Political Representation: Communities, Ideas and Institutions in Europe (c. 1200-c. 1690)

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.