How was law made in England in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? Through detailed studies of what the courts actually did, Peter King argues that parliament and the Westminster courts played a less important role in the process of law making than is usually assumed. Justice was often remade from the margins by magistrates, judges and others at the local level. His book also focuses on four specific themes - gender, youth, violent crime and the attack on customary rights. In doing so it highlights a variety of important changes - the relatively lenient treatment meted out to women by the late eighteenth century, the early development of the juvenile reformatory in England before 1825, i.e. before similar changes on the continent or in America, and the growing intolerance of the courts towards everyday violence. This study is invaluable reading to anyone interested in British political and legal history.

The Peasants of Ottobeuren offers an interesting perspective on one of the enduring problems of early modern European history: the possibilities for economic growth and social change in rural society. Based on the voluminous records of the Swabian Benedictine monastery of Ottobeuren, this study underscores the limitations of the traditional narrative of a sixteenth-century boom which foundered on the productive rigidities of the peasant economy and then degenerated into social crisis in the seventeenth century. Population growth did strain resources at Ottobeuren, but the peasantry continued to produce substantial agricultural surplus. More importantly, peasants reacted to demographic pressure by deepening their involvement in land and credit markets, and more widely and aggressively marketing the fruits of their labour. Marriage and inheritance underwent a similar process of commercialization which made heavy demands on the peasantry, but which maintained a degree of social stability through the devastations of war, plague and famine.

This book takes a look at the 'age of reform', from 1780 when reform became a common object of aspiration, to the 1830s - the era of the 'Reform Ministry' and of the Great Reform Act of 1832 - and beyond, when such aspirations were realized more frequently. It pays close attention to what contemporaries termed 'reform', identifying two strands, institutional and moral, which interacted in complex ways. Particular reforming initiatives singled out for attention include those targeting parliament, government, the law, the Church, medicine, slavery, regimens of self-care, opera, theatre, and art institutions, while later chapters situate British reform in its imperial and European contexts. An extended introduction provides a point of entry to the history and historiography of the period. The book will therefore stimulate fresh thinking about this formative period of British history.

The gentry played a central role in medieval England, and this study is a sustained attempt to explore the origins of the gentry and to account for its contours and peculiarities between the mid-thirteenth and the mid-fourteenth century. The book deals with the deep roots of the gentry, but argues against views which see the gentry as formed or created earlier. It investigates the relationship between lesser landowners and the Angevin state, the transformation of knighthood, and the role of knights in the rebellion of mid thirteenth-century England. The role of lesser landowners in the society and politics of Edwardian England is then put under close scrutiny. It also emphasises changes in social terminology and the rise of social gradation, the emergence of the county as an important focus of identity, the gentry's control over the populace, and their openness to the upward mobility of professionals.

This 2002 book provides a major survey of representations of adultery in later seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England. Bringing together a wide variety of literary and legal sources - including sermons, pamphlets, plays, diaries, periodicals, trial reports and the records of marital litigation - it documents a growing diversity in perceptions of marital infidelity in this period, against the backdrop of an explosion in print culture and a decline in the judicial regulation of sexual immorality. In general terms the book charts and explains a gradual transformation of ideas about extra-marital sex, whereby the powerfully established religious argument that adultery was universally a sin became increasingly open to challenge. The book charts significant developments in the idiom in which sexually transgressive behaviour was discussed, showing how evolving ideas of civility and social refinement and new thinking about gender difference influenced assessments of immoral behaviour.

This book, first published in 2000, offers a wide-ranging and ambitious analysis of how European travellers in India developed their perceptions of ethnic, political and religious diversity over three hundred years. It analyses the growth of novel historical and philosophical concerns, from the early and rare examples of medieval travellers such as Marco Polo, through to the more sophisticated narratives of seventeenth-century observers - religious writers such as Jesuit missionaries, or independent antiquarians such as Pietro della Valle. The book's approach combines the detailed contextual analysis of individual narratives with an original long-term interpretation of the role of cross-cultural encounters in the European Renaissance. An extremely wide range of European sources is discussed, including the often neglected but extremely important Iberian and Italian sources. However, the book also discusses a number of non-European sources, Muslim and Hindu, thereby challenging simplistic interpretations of western 'orientalism'.

