The work

The essays gathered in this volume are the revision of a significant part of the paper presented to the ICHRPI 59th Conference, which took place in Alghero on July 2008. They cover a very wide temporal and spatial range: they describe events that refer to different ages, from Medieval to contemporary ones, and different contexts mainly limited to European countries. Neverthless they are ascribable to three themes: 1) sources and methodologies for the study of parliamentary history; 2) political cultures which influenced the evolution of representative assemblies; 3) the centrl role of the representative institutions in the definition of territorial identities and autonomies.