Essays consider the changes and development of Scotland at a time of considerable flux in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The years between the deaths of King Mael Coluim and Queen Margaret in 1093 and King Alexander III in 1286 witnessed the formation of a kingdom resembling the Scotland we know today, which was a full member of the European club ofmonarchies; the period is also marked by an explosion in the production of documents. This volume includes a range of new studies casting fresh light on the institutions and people of the Scottish kingdom, especially in thethirteenth century. New perspectives are offered on topics as diverse as the limited reach of Scottish royal administration and justice, the ties that bound the unfree to their lords, the extent of a political community in the time of King Alexander II, a view of Europeanization from the spread of a common material culture, the role of a major Cistercian monastery in the kingdom and the broader world, and the idea of the neighbourhood in Scots law. There are also chapters on the corpus of charters and names and the innovative technology behind the People of Medieval Scotland prosopographical database, which made use of over 6000 individual documents from the period. Matthew Hammond is a Research Associate at the University of Glasgow. Contributors: John Bradley, Stuart Campbell, David Carpenter, Matthew Hammond, Emilia Jamroziak, Cynthia Neville, Michele Pasin, Keith Stringer, Alice Taylor.

What does it mean for a student to come to an understanding of a philosophical standpoint and can the explosion of resources now available on the web support this process, or is it inclined instead to create more confusion? We believe that a possible answer to the problem of finding a means through the morass of information on the web to the philosophical insights it conceals lies in the process of narrative pathway generation. That is, the active linking of resources into a learning path that contextualizes them with respect to one another. This result can be achieved only if the content of the resources is indexed, not just their status as a text document, an image or a video. To this aim, we propose a formal conceptualization of the domain of philosophy, an ontology that would allow the categorization of resources according to a series of pre-agreed content descriptors. Within an e-learning scenario, a teacher could use a tool comprising such an ontology to annotate at various levels of granularity available philosophical materials, and let the students explore this semantic space in an unsupervised manner, according to pre-defined narrative pathways.