Since Elton's commentary on the absence of critical study of the early Tudor council in 1964, some progress has been made towards a wider, fuller, more detailed understanding of Henry VII's council and where it fits-or does not-into the development of council under the Tudors. However, the early Tudor council remains something of an enigma. Added to that is recent interest by late medieval historians in just how much power Henry VII exercised in the operation of his councils. Was Henry ruling, or were his bureaucratic counsellors ruling him? A re-examination of the various Elizabethan/Jacobean council extracts, as well as the examination of data contained in a wide variety of primary documents, such as the chamber account books, petitions, privy seal warrants and view books, provides evidence with which to suggest a more precisely defined and better organized council than that previously established for the first Tudor monarch, and also to demonstrate that Henry VII was actively involved in the business of the protean forms of that council, at Westminster or away. This thesis hopefully advances the picture of the conciliar and administrative matrix which was governing under Henry VII, its component parts, including an embryonic privy council, the personnel of that council, the systems through which conciliar business was developed, and the king's position at the head of that council in the most literal sense.

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The purpose of this essay is to explore how different means are used to create indeterminate meaning in Henry James’s novella The Turn of the Screw. It suggests that the indeterminacy creates gaps in the text which the reader is required to fill in during the reading process, and that this indeterminacy is achieved chiefly through the use of an unreliable narrator and of ambiguity in the way the narrator relates the events that take place. The reliability of the narrator is called into question by her personal qualities as well as by narrative factors. Personal qualities that undermine the narrator’s reliability are youth, inexperience, nervousness, excitability and vanity. Narrative factors that damage the narrator’s reliability concern the story as manuscript, the narrator’s role in the story she narrates, and her line of argumentation. The ambiguity in the way events are reported is produced by ambiguous words, dismissed propositions and omissions. The essay demonstrates how the unreliable narrator and the ambiguity combine to make the reader question the narrator’s account and supply his or her own interpretation of key elements in the story, that is, how they invite the reader to “co-author” the text.