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This chapter discusses two ‘prison’ texts which are remarkably similar: both present the heretical investigation of a suspected Lollard, which appears to fall short of a formal trial, occurring at the beginning of the 15th century, yet before the publication of Arundel's Constitutions in 1409, and described by the ‘ suspect’ himself shortly after the examination, when he was returned to prison. Indeed, Wyche's Trial and Thorpe's Testimony are the only two surviving documents in which a Lollard describes his own heretical examination. Both texts present a persuasive autobiographical identity so constructed to impact upon the political situation for which the author finds himself imprisoned. Both texts construct textual identities whose exemplary behaviour in the face of imprisonment and persecution is designed to encourage other Lollards in the firmness of their beliefs, and convince of the corruption of the Church. Both authors construct a favourable literary identity through intertextual reference.

The proprietary founder of South Carolina and author of its Fundamental Constitutions envisioned his colony as a trading outpost. From the earliest decades, the colony needed law to regulate trade with inland Native Americans and Atlantic partners, as well as for the adjudication of internal disputes. South Carolina quickly turned to the common law for adjudication of internal disputes and regulation of trade with other parts of England's empire, with the result that common lawyers were well ensconced in the colony by the early 1700s. But new forms of administrative law were needed to regulate trade with Native Americans, and they did not fully develop until an Indian war, along with a major conflict with pirates, led to the overthrow of the proprietary regime and the establishment of royal government in the 1720s.

This chapter examines the Grand Model for the Province of Carolina. The term “Grand Model” was sometimes used to refer to the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina. At other times the term was used to refer specifically to the settlement plan for the colony, including detailed urban design specifications. In this chapter, the Grand Model is used to mean the Fundamental Constitutions taken together with the detailed implementing “instructions” written mostly by Locke. Special attention is given to the social hierarchy prescribed for the colony and the spatial planning associated with that idealized Gothic social model. The overall design was an attempt to create a just and stable society within a traditional social framework, and it may have led Locke to make the later, paradigm-shifting leap to new perspectives that would soon characterize the Enlightenment.

Throughout my years at the OC, first as a parent and then also as a teacher, I have given a lot of thought to the structure and coordination of the classroom, which supports parents, children, and teachers in creating a community of learners. I had enrolled my children in the OC because I liked the idea of students, teachers, and parents all working together as a community to help children learn. After spending a great deal of time as a co-oper, I returned to the university to earn a degree in elementary education and then added the role of teacher to my established parent role in the OC. In a community of learners, a tremendous amount of work is done behind the scenes—extensive coordination, planning, and structure allow the daily learning and activities to flow smoothly. It is like a ballet, where the performers move so gracefully, flowing to their positions and cooperating with such beauty that it looks deceptively simple. Yet we know it is preparation, planning, refining, and cooperation that allow the production to run so smoothly. In the OC, the coordination is based on backstage efforts among the adults of each classroom, teamwork among children and adults, and daily and weekly routines around which children’s, co-opers’, and teachers’ activities are organized. Although the teacher plays a unique role, coordination and planning are shared among all participants and extend beyond individual classrooms to the OC program as a whole. . . . Backstage Coordinating among Adults in the Classroom . . . A key support for coordinating the classroom community is the collaboration among adults. Before the school year begins, parents and the teacher hold a meeting at a family’s home to prepare for the upcoming year, getting acquainted and establishing weekly co-oper schedules and curriculum areas for the parents’ contributions to the classroom teaching. As teacher, I figure out how to coordinate the co-opers’ schedules, interests, and talents from their work, hobbies, and outside activities to create a balanced weekly structure that becomes the framework for the children’s activities.

