Native Americans working in alternative media to Hollywood are overthrowing Indian stereotypes. The 1990s rise of an independent film festival circuit, especially the Sundance Film Festival, and multiplying cable channels and streaming services, have supported Indigenous self-representation and anti-colonial discourse. Documentaries by Native American filmmakers Sandra Osawa, George Burdeau, and Victor Masayesva Jr. critique stereotypes and express tribal aesthetics. Fiction films, like Chris Eyre’s Smoke Signals (1998), Naturally Native (1998), Doe Boy (2001), and Sterlin Harjo’s features, depict modern Native American life and characters while cable and streaming TV series are set in modern Indigenous communities. However, Martin Scorcese’s big-budget Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) garnered more attention and awards for portraying 1920s atrocities against the Osage Nation. Although sympathetic to Native Americans, the film is still a reiteration of history. Only with Native American artists are stories refocusing from fascination with the past to the present and future.

What did King Charles the Great or ‘Charlemagne’ (768–814) think of English kings? As his vassals, if we go by his extant letters to the most powerful among them, Offa of Mercia (757–96). In one letter, he asks Offa to have a priest escorted back to his bishop in Ireland. In the other, probably written in early April 796, he alludes to a past ‘foedus’ [treaty] and acknowledges that he is at last replying to the ‘epistolis quae diversis siquidem temporibus per missorum vestrorum manus nobis delatae sunt’ [letters which have been brought to us at various times by the hands of your messengers]. Answering Offa's questions on trade, he reveals here that he has sent some exiles to safety in Rome. Finally, speaking like a king to his margrave, Charlemagne announces that, from treasures recently given him by Lord Jesus (from his victory in Pannonia), he has sent dalmatics and palls to churches in Mercia and Northumbria, and to Offa ‘unum balteum et unum gladium Huniscum et dua pallia sirica’ [a belt, a Hunnish sword, and two silk cloaks]. In return, he asks Offa to organise regular prayers ‘pro nobis nostrisque fidelibus, immo et pro cuncto populo christiano’ [for us and our faithful servants, indeed for all the people of Christ]. Thereafter he calls him the doughtiest patriot and most devout defender of the faith.

No other correspondence with English kings survives from Charles, king of France and patrician of Lombardy and Rome and later crowned emperor in St Peter's on Christmas Day 800.

There is a rich history of domino tilings in two dimensions. Through a variety of techniques, we can answer questions such as: how many tilings are there of a given region, or what does the space of all tilings look like? These questions and their answers become significantly more difficult in dimension three and above. Despite this curse of dimensionality, there have been exciting recent advances in the theory. Here we briefly review foundational results of two-dimensional domino tilings and highlight where challenges arise when generalizing to higher dimensions. We then survey results in higher dimensional domino tilings, focusing on the question of connectivity of the space of tilings, and the open problems that still remain.

This chapter explores the political implications of reprinting Othello in republican England. Recent scholarship has drawn attention to the publication of early modern drama during the mid seventeenth century, examining how the ban on theatrical performance and the circumstances of civil war and revolution shaped the production and reception of pre-Civil War plays. The chapter builds on these studies by situating Othello within the ideological currents of English republicanism, focusing on the ways in which Venice, the play’s setting, took on new and pressing significance during the 1650s as a model of kingless governance. Renowned both for its elitist, rather than populist, tendencies as well as for its institutional stability, Venice exemplified an aristocratic form of republicanism that promised to secure traditional social hierarchies. By reprinting Othello in 1655, the bookseller William Leake capitalized on the topicality and political associations of the play’s Venetian milieu.

Chapter 6 investigates the erosion of electoral integrity in Venezuela, focusing on the transformation of the Supreme Electoral Council (CSE) from a partially autonomous institution into a politically captured body under Hugo Chávez and his successors. The chapter shows how reforms that insulated the National Electoral Council (CNE) from partisan influence, which intended to protect independence, paradoxically weakened transparency and accountability. Without mechanisms for party consultation, internal checks declined, administrative discretion expanded, and opportunities for manipulation increased. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and archival research, the chapter analyzes controversial decisions related to districting, voter registration, technology adoption, and election timing. It argues that Venezuela illustrates the risks of insulation without meaningful stakeholder engagement and provides a powerful contrast to cases where partisan inclusion stabilizes electoral governance.

High Court of Admiralty

A monition was a warning, usually issued by an ecclesiastical court, advising an individual not to commit an offence. However, as issued by the High Court of Admiralty, the warning was that the interested parties should attend the court hearing about to be held. The decision to be made was whether the capture was a legitimate prize and could be condemned, or not and should be returned.

There was a concentration of ecclesiastical lawyers in the City of London, and in the fifteenth century these became loosely associated into a Society which fulfilled the functions of an Inn of Court. Referred to as ‘Doctors of the Arches’ in 1496, the advocates together with a few proctors specialised in canon and civil law. Their ancient home was the church of St Mary-le-Bow, or in Latin, Sancta Maria de Arcubus – the Arches. After the great fire of London in 1666 the premises in which Doctors Commons were based were rapidly rebuilt around two quadrangles, one entered from Great Knightrider Street, the other from St Benet's Hill, with a covered passage connecting them. The new court room was used for the sittings of the Court of Admiralty and of the prerogative Court of Canterbury and the Bishop of London's Consistory Court.

Doctors Commons

No trace of Doctors Commons survives, although the space where the building once stood is just below St Paul's Cathedral.

