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Stack architectures are designed to be remade. Each modular layer can contain any technology able to communicate with the layer above and below it. This chapter examines not the Stack-we-have but the Stack-to-come. It considers possible futures for each of the six layers, recognizing both the potential and the risks that each may bring. As each layer is considered in relation to its own potential accidents, as The Stack as a whole is a composite accident. Some scenarios suggest further ecological calamity, Cloud Feudalism, and revitalized political theological fundamentalisms. Others may suggest instead robust ecological polities, rationalized algorithmic governance, and a vibrant proliferation of human and non-human agents. Whether the latter wins out over the former depends on how well we cope with the Copernican traumas of planetary-scale computation.

This chapter argues that one of the best known ideas in the thought of the Scottish Enlightenment, namely, their notion of the four-stages (hunting, herding, farming, commerce) is best interpreted as an instance of Dugald Stewart's summary characterization of ‘natural history’. After a close analysis of both the primary and secondary literature the Scots’ account of the emergence of commerce is examined. The focus of this account is their explanation of the break-up of feudalism (3^rd stage) and the establishment of commerce as a way of life. This establishes the ‘distinctiveness’ of commerce and situates it within a temporal narrative

This chapter consists of an extended meditation upon the nature and historical expression of medievalism and the historiographical links between medievalism and feudalism, a term more commonly encountered in European, especially French, commentary.

This chapter examines how, in Caleb Williams (1794), Godwin brings the Gothic to bear on the eighteenth century. It considers the novel as a manifestation of his radical views outlined in Political Justice (1793) and explores the novel as a response to English anxieties about the French Revolution at home and abroad. This chapter examines representations of the past in the novel, particularly in relation to Godwin’s ‘Of History and Romance’ (1797), which criticises works of Enlightenment history. The psychological introspection of Caleb Williams is discussed, as well as the presence of history in the human psyche and the (unwanted) ideological legacy of the past. This chapter goes on to explore how, in a similar vein to Godwin, Wollstonecraft refuses to use a fictional past as a subterfuge to comment on the present in Maria (1798) and uses the Gothic to examine women’s plight in eighteenth-century England. Discussing Maria in relation to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, it is argued that the novel brings the Female Gothic and its political agenda into sharper focus. This chapter discusses Wollstonecraft’s exploration of the female psyche, and how Maria’s thoughts and actions are governed by anachronistic and patriarchal social customs.

The institutional practice of exemption did not operate outside existing ecclesiastical and political structures. It required the willing participation of lay and ecclesiastical magnates, whose support reveals a confluence of contemporary factors and motivations at play. That monasteries were increasingly seeking privileges from Rome raises important questions about their rights and authority (spiritual and judicial), and the potential disruption to established norms. This chapter asks whether a monastery’s success in acquiring exemption privileges effectively undermined existing political and ecclesiastical authority. In short: did the growth of this practice in any way contribute to a process of political fragmentation? Did individual religious houses benefit, or seek to benefit, from changing political circumstances? And finally: what role did the papacy play in these wider transformations?

I Sat down the other night to do something I had not done in a long time: read the United States Constitution. Though a short document, only some twelve or thirteen double-columned pages in most printings, it was writing I had not looked at for over a decade. Yet I am an historian of this country. My excuse is that there is not enough time to read most things even once, and twice or more is out of the question. It is a poor excuse; some things we really ought to read more than once in a lifetime—ought to read every year, like Emily Dickinson’s poetry or Henry Thoreau’s book about that pond in Massachusetts. The Constitution is a piece of writing I would recommend reading no more than once a decade. It hasn’t got much of a plot. The language is clear and easy, but lacks eloquence. Its single great virtue is its plain sensibleness, a virtue that has, with many glaring exceptions, stayed with us and become one of our most attractive national qualities. We like to think we are a level-headed people and that this document epitomizes our level-headedness. In a world that often seems to have gone plumb crazy into one fanaticism or another, the Constitution reassures us with its good sense. We can look back to it with relief that our political system was framed by wise, far-sighted people; and unsure today whether we could improve on their wisdom, we usually leave it alone. Now and then we take the document out and actually read it. There is, however, one glaring omission in the Constitution, so immense and damaging that I believe we ought to try to repair it. Nowhere in all the sections, articles, and amendments is there any mention of the American land and our rights and responsibilities pertaining thereto. I find the word “land” appearing only once, and then it refers to rules governing the capture of prisoners “on Land and Water.”

Lordship over land throughout the medieval period involved a bundle of rights that characteristically encompassed both the economic (e.g. rights to rents and other recurring dues from the resident peasantry) and the legal (e.g. rights relating to the punishment of wrongdoing). Changes in the content of this bundle are the subject of a long tradition of historical scholarship, which has helped shape influential narratives of the rise and fall of feudalism. This chapter offers a new account of the origins in England of what this literature knows as ‘jurisdictional’ rights: rights not just to receive legal revenues but to perform legal functions. The decades around the millennium witnessed economic, legal and administrative changes that made legal revenues a focus of competition, and a powerful way of asserting ownership of such revenues was to perform associated legal functions.

This chapter looks at Lois McMaster Bujold’s use of medievalism, specifically at how Bujold uses feudalism in her Vorkosigan science fiction novel The Warrior’s Apprentice as a bridge between past and future. In constructing Barrayaran politics, Bujold simplifies feudalism by only showing us the basic chain from emperor to Vor nobility to armsman. She also presents an Imperium that, over the course of a century, has broken the power of the Vor nobility (as happened in late medieval and early modern France) and is moving towards a more parliamentary form of government (as happened in late medieval and early modern England). The chapter thus shows how Bujold’s feudalism is simplified from medieval European feudalism and, in terms of its history, is beginning to move beyond the medieval period. Nevertheless, as the chapter concludes, on Barrayar the bonds of mutual obligation created by feudalism remain crucial, as does the centrality of military protection and service.