This chapter shows that not all relationships, and therefore not all sites, fall neatly into a polarised concept of meetings between equals or meetings between superior and inferior. Whether a ruler was a superior or an inferior is an issue dependent on one's vantage point at any one particular time. Hence, superiority and inferiority are in terms of Anglo-Welsh peacemaking not static points at the opposite ends of a scale, but rather a fluid framework guided by realpolitik. Meetings between superior and inferior, or between victor and vanquished, were not located on border sites and they were generally characterised by one-sidedness rather than exchanges. It is evident that, to modern and medieval commentators alike, the site of a conference directly influenced the succeeding chain of events and it reflected the relationship between the two rulers making peace, or, for that matter, war.

New historicism envisages and practises a mode of study in which literary and non-literary texts are given equal weight and constantly inform or interrogate each other. It is resolutely anti-establishment, always implicitly on the side of liberal ideals of personal freedom and accepting and celebrating all forms of difference and 'deviance'. This chapter describes the critical activities of new historicists and presents an example of new historicism. Cultural materialism combines an attention to historical context, theoretical method, political commitment, and textual analysis. It is often linked in discussion with new historicism, its American counterpart. Political Shakespeare explains some of the differences between the two movements. STOP and THINK sections in the chapter provide the reader with some ‘hands-on’ experience with the subject discussed. It presents Terence Hawkes's essay 'Telmah' as an example of an informal variant of cultural materialism.

This introduction presents some of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book is an examination of the themes and approaches employed by historians in their discussions of the medieval English peasant, and most particularly in the period from the end of the eleventh to the beginning of the sixteenth century. It offers an overview and assessment of the development of work on medieval peasants since the close of the nineteenth century. Much of the early twentieth-century discussion of the medieval economy was located within and was explained by institutional structures. The book presents a sketch of the key historiographical phases in this area of research and writing. This sketch is also supported by a discussion of a range of possible causes of changes and developments in writing on the medieval English peasantry. The book considers historical reflection upon the term 'peasant' and its appropriateness.

This chapter looks at sections from Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835-40). Tocqueville uses ‘democracy’ as a social rather than narrowly political concept, i.e. a concept that points to a general tendency underlying the development of modern society. Tocqueville regrets the decline of aristocratic society and its values but thinks it is irreversible. Instead, he finds in the USA some of the mechanisms – including religion and ‘individualism properly understood’ – that can turn democracy into a good thing, after all.

This chapter is about how what was unsayable in late sixteenth-century England became sayable by mid-seventeenth-century England. The dynamics of what we might call free speech were worked out in a series of tensions, and sometimes conflicts, between the duty of certain public men to defend the public interest – crudely that of the commonwealth and of true religion – and the constraints placed on who got to talk about such things and where and to whom they got to talk about them. The result was a very restricted circle of persons comprising in secular affairs Privy Counsellors, in practice certain courtiers and favourites, and in ecclesiastical matter the bishops and certain godly leaned clergy, and on some topics, but not on others, Parliament-men. Under the right circumstances, most often those created by actual or perceived crisis and threat, these very restricted ranks of the counsel-giving classes could be expanded. While one should not ignore, or even play down, the contingency of the political events that drove this narrative, one can also surely see a dialectical progression at work here, as acts of free speech, each designed to describe, unmask and denounce various conspiracy-based emergencies, practised by one group or another – by the state and its (either Catholic or Puritan) critics, by various Parliament-men and the defenders of the court, or the Crown, or indeed by the monarch himself, by the opponents or defenders of the Spanish Match – elicited other such acts from their opponents. The result was a series of claims to and outbreaks of ‘free speech’ of increasing frequency, if not intensity. But what this was not was the rise of free speech in anything like the modern sense, since the aim of each of these exercises in parrhesia was to achieve a situation in which certain groups got to speak and certain things got to get said while others most definitely did not.

Swift frequently fell foul of the post-publication censorship regime of Hanoverian England, yet notwithstanding these collisions with authority he was no advocate of free speech. This chapter positions Swift’s resistance to free speech against the backdrop of assertions of the principle of parrhesia from antiquity to the mid-twentieth century. It identifies Swift’s age as a moment when vindications of the right to free speech began to be couched in ever more absolute and unconditional forms. The underpinnings of those gradually more expansive claims (as they arose in an English context) in positions associated with nonconformity and forged in the heat of the mid-seventeenth-century conflict between Crown and Parliament goes some way towards explaining Swift’s suspicion of them and his tendency to characterise those engaged in free speech and free thinking as chaotic and confused. By contrast, Swift tended to characterise his own outspokenness before authority as a special kind of constrained speech, and hence not vulnerable to the accusations he levelled against the free and irresponsible speakers whose actions he deplored and despised.

This chapter reviews the evidence on promoting volunteering and asks what a nudge strategy can offer. It contains details on a design experiment that asked citizens complaining to a local authority telephone call centre to undertake civic-minded activity. What do these findings indicate about the challenge of promoting volunteering? By changing the choice architecture, is it possible to turn complainers into volunteers?