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Early Modern England: Histories
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Widely praised and consistently popular since its first publication in 1987, 'Early Modern England' now reflects in this new edition the invigorating and substantial changes that have swept the field over the past decade and more. It combines consideration of more traditional concerns of social history with investigation of the newer items on the agenda of historians. There is as much attention given to the spiritual and mental worlds and cultural history as to examination of social structures. Even social structure is understood in a wider sense than would once have been customary, with family and local community firmly part of the analysis. The result is a masterly study, providing the only up-to-date interpretation available for the period.
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Still the only general survey of the topic available, this widely-used exploration of the incidence, causes and control of crime in Early Modern England throws a vivid light on the times. It uses court archives to capture vividly the everyday lives of people who would otherwise have left little mark on the historical record. This new edition - fully updated throughout - incorporates new thinking on many issues including gender and crime; changes in punishment; and literary perspectives on crime.
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Arguments about the place and practice of the duel in early modern England were widespread. The distinguished intellectual historian Markku Peltonen examines this debate, and show how the moral and ideological status of duelling was discussed within a much larger cultural context of courtesy, civility and politeness. The advocates of the duel, following Italian and French examples, contended that it maintained and enhanced politeness; its critics by contrast increasingly severed duelling from civility, and this separation became part of a vigorous attempt in the late seventeenth century and beyond to redefine civility, politeness and indeed the nature and evolution of Englishness. To understand the duel is to understand much more fully some crucial issues in the cultural and ideological history of Stuart England, and Markku Peltonen's study will ... engage the attention of a very wide audience of historians, cultural and literary scholars.
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The Clothing, Culture and Identity in Early Modern England project will reconstruct the everyday life of clothes in late sixteenth and early seventeenth century England. This project will address key areas of the cultural consumption of clothing: clothing and religious identity, the moral consumption of clothing, the everyday life of clothes, clothing and social status, and dress and gender identity. The project is based in the Department of Modern History and at the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham.
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Dr Laven works on the social and cultural history of early modern Europe, and especially on Italy. Particular interests include gender, religion and sociability. Her first book used court records to reconstruct the experiences of women in the convents of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Venice; it has been translated into several languages and was awarded the John Llewellyn Rhys prize for 2002. Her current projects include a textbook on the Counter-Reformation, and a study of the Jesuit mission to China.
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The notion that politics after the Reformation happened at local level as well as on the national and international stages has become more prominent among early modern historians. John Morrill, among others, has made the case for ‘county community’ politics, and this excellent book by Phil Withington makes the case for the urban community. The surge in the number of incorporated towns that picked up, in Peter Slack’s words, ‘the vacuum left by the dissolution’, gave the townsmen a degree of importance and responsibility that hitherto had belonged to the gentry. This is turn gave burgesses and guild members a sense of freedom and independence that they were never afterwards to lose. Phil Withington comprehensively charts the rise of the corporate system and assesses its effect on the activities and ideologies of the townsmen that ‘drove and legitimated its formation’. This corporate system, he asserts, was not the remnants of a dying society but a vehicle for early modern change.
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