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Magna Carta can be read as a historical, constitutional or legal document. But it was first and foremost a religious document. It was sealed by King John in 1215 ‘from reverence for God and for the salvation of our soul and those of all our ancestors and heirs, for the honour of God and the exaltation of Holy Church and the reform of our realm’. The king was acting on the advice of two archbishops and nine bishops. The Charter itself was in many ways the work of Archbishop Stephen Langton. Langton had in his Parisian exile been among the most famous lecturers on the churches’ Old Testament. Moses had commanded in Deuteronomy, that if a king were chosen, After [the king] has sat down on the throne of his kingdom he will write out for himself the Deuteronomy of this law in a book, taking an exemplar from the priests of the levitical tribe; and he will have it with him and will read it all the days of his life so that he might learn to fear the Lord his God and observe his words and ceremonies which are written in the law and so that his heart may not be raised into pride over his brothers nor veer to the right or to the left. (Deuteronomy 17:18–20, Latin) The law, argued Langton, was written down in Deuteronomy to prevent the king from demanding more power than had been agreed. Langton had in particular studied Saul's acclamation as king over Israel: ‘Samuel declared to the people the law of the kingdom and wrote it in a book and deposited it in the presence of the Lord’ (1 Samuel 10:25). What had been true in ancient Israel was to be true in medieval England. Langton was trying in his contributions to the Charter to realise in England a biblical, covenantal kingship. The Charter would soon be known as the Great Charter of Liberties. It is in the form of a covenant of liberties: a covenant between God, the king and the people, laying down the principles on which the king would reign.

A t the unusually early age of forty-five Alexander Duff was, in 1851, called by acclamation to the highest ecclesiastical seat in Scotland, that of Knox and Melville, Henderson and Chalmers. His immediate predecessor had declared that what the Preacher of the Old Testament calls “the flourish of the almond tree” had been the chief recommendation in his case. The still young missionary found his qualification in “the office which it has been my privilege, however unworthily, amid sunshine and storm, for nearly a quarter of a century, to hold—the glorious office of evangelist, or that of ‘making known the unsearchable riches of Christ among the Gentiles’. “Wholly sinking, therefore, the man into the office, and desiring to magnify my office, I can rejoice in the appointment. In the early and most flourishing times of the Church, the office of the apostle, missionary, or evangelist, who ‘built not on another man's foundation,’ was regarded as the highest and most honourable. Those who thus went forth to the unreclaimed nations were the generals and the captains of the invading army in the field, while bishops or presbyters were but the secondary commandants of garrisons planted in the already conquered territory. And even in later times, when, in the progress of degeneracy and amid the increasing symptoms of decrepitude and decay, the bishop came to mount the ladder of secular ambition over the more devoted and self-denying missionary, the office of the latter still continued to be held in considerable repute.

The fourth decade of the second century CE witnessed the outbreak and apex of the final Jewish uprising against Roman rule in Palestine. Named the Bar Kochba Revolt for its leader, its details remain shrouded in mystery. This chapter describes the revolt's direct causes, the geographical extent of Bar Kochba's regime and whether it included Jerusalem, and the magnitude of the Roman reaction. It also describes Bar Kochba's leadership style and administration, his state's borders, Jewish observance under wartime conditions, and the strong Roman reaction. Judaean desert documents provide a glimpse of Bar Kochba's administrative system. The list of Roman forces that participated in suppressing the Bar Kochba Revolt, compiled on the basis of epigraphic sources, assists in a tentative assessment of their magnitude. The Roman sense of having won a great victory emerges from Hadrian's second acclamation as imperator sometime after 135, following the revolt's suppression.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT On a day in the late 40s or early 50s, after some years of missionary work in Syria, Arabia, and Asia Minor, Paul sailed from Troas and landed in Europe, acting on his intention to spread his gospel proclamation in territory 'where Christ had not yet been named' (Rom. 15:20). Travelling along the Via Egnatia, the major thoroughfare from the East to Rome, Paul would have encountered a great range of artisans, peddlers, slaves, sailors, traders, farmers, and civil servants, alongside the formidable presence of the Roman military. When he stepped off the highway in Macedonia, first at Philippi and then at Thessalonica, Paul entered cities known for long and fervent associations with the cult of Roma and the Emperor. He came bearing a message crystallized in the proclamation, Kyrios Iesous ('Jesus is Lord', 1 Cor. 12:3), a confession destined to collide with the customary acclamation, Kyrios Caesar , 'Caesar is Lord' (see Acts 17:7). In this early encounter, the 'living and true God' (1 Thess. 1:9)was preached in the capital of the Roman province of Macedonia, whose local coins a mere half century before had boldly designated Julius Caesar as theos , 'god'. Thessalonica’s position, as both trade station on the Via Egnatia and chief Macedonian port on the Thermaic Gulf, ensured a rich and cosmopolitan mix of available religious options – the Hellenistic-Egyptian cults of Isis, Osiris, and Sarapis, the local cult of the Kabeiroi, and the Olympian gods Zeus ( Hypsistos , ‘the highest’), Apollo, and Aphrodite, as well as Herakles, the Dioskouroi, and the ever-popular Dionysos.