New Hollywood describes European influenced, character driven films from 1967–1980 directed by a new generation of film school-educated White males. As the movies’ creative forces or auteurs, they staked out self-conscious stylistic boundaries that reflected contemporary social upheaval. Their hit films instilled new life into a stale Hollywood cinema and spoke to a youthful audience with whom they shared cultural values. The collapse of the Hollywood studio system, the transition from an outdated censorship Production Code to a new ratings system, and financial restructuring of big production companies enabled this brief golden age. New Hollywood ended when big-budget, spectacular movies restored the status of Hollywood blockbusters and ushered in Postclassical Hollywood. By the 2000s, the top movies were all blockbusters. But, both New Hollywood and Postclassical Hollywood stemmed from intersections of economics, technology, global marketing, and cultural relevancy.

After more than thirty years of teaching and research, Rolf H. Bremmer Jr retired from Leiden University on the 16th of June, 2017. At Leiden, he had been the occupant of two professorial chairs: ‘Frisian Language and Linguistics’ and ‘English Philology, with a particular focus on the Middle Ages’. An internationally renowned expert in both fields, Bremmer was celebrated for his efforts in Old Frisian studies with a festschrift in 2017 on the occasion of his retirement. The present volume, published for his 75th birthday in 2025, honours the major contributions that Bremmer has made and continues to make to the field of English philology. Bremmer's impressive scholarly output covers not only the history and traditions of Old English philology, but also showcases his keen interest in continually innovative approaches to Anglo-Saxon materials.

Bremmer has shared his respect for tradition and his fascination for methodological innovation with his students, many of whom he inspired to pursue academic careers. His combined interest in philological tradition and methodological innovation is reflected in the topics of his first and last PhD students. Kees Dekker, Bremmer's first doctoral student, wrote his dissertation on the origins of the philological study of Old Germanic languages in the early modern Low Countries, while his last PhD student, Sander Stolk, completed his thesis in 2023 on a Linguistic Linked Data approach to the Thesaurus of Old English, developing a new digital technique for studying Old English language and literature.

Despite the political destabilisation at the beginning of the sixteenth century that resulted from Flodden and the long minority of James V, the king's personal rule during the 1530s quickly sought to re-establish the crown's authority through a course of action that has been represented by Gordon Donaldson as ‘something of a reign of terror’ that betrayed ‘a streak of sadistic cruelty in his nature’. Jamie Cameron points out that it is ‘difficult to find the evidence on which Donaldson builds such a damning and influential verdict’ of James. For Cameron, while the domestic power struggles of the reign were prolonged – lasting at least until the execution of James Hamilton of Finnart in 1540 – the personal rule of James V was also marked by the effective development of the judicial system and the intention to craft a Scottish imperial monarchy. In Cameron's assessment, James V was no more ruthless and effective than many of his forebears, and his reign was marked by tensions both within and outwith Scotland's borders. While Anglo-Scottish relations were tense during the 1520s, by the mid-1530s they had acquired a religious dimension as anti-clerical factions attempted to persuade the king to emulate Henry VIII's assertion of monarchical supremacy over the Church. Aware of England's isolation in Europe following Henry's break with Rome, James adeptly navigated the political landscape by leveraging a Protestant England against a Catholic Europe. James's marriages, first to Francis I's daughter, Madeleine of Valois (1537), and then to Mary of Guise-Lorraine (1538), demonstrate a strategic use of the marriage market, positioning Scotland as a kingdom oriented towards European alliances and interests as well as obtaining papal securities.

This chapter considers the potential impacts of the Roman empire’s conquest and governance of provincial landscapes and how this may be manifest in the archaeological evidence, especially derived from field survey. The imperial negotiations and impositions, met with varied degrees of compliance and resistance, produced complex outcomes for landholding and landuse that are often difficult to decipher unambiguously in the archaeological record, but which nonetheless should be kept in mind by researchers.

INTRODUCTION

John Kincaid was not a witch but the most active of the witch-prickers in Scotland. This document shows him explaining his practices to a sceptical justice depute.

Kincaid was originally from Tranent in East Lothian. His activities in pricking witchcraft suspects to detect the Devil's mark are recorded from 1649 until 1662. On 31 March 1662 he was imprisoned in the tolbooth of Edinburgh on suspicion of malpractice. The document edited below records the answers he gave to a justice depute who interrogated him four days later. Kincaid remained in prison until June, when he petitioned the privy council for liberation on the grounds that he was old and ill. He was freed on 13 June on finding caution to carry out no further pricking without warrant. This seems to be the last that we hear of him.

The Devil's mark in Scotland was usually assumed to be an insensitive spot on the witch's body that the Devil had nipped as part of the process of formalising the demonic pact. Prickers seem to have had some knowledge of where in the body a pin could be inserted without causing unbearable pain or injury. It has occasionally been suggested (notably by Sir Walter Scott in 1830) that prickers might have used a deceptive retractable bodkin rather than a pin, but there seems to be no contemporary evidence for any use of a bodkin with a handle. Kincaid certainly used an ordinary pin, since a drawing of a pin that he used was included in a manuscript of 1657. It is just under 5cm long; some descriptions of longer pins may have been exaggerated. Formally witch-pricking was not ‘torture’, but the two were sometimes conflated by contemporary sceptics. Kincaid's own bond of caution promised that he would carry out no pricking or torturing.

The small world networks considered in this chapter were originally designed to provide examples of networks whose clustering coefficient is not small (as is the case in locally tree-like networks), but in which shortest path lengths grow only logarithmically with the number of vertices if the expected degree of a typical vertex remains bounded (unlike what happens in random geometric graphs). These small world networks can be thought of as interpolating between the Bernoulli random graph and random geometric graphs, by superimposing one upon the other, thus reducing the shortest path lengths without greatly reducing the clustering coefficient. In a limiting version, in which random shortcuts are superimposed on a circle, it is shown that shortest path lengths between randomly chosen points of the circle are divided by a quantity roughly equal to the reciprocal of the number of shortcuts.