Many people think a well-functioning classroom needs a teacher to be in control. In the OC, the structure of the classroom is not based on a teacher or other adult controlling the children. A key aim of the OC is for children and adults to collaborate, with responsibility to the group, so that the classroom community is in control, not the teacher. If adults controlled the children, it would impede the children’s opportunities to learn how to become responsible for their own learning and their collaboration with the group. Building the skills and expectations for responsible participation in a group is an important part of the curriculum from kindergarten through sixth grade. On a daily basis in Leslee’s kindergarten classroom, time is spent helping children take responsibility for their own behavior. Five- and six-year-olds are capable of discussing, following, and reflecting on classroom guidelines that allow productive and co-operative learning to occur. The guidelines come from the class constitution that children help develop at the beginning of the year, which sets up expectations for behavior. A daily opportunity for the kindergarten classroom to learn to manage itself occurs during a challenging transition time between snack and story circle. Although this transition may last for only five minutes, it is easy for these young children to forget appropriate behavior—when children finish their snack, they can either choose a book to read or visit quietly in circle while waiting for the rest of the class to join them. The challenge of this transition often provides a learning experience through a conversation that takes place once the whole group is assembled in circle. With guidance from Leslee, the children evaluate their own behavior and that of the classroom as a whole. The goal is a classroom in control, not a teacher in control. To evaluate how the group is progressing in learning to manage the classroom structure, Leslee purposely leaves the classroom at times and asks a co-oper to keep an eye on things in case there are any issues.

Children are natural learners, curious and inquisitive, wondering why and who and how. They thrive in an environment that allows curriculum to emerge naturally, with support from other children, co-oping parents, and teachers, around their needs and interests. They are quick to express opinions, offer suggestions, and invent projects. They are an incredible natural resource, and in a community of learners, they contribute to meaningful, exciting curriculum. In a community of learners, everyone has a part to play in supporting the learning process. Children help plan and develop curriculum and are expected to be active participants and responsible learners. Parents support projects and activities with ideas and guest speakers; they teach and present curriculum. The teacher supports both children and parents in their planning, organizes and facilitates all the learning involved, and is ultimately accountable for curriculum development and content. Each role is valuable and part of the whole—more than the sum of the parts. Curriculum can be built by the community together, making use of children’s interests and experience as a key impetus. Such curriculum builds on individual and collective interests to weave together instructional interactions that support and inspire learning by: . . . • Seizing the moment to build on interesting ideas that emerge in classroom discussion . . . . . . • Recognizing that children have their own learning agendas that can provide motivation and the “way in” to learning about all kinds of other curriculum areas . . . . . . • Supporting units of study that often emerge as a group process, as people become interested in each others’ interests and build on each others’ expertise . . . . . . • Using resources of all kinds (with little reliance on textbooks) . . . After exploring these points, I will discuss how the classroom structure and the teacher help create such an emerging curriculum, and the question of what the children learn. Curriculum is all around us, just waiting to happen. This is frequently referred to as “teaching to the moment,” or “seizing the moment.”

As an OC teacher and parent, I have learned that making responsible choices is an ongoing process. A few years ago, I envisioned myself as “Supermom.” I made sure my son was getting his nutritious, low-sugar lunch, and I tried to anticipate anything that could come up by laying out his clothes, lunch, and sports equipment the night before. Or I would pack up my other three kids, ages one to five, and drive 20 minutes across town to bring my son his forgotten books, papers, lunches, or sports equipment. I did this at least twice a week. I was great! I gave myself the “Mother of the Year Award.” Then one day Mark’s first-grade OC teacher met me at the classroom door and asked me to consider letting Mark go without lunch the next time he forgot it. She gave me an article to read on teaching kids responsibility. She said that without his sack lunch, he would be forced to find other options; he could charge his lunch in the school cafeteria, or he could ask his friends for help. Could this possibly work? The next time he forgot his lunch, I stayed home and waited, just knowing that he was probably going to starve. However, when he came home he was fine and happy—all of his friends had shared their lunches with him! After that incident, he started putting his own things by the door and getting them ready to go for school. Another day he had to sit on the sidelines at the pool when he forgot his swimming suit. From then on, he remembered to take his own sports equipment. As I allowed my son to experience the logical consequences of his behavior, he learned to be more responsible. Helping children to make responsible choices in school begins with making sure that choices are available, then allowing children to learn from the logical consequences of their choices, with support from adults in reflecting on the process and results. Parents are sometimes concerned about the children’s use of time because so many choices are available in the OC.

This chapter examines the political foundation of the Province of Carolina. The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina was the central guiding document for the colony. It not only set forth the system of government for the colony, but also prescribed its social structure, key elements of its economic system, and principles for the design of cities and their hinterlands. Subsequent “instructions” provided further detail on urban design. Planning for the colony was led by Anthony Ashley Cooper, later the 1^st Earl of Shaftesbury, who was assisted by John Locke. Ashley Cooper’s vision for the colony was influenced by an idealized interpretation of feudalistic Gothic society, reflections on the failure of the English Commonwealth, and the political philosopher James Harrington. Locke’s role in planning the colony has long been the subject of speculation, and this chapter adds a new perspective to that discussion.

