly a first port of call for the material culture researcher.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a record of, and tribute to, the beauties and pleasures of chivalric life. Gawain tells the story of a fearsome green-skinned knight who rides into King Arthur's court, and issues a challenge: will one of them strike a blow at him with his axe, and agree to receive a return blow in a year's time? Chivalry is presented throughout as offering an attractive front to the world with nothing solid underpinning it. In life as well as in literature, chivalry emphasises the importance of polite and honourable behaviour and speech, lavish display, and other external manifestations. The confessions in the last part of the poem point to a fundamental difference between the secular chivalric and the Christian ethical systems. The games and the glamour end in Morgan, and the code of honour leaves Gawain, the pearl of knights, a broken man.

Howard’s fame meant that philanthropy, prison and crime were inextricably linked after his death. The foundation of the Philanthropic Society in 1788, aiming to rescue children likely to fall into crime, further strengthened the link. Robert Young, its founder, had far-reaching ideas for what philanthropy could achieve, testament to the impact of the Enlightenment. On a practical level, the movement for reform of prisons revived in the 1810s, spearheaded by Quakers. One of them, William Allen, started a periodical, The Philanthropist, to advance his ideas and to lament the failure to sustain reform after Howard’s death. Quakers founded the Prison Discipline Society and in the harsher mood of the early nineteenth century promoted use of the treadwheel. By the mid-1830s the state had effectively taken over control of prison, but critics continued to focus their attention on philanthropy for its failures, either because, with solitary confinement, prison was too harsh or because it was too comfortable for prisoners. The chapter ends with a section on the Howard Association, founded in 1866, again with Quaker support. It was the main pressure group though by the end of the century it was being challenged as too conservative.

Paris, BNF Latin 4629, is a manuscript containing Frankish law-codes, capitularies of Charlemagne and formulae, most probably copied in Bourges at the start of the ninth century. It has been linked with the court of Charlemagne by Donald Bullough. Amid the legal texts, it contains a dialogue that offers insights into some of the questions Charlemagne's subjects sought to answer. By offering a transcription and a translation, this chapter first provides a teaching source for those who want to understand Frankish thoughts, especially about religion and ethics, and then explores where these questions and answers may have come from, and why they might have been copied here. That exploration is, of course, an exercise in what some call historical imagination and others call guesswork. As such, it stands as a tribute to the scholar who has given the author the strongest support for guessing how Carolingians thought and acted.

This chapter explains the concept of reliance and reliance systems – the way in which human agency stems from collectively produced systems. It then links this understanding of reliance and agency to capabilities theory, and explains the contribution that reliance systems make to rendering capabilities theory more aware of the materiality of capabilities. The chapter then delves into the nature of reliance systems, focusing on separating the material and functional components of reliance systems. We explain the need to modify social contract theory in order to pursue a better politics of reliance systems, as opposed to other possible political avenues such as rights and deliberative democracy. The chapter ends by suggesting six principles for examining the morality of any given spatial contract.

This chapter explores Chinese efforts at indigenising Christianity and this could not have been more obvious than with the Taiping Rebellion. It explains why both the Qing’s intellectual elite and foreign missionaries shunned the Taiping Rebellion. It also probes the strange alliance to suppress the Taiping between the Westerners who waged the Second Opium War on China and the Qing regime.

Royal jurisdiction through the common law increased exponentially during the period 1215-1381. Participation in the royal courts was therefore an important way in which people became increasingly familiar with the processes of law. A mixture of royal policy, experience of litigation and feedback from lawyers and litigants shaped the development of the royal courts. The effects of changes are assessed by four criteria: availability, actionability, accountability and accessibility. The chapter first considers the availability of royal justice and provides the reader with a snapshot of the judicial system. Accountability was an important feature of the Crown's policy towards the administration of justice and one that had political and financial implications as well as purely legal ones. The Crown's role in the prosecution of individuals was not restricted to the identification of offenders through the use of local juries.

Just as the founding of the first European Communities in the 1950s produced a backlash in the 1960s and 1970s, the second phase of integration has also met with resistance. Recent challenges to the classic narrative have taken a number of forms: the desire of the new member-states from East-Central Europe for recognition of their suffering under communism, the growing economic problems brought about by the Eurozone crisis, and the threat of disintegration posed by Brexit. In the case of European expansion, continental institutions and existing member-states were again confronted by conflicting understandings of the European past. In particular, the states of the east have challenged the central place of the Holocaust and the image of Auschwitz in the classic narrative of integration. The combined monetary, banking, and sovereign debt crisis brought on by the Great Recession of 2008 merely reinforced these cleavages. This was followed by the Brexit vote on 23 June 2016 and is further threatened by the rise of populism and the spectre of additional votes to leave the EU. These proximate challenges have been compounded by rise to power of the first generation of European leaders with no personal memories of Europe’s age of total war.

Daniel Weinstock frames his response to Rainer Forst within debates over ideal and non-ideal political theory. If any political concept reflects non-ideal political circumstances, he argues, it is toleration, since it emerges from a context in which people not only disagree about how their common lives should be organised, but are willing to coerce others into seeing things their way. Turning to Forst’s work, Weinstock provides a brief account of the overall argument, highlighting the main structural elements of the view Forst defends. He then identifies a puzzling feature in that account, one that facilitates the conflation of non-ideal and ideal toleration. In the third and fourth sections of the chapter, Weinstock describes two families of reasons that might underpin a non-ideal conception of toleration, one that is more attuned than Forst’s is to self-restraint as a constitutive ingredient of the structural account of toleration. The first of these families of reasons is consequentialist in nature, while the second emphasises the fallibilism of the kind of human judgement that is central to Forst’s own way of thinking about toleration. Finally, Weinstock offers some reasons for thinking that these two conceptions of toleration ought to be considered distinct, rather than, as Forst thinks, examples of the non-ideal kind drawing its normative justification from its approximation of the ideal kind.

After c.1970 few medieval economic and social historians approaching the topic of the medieval peasantry could do so without including some discussion of the demography of their object of investigation. The introduction of subtle and involved demographic technique into the research of medievalists was dependent upon the development of the subject of demography and of an overlap between historians and demographers. J.C. Russell, one of the most important exponents of historical demography in the middle decades of the twentieth century, had begun to consider the sources and approaches to the population history of the middle ages in the 1920s and 1930s while teaching relevant university courses in New Mexico. Russell's own discussion of medieval demography, while certainly not confined to the sources of the social elites in this period, offers little comment on the rural population per se or the demography of the medieval English peasantry in particular.