In 1507 and again in 1508 the court of King James IV of Scotland mounted a tournament of the wild knight and the black lady. Surviving accounts of these splendid occasions constitute a rare record of the representation of African women in the early modern period. We know that the king was outfitted in black and gold, from his doublet and hood to the weapons he carried and possibly later presented as prizes. His attendants may even have worn silver and gilt horns as part of their costumes, and ridden contraptions rigged up to look like wild beasts. Mounted during a period when James was attempting to pacify the Gaelic Scots of the Highlands, the tournament of the wild knight performed for court consumption a kind of flirtation with the cultural notion of wildness. As the wild knight who wins the black lady and then reveals himself as the king, James symbolically crosses out of the self-consciously civilized and magnificent precincts of his court at Edinburgh, secures a prize from outside the borders of that court through at least partial symbolic appropriation of the tools of the unknown, and then returns home to the admiration and acclamation of his subjects. This notion of voyaging outward and then returning with knowledge of and booty from the outside gains significance from the position of the black lady as the prize to be won.

Since 1871 Germany has had five different constitutions and six different forms of the state - monarchical and republican, democratic and dictatorial, federal and unitary, divided and unified. There are no countries where the exercise of political authority and the perception of civil rights derive solely from the letter of the law or the structure of institutions; they depend as much on mentalities, traditions and conventions. It is difficult enough to maintain a consensus on such matters in countries with stable constitutional systems, like Britain or the United States. It is therefore hardly surprising that the roles of the state and the citizen and the rival claims of order and liberty are subject to dispute and misunderstanding in a country like Germany, with its broken constitutional history. Imperial Germany, 1871-1918 The Empire that was proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles on 18 January 1871 was the first approximation to a nation state in German history. Yet it had come into being not through popular acclamation or plebiscite, but through Prussian military victories. It was a nation state in that the great majority of the German-speakers of Europe were included in it; except for a Polish minority in the East and smaller Danish and French minorities in the North and the West, its population was homogeneously German. But the people had played little part in its creation, except as conscript soldiers.

The tradition of the ‘triumphal’ entry plays a crucial role in the Markan scheme. The confession of Jesus as messiah in 8:27–30 had followed a miracle on a blind man (8: 22–6) and had led immediately into a complex of material (8:31 to 10:45) structured by three sayings about the suffering Son of man (8: 31–3; 9: 30–2; 10: 32–4) and several ensuing traditions about discipleship. With 10:46–52 the journey to Jerusalem has reached Jericho where there occurs a further miracle on a blind man. This tradition is clamped to the following tradition of the entry quite unmistakably: in both ‘the way’ is mentioned (10:46, 52; 11:8), in both Jesus is acclaimed in Davidic terms (10: 47f; 11: 10), in both there is a ἱμάτιoν reference (10: 50; 11:71), in both the theme of salvation is prominent (10:52; 11:9), and significantly in both acclamation and following are joined (10: 52; 11:9). Consequently it appears that the Markan plan is to link 11: 1–10 with 10:46–52 in much the same way as 8: 27–30 is linked with 8: 22–6. The ‘triumphal’ entry, therefore, matches the confession and has to do with the disclosure of Jesus's identity and status. This Markan presentation of the entry into Jerusalem by the one who has already effected a victory is precisely what permits a classification of the story as such. For there is already in existence a family of stories detailing the celebratory entry to a city by a hero figure who has previously achieved his triumph.

THE NARRATIVE FRAME of the Canterbury Tales is the tale about the tales. The relationships among Harry Bailly, the narrator, and the pilgrims demonstrate the themes of literary and political authority I have examined in the previous chapters. The political questions about who will lead and how decisions will be made bear upon the literary questions because at stake are the terms of the storytelling game and the order of the stories. All the negotiations and arguments concern the shape and meaning of the text (although only the narrator refers to the literary text explicitly). As Alan T. Gaylord has pointed out, when the Host becomes master of ceremonies of the pilgrimage, he tries to commission certain kinds of tales in a certain order, and judges and interprets some of them. He is part editor, part patron, part literary critic. He is both a producer and a consumer of the text. As he stands before the pilgrims, nominating himself as leader and requesting election by acclamation, he stands for authors, especially those who perform their works orally. Like poet-performers, he must have the consent of the group in order to entertain them. But since he tells no tale of his own, he is also consumer as producer, representing the audience's power over the shape and meaning of the text. In contrast, the narrator is producer as consumer, or rather he pretends to be.