I am working on a book covering the history of North-Western Europe from c. 400 A.D. to 1914. Recent publications include a chapter on ‘The Rhine-Moselle Borderlands’ in The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft (ed B. Levack), an article on ‘From Devilry to Sainthood: Mère Jeanne des Anges and the Catholic Reform’ in Women and Religion in the Atlantic Age, 1550-1900 (ed. M. Laven and E. Clark), and an article on ‘The Gallican Context for Pascal's Writings on Grace’ in Seventeenth Century French Studies. Other pieces in the press are contributions on social problems and policies in the later years of Louis XIV, and on emotions and witchcraft as they appear in Lorraine trial records. My current research interests are necessarily very wide, because I am writing a general book covering an immense span of European history. However I do also maintain a particular interest in seventeenth-century French history, with a more precise focus on the half-century of troubles from 1610-61. My next project is likely to be a book attempting to rethink aspects of this crucial period, where much recent work has added to our detailed knowledge, but there has been little in the way of changes to broader interpretations that now look dated and inadequate.

Paul Brand continued work on English legal history, publishing two articles and presenting papers in Erice (Sicily), Royaumont (France), Ann Arbor and Michigan (USA) and in Leeds, Glasgow and Harlaxton. He acted as graduate interviewer for medieval history for the Faculty of History in Oxford for 2012/13 and taught a legal history course at Ann Arbor in March and April 2013. In the summer of 2012 he became one of the lead investigators of a major three year AHRC-financed Magna Carta project.

Margaret Bent's publications range over English, French and Italian polyphonic musical repertories, manuscripts, compositional processes, notation and theory of the 14th to 16th centuries. Recent publications include a study and facsimile of the early 15th-century Veneto manuscript Bologna Q15 (2008), and (with Robert Klugseder) a reconstructed Liber cantus from the Veneto (2012). Her current work explores networks of musicians in the Veneto, and she has just completed a monograph relocating the origins of Jacobus, the author of the Speculum Musicae, from Liège to Spain (2015).

My current research interests centre on three areas – sentencing principles; the idea of preventive justice, and the need for safeguards where ‘the protection of the public’ is invoked in support of coercive measures; and the justifications for convicting people for omissions, i.e. for failing to act in a given situation, and particularly exploring the duties that citizens do or ought to have.