Suchergebnisse

This study brings together an unprecedented volume of material to offer a fundamentally new account of the social order in early modern England. The book pieces together the language of self-description deployed by over 13,500 witnesses in English courts in response to questions designed to assess their creditworthiness. Spanning the period between 1550 and 1728, it is the first study of English society that fully incorporates women; that offers comprehensive coverage of the range of social groups from the gentry to the labouring poor and across the life cycle; and that represents regional variation

The importance of legal institutions as mediators of social relations in early modern towns has long been recognized. However, opinion differs over the extent to which early modern courts generated social conflict or resolved it through promoting consensus. This article brings to light a neglected jurisdiction and argues that while the university courts inevitably generated conflict when pursuing their regulative agenda, they nonetheless offered Cambridge inhabitants a considerable resource which was used extensively in both the speedy resolution and the vexatious prolongation of a wide range of disputes which tended to cut across rather than deepen town–gown hostilities.

Gender, change and periodisation / Alexandra Shepard and Garthine Walker -- Somatic styles of the early Middle Ages (c.600-900) / Lynda L. Coon -- Gendering the history of women's healthcare / Monica H. Green -- The gender of Europe's commercial economy, 1200-1700 / Martha Howell -- Do women need the Renaissance? / Merry E. Wiesner-hanks -- Gender as a question of historical analysis / Jeanne Boydston -- Change and the corporeal in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century gender history : or, can cultural history be rigorous? / Dror Wahrman -- Agency, periodisation and change in the gender and women's history of colonial India / Padma Anagol -- The unseamed picture : conflicting narratives of women in the modern European past / Lynn Abrams -- The gendered genealogy of political religions theory / Kevin Passmore -- Forgetting the past / Judith M. Bennett

A tribute to the work of Keith Wrightson, Remaking English Society re-examines the relationship between enduring structures and social change in early modern England. Collectively, the essays in the volume reconstruct the fissures and connections that developed both within and between social groups during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Focusing on the experience of rapid economic and demographic growth and on related processes of cultural diversification, the contributors address fundamental questions about the character of English society during a period of decisive change. Prefaced by a substantial introduction which traces the evolution of early modern social history over the last fifty years, these essays (each of them written by a leading authority) not only offer state-of-the-art assessments of the historiography but also represent the latest research on a variety of topics that have been at the heart of the development of 'the new social history' and its cultural turn: gender relations and sexuality; governance and litigation; class and deference; labouring relations, neighbourliness and reciprocity; and social status and consumption. STEVE HINDLE is W. M. Keck Foundation Director of Research at the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. ALEXANDRA SHEPARD is Reader in History, University of Glasgow. JOHN WALTER is Professor of History, University of Essex