This chapter focuses on the role that constitutions play in national identity, particularly in states that are recently independent and constrained by a colonial legacy. It uses Fiji as a case study, exploring how British colonialism influenced conceptions of Fijian national identity in the constitutional texts of 1970, 1990 and 1997. The chapter explores the indigenous ethno-nationalist ideals that underpinned these constitutions, which led to the privileging of indigenous Fijian identity within the wider national identity. However, in 2013, Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama introduced a new constitution which shifted away from previous ethno-nationalist underpinnings towards a more inclusive national identity through the promotion of a civic nationalist agenda. In doing so, Bainimarama’s goal of reducing ethnic conflict has seen a constitutional re-imagining of Fijian identity, which includes the introduction of new national symbols, and a new electoral system, alongside equal citizenry clauses within the Constitution. This study offers a unique insight into power and identity within post-colonial island states.

Hincmar is notable for citing Roman legal texts more extensively than his contemporaries. However, the range of sources available to him was limited, mostly deriving from the tradition of the Breviary of Alaric, especially in a form augmented by religious material from Theodosian Code Book 16. Much of this material was mediated through two of his “working” manuscripts (Berlin SB Phillipps 1741 and its derivative BN Par. Lat. 12445), whose contents reflect two active periods of collecting and use, the later 850s and 868-871. The other significant source in the latter period was Julian’s Epitome of the Novels, the principal way Justinianic law was known in the early mediaeval west. For Hincmar, the Roman legal materials were always less important than Biblical or canonical texts, often gaining status only as being laws the church had approved; he was generally less interested in the substantive law of Rome than its procedural rules, which were key tools in his legal disputes, especially in that with Hincmar of Laon. Hincmar was canny at selective quotation to suit his purposes, even to the extent of minor textual emendation.

The sources of Wesley’s understanding of primitive Christianity were rooted in the revival of patristic scholarship in the Church of England in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Knowledge of the early church was conveyed to Wesley by his parents in the Epworth rectory and through his academic life at Oxford. However, his interest in the primitive church took a new, more intense direction beginning with his friendship with John Clayton in 1732. Clayton and his mentor, Thomas Deacon, propelled Wesley to investigate the doctrine, discipline, and practice of the early church. Wesley began a rigorous course of studying primarily the Apostolic Fathers (including the Apostolic Constitutions and Canons), secondarily the ante-Nicene Fathers, and thirdly select holy men of the fourth century. He utilized editions of the Fathers by recent Anglican patristic scholars supplemented by works on the primitive church by William Cave, Claude Fleury, and Anthony Horneck, amongst others.

‘Voice After Arundel’ moves into the question of how we listen for voice, especially when hard historical evidence of context is lacking, and in a climate of greater censorship than that in which Chaucer and Langland wrote. In the politically fraught culture of the early and mid-fifteenth century, after Arundel's Constitutions, it is in voice that we hear complicity, or resistance, or anxiety. After identifying the subject of the 1413 conversation between Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe as good and bad voice, the same as a treatise in Trinity College Cambridge MS B 14.19, the chapter goes on to examine three major repertoires for voice in the fifteenth century, the Boethian, the Psalmodic (read prosopologically), and the Pauline. Literary examples are drawn from Hoccleve, Skelton, Eleanor Hull, and religious prose, including the Paues ‘biblical version’.

It is suggested that, contrary to the claims of the ‘new constitutionalist’ school, the UK economic constitution does not impose major substantive constraints on government. This is welcome as it does not restrict economic policy choices, nor lead to last-minute bargaining of the sort encouraged by balanced budget rules or the US debt ceiling. It is not substantive constraints but a lack of constitutional and institutional coherence which causes problems for governments implementing economic policy. There are also limits to deliberation and accountability in such policy, although there has been a welcome move towards a more plural view of the constitution using a variety of different interacting institutions rather than concentrating on the role of ministers accountable to Parliament; examples include the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England and the Office for Budget Responsibility.