This paper considers the traditional idea about English that syntactic operations targeting Verb Phrase (VP), including do so-anaphora, do what-pseudoclefting and VP-fronting, can separate adjuncts but not arguments from the VP. I argue that, in each case, the argument/adjunct distinction (A/AD) makes incorrect predictions and that the behavior of verbal dependents is more accurately explained without reference to the A/AD. With do so-anaphora and do what-pseudoclefting, I show that the behavior of a variety of Prepositional Phrase (PP) dependents is better explained by the lexical properties of the verb do: a PP’s ability to occur with do so-anaphora/do what-pseudoclefting depends on the PP’s independent compatibility with the lexical verb do. On VP-fronting, I show that apparent stranding of arguments and adjuncts poses major problems for A/AD-based analyses and suggest apparent stranding is better analyzed as extraposition. These results weaken an important motivation for the idea that adjuncts attach to a higher projection in the VP than arguments do.

The protection of privileges abroad was a recurring theme in Hanseatic conflict management. Trade rights were to be shielded from outsiders and internal mercantile conflicts were part of its own jurisdiction. However, efforts to maintain privileged trade relations in London and Bruges were complicated by the Hanse’s own transregional organization and the diverging interests of its members. This article explores the tense dynamic between institutional and individual perceptions of the Hanseatic common good. While the increasingly strict rules of membership and jurisdiction were meant to serve Hansards abroad, these regulations were continuously contested by those the Hanse sought to protect.

This article examines the rise of a culture of local petitioning, through which growing numbers of ordinary people sought to win the support of state authorities through collective claims to represent the “voice of the people” at the local level. These participatory, subscriptional practices were an essential component in the intensification of popular politics in the seventeenth century. The analysis focuses on over 3,800 manuscript petitions submitted to the magistrates across fifteen jurisdictions with “sessions of the peace” in England, with nearly 1,000 dating from before 1640. Over the course of the early seventeenth century many, if not most, English parishes witnessed attempts to persuade the authorities through collective petitioning. Groups of neighbors across the kingdom formulated their grievances, organized subscription lists, and articulated their own role in the polity as “the inhabitants” or “the parishioners” of a particular community. In so doing, they not only directly shaped their own “little commonwealths” but also unintentionally helped to develop habits of political mobilization in a crucial period of English history.

Ties of trade, credit and family provided the basis for trading networks between Hanseatic towns. They also, however, contained the seed for conflicts over fraud, debt and inheritance. Such disputes between burghers of different Hanseatic cities presented municipal governments with the particular challenge to balance their role as Hanseatic partners with an obligation of externally representing their own burghers. Focusing on relations between the cities of Lübeck and Reval, this article explores the variety of diplomatic strategies and tactics which city councils employed to preserve the political and economic benefits of intercity co-operation.

This article discusses the archives of Westbourne Park Baptist Church in London and its world-renowned pastor in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Dr. John Clifford. As leader of the National Passive Resistance League, the fiery Clifford came to be synonymous with the Nonconformist conscience at the height of its political influence in the early twentieth century. The article foregrounds the tension between what I call archival intimacy and archival precarity, while analyzing the power of seeing the diverse photographs in this collection as evidence of the gendered politics of passive resistance in the early twentieth century. Some— though not all—of the collection that I consulted at Westbourne Park Baptist Church in 2016 has now been transferred to the Angus Library, Regent's Park College, Oxford.