This study explores the egalitarian policies pursued in the provinces during the radical phase of the French Revolution, but moves away from the habit of looking at such issues in terms of the Terror alone. It challenges revisionist readings of Jacobinism that dwell on its totalitarian potential or portray it as dangerously utopian. The mainstream Jacobin agenda emphasised 'fair shares' and equal opportunities for all in a private ownership market economy. It sought to achieve social justice without jeopardising human rights and tended thus to complement, rather than undermine, the liberal, individualist programme of the Revolution. The book stresses the relevance of the 'Enlightenment legacy', the close affinity between Girondins and Montagnards, the key role played by many lesser-known figures and the moral ascendancy of Robespierre. It reassesses the basic social and economic issues at stake in the Revolution, which cannot be understood solely in terms of political discourse.

This important collection brings together both established figures and new researchers to offer fresh perspectives on the ever-controversial subject of the history of witchcraft. Using Keith Thomas's Religion and the Decline of Magic as a starting point, the contributors explore the changes of the last twenty-five years in the understanding of early modern witchcraft, and suggest new approaches, especially concerning the cultural dimensions of the subject. Witchcraft cases must be understood as power struggles, over gender and ideology as well as social relationships, with a crucial role played by alternative representations. Witchcraft was always a contested idea, never fully established in early modern culture but much harder to dislodge than has usually been assumed. The essays are European in scope, with examples from Germany, France, and the Spanish expansion into the New World, as well as a strong core of English material.

This book analyses County Mayo in Ireland from the Elizabethan pacification of the county to the first stage of the Land War in the late nineteenth century. During those three centuries the county was transformed from being a remote, isolated, impoverished and hostile region of the country to being at the centre of Irish politics and integrated into an agrarian capitalist economy. The book is divided into two sections. The first contains an analysis of the county prior to the Great Famine, and provides the foundation for a core/periphery analysis of Mayo's economic development and its impact upon popular politics in the county. The second, employing a core/periphery analysis of the post-Famine economic and political transformation of the county, demonstrates that the structural changes that gave rise to the Land War occurred more rapidly in central Mayo than along its western coastline or eastern boundaries. This uneven development helps account for both the initial strength and rapid disintegration of the land movement in the county.

This is one of the most important and original contributions to English rural history to be published in the past generation. Winner of the Whitfield Prize of the Royal Historical Society in 1994, Commoners challenges the view that England had no peasantry or that it had disappeared before industrialization: rather it shows that common rights and petty landholding shaped social relations in English villages, and that their loss at enclosure sharpened social antagonisms and imprinted on popular culture a pervasive sense of loss.

From the mid–1880s a shopkeeper movement developed in Milan, centred around a shopkeeper newspaper, a federation of shopkeeper trade associations, and a shopkeeper bank. In 1904 shopkeeper representatives initiated a sequence of events that led to the fall of the first radical-socialist administration within the city. The author explains these events with reference to the business of shopkeeping itself. He analyses the trades, techniques, tax structure and topography of the Milanese retail sector, and traces the history of the contest between shops and cooperatives and the shopkeeper's changing relationship with his employees and with his clientele. The final chapter confronts the crucial question of why the Milanese shopkeepers were to be found on the political right in the years leading up to the Fascist takeover. This is the first book to deal with any aspect of the Italian petite bourgeoisie.

From plague to AIDS, epidemics have been the most spectacular diseases to afflict human societies. This volume examines the way in which these great crises have influenced ideas, how they have helped to shape theological, political and social thought, and how they have been interpreted and understood in the intellectual context of their time.

This study of late medieval Sicily develops a critique of theories of dependence through trade, and a new interpretation of the late medieval economy. It thus addresses current debates on the origins of modern Italian economic dualism, and on the transition from feudalism to capitalism in early modern Europe. Dr Epstein argues that economic development during this period was shaped largely by regional political and institutional structures which regulated access to markets. Following the Black Death, many institutional and social constraints on commercialization were relaxed throughout western Europe as a result of social conflict and demographic change. Peasants became more commercialized; economic growth occurred through regional integration and specialization. The Sicilian economy also expanded and became increasingly export-oriented. although only a small proportion of its output was shipped abroad before 1500. Late medieval Sicily is thus shown to have been neither underdeveloped nor dependent on foreign manufactures and trade.

