Friendly Foreigners: International Warfare, Resident Aliens and the Early History of Denization in England, c.1250–c.1400

The search for the origins of the process of denization in England has traditionally focused on the needs of merchants and the context of international trade, and no credible explanation has been given for why denization emerged as a recognisable Chancery form in the 1380s and 1390s. A new consideration of wartime treatment of aliens demonstrates the slow emergence, between c.1250 and c.1400, of an official policy towards lay foreigners that sought to minimise the disruptions arising in moments of national emergency and to accord rights of denizen equivalence to foreigners whose presence was profitable to the realm. In certain exceptional conditions during the 1270s and 1340s, alien residents with good connections at court could secure more developed statements of their rights as denizens. However, it was a series of events set off by the announcement of an intention to expel all French residents in 1377–78 that generated letters of protection containing specific reference to a change of allegiance, and thus established the principle that the recipient should renounce his former commitment and became a subject of the English Crown. Applied to other nationalities and outside the immediate context of war, these developments would give rise to the form known as letters of denization during the decades that followed

Present eternity : quests of temporality in the literary production of the "extrême contemporain" in France (The Writings of Dominique Fourcade and Emmanuel Hocquard)

The term \uab extr\ueame contemporain \ubb is an expression currently used by scholars to indicate the French literary production of the last 20 years. This term was used in a work of literature for the first time by the French poet Dominique Fourcade in 1986 (\uc9l\ue9gie L apostrophe E.C.) in reference to an epoch, but also to a new sense of experiencing time and space in the so-called \uab age of digital reproducibility \ubb. The aim of this paper is to consider how the change in temporal protocols due to the triumph of Big Optics (Paul Virilio) affects the sense of teleology (destiny) and the quest for experience in French contemporary poetry (in particular, in the genre of the elegy). Including both memory and anticipation, the \uab extr\ueame contemporain \ubb production seems to prefer the \u201ctime of now\u201d, Jetz-zeit in Benjamin\u2019s words, to past or testimony, and speaks to the present, whose responsibility is to give voice to a space where everything is simply allowed to happen

The Early Royal Society and Visual Culture

Recent studies have fruitfully examined the intersection between early modern science and visual culture by elucidating the functions of images in shaping and disseminating scientific knowledge. Given its rich archival sources, it is possible to extend this line of research in the case of the Royal Society to an examination of attitudes towards images as artefacts –manufactured objects worth commissioning, collecting and studying. Drawing on existing scholarship and material from the Royal Society Archives, I discuss Fellows’ interests in prints, drawings, varnishes, colorants, images made out of unusual materials, and methods of identifying the painter from a painting. Knowledge of production processes of images was important to members of the Royal Society, not only as connoisseurs and collectors, but also as those interested in a Baconian mastery of material processes, including a “history of trades”. Their antiquarian interests led to discussion of painters’ styles, and they gradually developed a visual memorial to an institution through portraits and other visual records.AH/M001938/1 (AHRC

The King’s Mercy

Mercy is not a subject that perhaps springs naturally to the lips of the English constitutional historian. Our traditions and training are focused on justice: that is, on the development of a rational, formal and increasingly secularised system of law operated through an expanding network of courts that sought, on the criminal side, to preserve public order and, on the civil side, to allow private parties to resolve disputes through peaceable process and definitive judgment.And yet the study ..

A Matter of Trust: The Royal Regulation of England's French Residents during Wartime, 1294-1377

This study focuses on how the English crown identified and categorized French-born people in the kingdom during the preliminaries and first stage of the Hundred Years War. Unlike the treatment of alien priories and nobles holding lands on both sides of the Channel, the attitude to laypeople became more positive as the period progressed. In particular, the crown was prepared to grant wartime protections to French-born residents based on evidence of local integration. Analysis of the process reveals the flexibility with which the government considered national status before the emergence of denization at the end of the fourteenth century