The nexus of artificial intelligence (AI) and memory is typically theorized as a ‘hybrid’ or ‘symbiosis’ between humans and machines. The dangers related to this nexus are subsequently imagined as tilting the power balance between its two components, such that humanity loses control over its perception of the past to the machines. In this article, I propose a new interpretation: AI, I posit, is not merely a non-human agency that changes mnemonic processes, but rather a window through which the past itself gains agency and extends into the present. This interpretation holds two advantages. First, it reveals the full scope of the AI–memory nexus. If AI is an interactive extension of the past, rather than a technology acting upon it, every application of it constitutes an act of memory. Second, rather than locating AI’s power along familiar axes – between humans and machines, or among competing social groups – it reveals a temporal axis of power: between the present and the past. In the article’s final section, I illustrate the utility of this approach by applying it to the legal system’s increasing dependence on machines, which, I claim, represents not just a technical but a mnemonic shift, where the present is increasingly falling under the dominion of the past – embodied by AI.

In 1717, an anonymous petition to the king of Spain expressed concern about the excessive number of Muslims living in Cartagena (Murcia). This complaint prompted the Council of Castile to launch a survey of the Muslim population with the aim of clarifying their status. In addition to galley slaves, the inquiry focused in particular on libertinos, a little-known category of slaves who lived and worked freely in the city but were heavily indebted to their masters due to the sums owed for their ransom. This article reconstructs the condition of these unbound slaves, who lived apart from their masters’ households, and the tensions this provoked between competing systems of norms. On the one hand, the right of slaves to work to finance their own redemption, and that of their masters to live off the rents imposed on them, were deeply rooted in local custom. On the other, rising insecurity along the coast prompted local authorities and the Crown to restrict these overlapping rights by forcing masters to keep their slaves at home. At stake in this conflict between different slavery regimes, the one based on local law and the other on royal jurisdiction, were slaves’ access to the labor market and their right to free residency and the protections afforded by contract law. Finally, by placing the inquiry itself at the heart of the study, the article investigates the meaning of a procedure that was less a demographic enumeration of slaves than a redistribution of rights to the city among its Muslim inhabitants.

This essay explores a key stage in the legal history of the concepts of consent and guilt in cases of rape, namely in twelfth-century canon law in the work of Gratian and the early canonists who commented on his Decretum. It substantially revises the account that currently exists in scholarship and explains that confusion between raptus and rape and a limited read of the Decretum have combined to provide a problematic picture in which, it has been claimed, neither Gratian nor broader medieval canon law took rape seriously as an offence. The essay focuses on the underexplored Causa 32 in the Decretum and discusses how Gratian very directly addressed forced coitus in that section of his text, both condemning it and exonerating women of all guilt who are forced to have sex without their consent. Gratian and the decretists ended up changing the discourse on rape, in part through their treatment of both Lucretia of Roman legend and an early Christian martyr, Lucia. Their considerations, which intersected with theology, resulted in a legal principle that a raped wife cannot be charged with adultery. Since their considerations could also be applied to any rape victim, their work is important for the development of rape law and legal notions of consent.

Wars make states, but the conclusion of conflict is critical for the trajectory of state-building that follows. At the end of World War II, both conservatives and progressives in the United States recognized the potential for ongoing statist development fueled by the wartime introduction of mass taxation and the expansion of regulatory intervention into the lives of citizens and the activities of firms. Entrenched traditions of anti-statism in American politics resurfaced forcefully only to encounter the new threats of a nuclear-capable Soviet Union and the onset of what came to be known as the Cold War. This conjuncture both reoriented and fractured trajectories of state development, leading to reliance on mechanisms – capitation, categorical eligibility, regulation of organizations, and limited duration – that enabled expansive federal intervention in the form of funds attached to rules but minimized the construction of new bureaucratic organization. These governing practices are evident in both the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act of 1944 (the G.I. Bill) and the European Recovery Act of 1948 (the Marshall Plan). The result was the development of a powerful postwar state that was deeply marked by anti-statist politics, a configuration that shaped future waves of both policy expansion and openings for renewed efforts to constrain the capacity of the American state.

This article explores the relationship(s) between ‘madness’, emotion and the archive in early modern England, taking as its case study the letters of British Library Lansdowne MS vol. 99, sent between c. 1570 and c. 1600 to the government of Elizabethan England and annotated at several stages in their history to describe their authors and contents as ‘mad’. Firstly, by examining the complex history of the archive, it demonstrates the potential for archival practices to bring into focus, and thereby facilitate historical examination of, past emotion. Secondly, it explores some of the ethical and methodological problems of third-party historical descriptions of madness, demonstrating that a focus on emotion – in particular ‘distress’ – offers a more fruitful path to understanding the significance of this material. Thirdly, it explores the Lansdowne 99 authors’ experiences of distress, revealing the ways distressed subjects exercised rhetorical agency when petitioning those in power. It identifies a series of prominent themes: desperation and deservingness; victimhood and persecution; and appeals to status and lineage. Ultimately, I argue that understanding their distress not only brings us closer to marginalised people in the past, but grants us a richer knowledge of past societies and the experience of being human in them.