The politics of being Norman in the reign of Richard the Fearless, Duke of Normandy (r. 942–996)
In 966, by the end of the reign of its third duke, Richard I, Normandy had overcome the crises that had beset it in the middle of the century. Much of this success came from the coherence of its ruling group, which expressed itself partly in terms of ‘Norman’ identity. This article uses Dudo's history of the dukes and Richard's charters to argue that ‘Norman’ as a political identity was a deliberate creation of the court of Richard I in the 960s, following the perceived failure of his and his father's policies of assimilation into Frankish culture.
Pro tutela regni: revisiting a royal diploma from 918 on the birth of Normandy and the first ‘ducal’ laws
The Treaty of Saint‐Clair‐sur‐Epte (911) and the cession of Normandy to Rollo have long been considered as evidence of a decline in Carolingian power during the reign of Charles III the Simple. If, during the twentieth century, this view has undergone gradual revision, the role that the king could have played in the process of the Normans’ installation on the Seine remains obscure. A review of the relevant royal diplomas, in particular that of 14 March 918, suggests, however, active participation by the king in the emergence of a Norman march in Neustria: that is to say, a political and legal programme intended to reaffirm royal authority over this part of the regnum Francorum. This rereading, based on Frankish texts, on Christian ideology and on the Roman heritage, suggests a new interpretation of the settlement of Scandinavians in Normandy, the emergence of a Norman principality, and the genesis of the famous ‘laws of Rollo’.
Reid on Hypotheses and the Ether; A Reassessment
In recent years historians of science have come to see that Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man had a profound impact on the development of British methodological thought in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Larry Laudan has argued that Reid was “the first major British philosopher to take Newton’s opinions on induction, causality, and hypotheses seriously”; and that Reid was thereby instrumental in changing the character of British methodological discourse in the Enlightenment.(1) Geoffrey Cantor has examined in detail the influence of Reid’s critique of ether theories and hypotheses in the Essays on leading protagonists in the nineteenth-century debates surrounding the wave theory of light,(2) and Richard Olson has traced the origins of the scientific style of British physics in the Victorian period to the writings of Reid and other Common Sense philosophers. (3) As well as delineating Reid’s influence, Laudan, Cantor, and Olson have attempted to identify the problems to which he addressed himself in articulating his methodology, and they have analysed with some care the internal structure of his methodological views. Thanks to the work of these historians, therefore, we have a fairly comprehensive picture of Reid’s methodology and its fortunes in the nineteenth century.