Robert M. Stein and Sandra Pierson Prior covers a wide range of fields, from Anglo-Saxon England to twelfth-century European intellectual culture, and from Chaucer's age to nineteenth- and twentieth-century medievalism, including a rich section on Italian Renaissance humanism and visual art.

Argues that the emergence of historiography and romance was linked to large-scale transformations in the structure of power attendant on Capetian and Anglo-Norman statemaking.

Stein and Bickers explore the policy subsystems--links among members of Congress, interest groups, government agencies--that blanket the American political landscape. They employ a new data base detailing federal outlays to Congressional districts for each federal program to examine four myths about the impact of policy subsystems on American government: that policy subsystems are a major contributor to the federal deficit, that federal programs grow and rarely die, that subsystem actors seek to universalize the scope of program benefits, and that the flow of program benefits to...