This is a comparative study of the role of English and French towns in feudal society in the middle ages. In bringing together much material which dissolves old categories and simplifications in the study of medieval towns, Professor Hilton provides an important new perspective on medieval society and on the nature of feudalism. He argues that medieval towns were not, as is often thought, the harbingers of capitalism, and emphasises the way in which urban social structures fitted into, rather than challenged, feudalism.

This book is first and foremost an extended examination and discussion of the enslavement of men and women by others of their society and in particular of the means and causes of the gradual end of slavery in early medieval Europe between 500 and 1200. Drawing upon a very wide range of primary and archival sources, Professor Bonnassie places fresh findings about subjection, servitude and lordship in relation to the prevailing understanding of social history which has developed since the work of Marc Bloch. The author explains how slavery long persisted in southern France and Spain, as part of a public order that also sheltered free peasants, giving way in the tenth and eleventh centuries to a new regime of harsh lordships that mark the beginnings of feudalism. He shows that feudalism in south-western Europe was no less significant than in northern European lands.

When maritime transport and communication depended on muscle and wind-power, the Mediterranean Sea functioned as a symbiotic force between the civilisations which surrounded it, at once the major dividing barrier and the major connecting element. In this study, the technological limitations of maritime traffic are considered in conjunction with the peculiar geographical conditions within which it operated, and which led to the establishment of major sea lanes on trunk routes along which traffic could move safely, efficiently, and economically. These trunk routes remained virtually unchanged from antiquity to the sixteenth century, and eventually constituted economic and strategic maritime frontiers between civilisations. At the same time, the technological limitations of the oared galley meant that coasts and islands along the trunk routes had also to be held, a necessity which favoured geographically the Christian West over the world of Byzantium and Islam.

Adultery, fornication, breach of marriage contract, sexual slander - these, along with religious offences of various kinds, were typical of the cases dealt with by the ecclesiastical courts in Elizabethan and early Stuart England. What was it like to live in a society in which personal morality was regulated by law in this fashion? How far-reaching was such surveillance in actual practice? How did ordinary people view the courts - as useful institutions upholding accepted standards, or as an alien system purveying unwanted values? How effective were the church courts in influencing attitudes and behaviour? Previous assessments of ecclesiastical justice, coloured by contemporary puritan and common law criticisms, have mostly been unfavourable. This in-depth, richly documented study of the sex and marriage business dealt with under church law, based on the records of the courts in Wiltshire, Cambridgeshire, Leicestershire and West Sussex in the period 1570–1640, presents a more balanced and more positive view.

In a number of related case-studies, this book traces the social political, and cultural factors making for conformity and obedience, and those promoting dissidence and revolt in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. The essays explore the significance of the concept of honour in forming the mentality of the ruling elites, the role of region, humanism, and law in promoting social and political solidarity, and the influences at work in the changing styles of political action as illustrated by the careers of four magnates.

Few historical issues have occasioned such discussion since at least the time of Marx as the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Western Europe. The Brenner Debate, which reprints from Past and Present various article in 1976, is a scholarly presentation of a variety of points of view, covering a very wide range in time, place and type of approach. Weighty theoretical responses to Brenner's first formulation followed from the late Sir Michael Postan, John Hatcher, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Guy Bois; more particular contributions came from Patricia Croot, David Parker, Arnost Klìma and Heide Wunder on England, France, Bohemia and Germany; and reflective pieces from R. H. Hilton and the late J. P. Cooper. Completing the volume, and giving it an overall coherence, are Brenner's own comprehensive response to those who had taken part in the debate, and also R. H. Hilton's introduction that aims to bring together the major themes in the collection of essays. The debate has already aroused widespread interest among historians and scholars in allied fields as well as among ordinary readers, and may reasonably be regarded as one of the most important historical debates of prevailing years.

Praise and Paradox explores the relationship of language, literary structure, and social ideology in the popular Elizabethan literature that praised merchants, industrialists and craftsmen. Part I defines a canon of 296 popular vernacular works, relates the increasing popularity of tales about tradesmen to the development of the English economy and the expansion of the Elizabethan audience, and discusses the social origins of the popular authors. Part II is concerned with the change of the merchant's literary image from that of a greedy usurer to that of a 'businessman in armour' who defended his monarch on the battlefield and entertained princes at lavish banquets. Part III discusses the change in the literary image of the craftsman, who ceased to be a clown or a rebel and became a 'gentle craftsman' who fought bravely on the battlefield when necessary but was happier in his humble shop, where he sang, danced, and courted pretty girls.