Political Representation : Communities, Ideas and Institutions in Europe

This scholarly collection on representation in medieval and early modern Europe opens up the field of institutional and parliamentary history to new paradigms of representation across a wide geography and chronology - as testified by the volume's studies on assemblies ranging from Burgundy and Brabant to Ireland and Italy. The focus is on three areas: institutional developments of representative institutions in Western Europe; the composition of these institutions concerning interest groups and individual participants; and the ideological environment of representatives in time and space. By analysing the balance between bottom-up and top-down approaches to the functioning of institutions of representation; by studying the actors behind the representative institutions linking prosopographical research with changes in political dialogue; and by exploring the ideological world of representation, this volume makes an key contribution to the historiography of pre-modern government and political culture.