This text argues that sexual difference has its own psychological and physiological reality, which must affect the way we write history. These essays deal with the nature of masculinity and femininity, the importance of the irrational and unconscious in history, the cultural impact of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and the central role of magic and witchcraft in the psychic and emotional world of the early modern period. It aims to define a different route towards understanding the body, and its relationship to culture and subjectivity.

Although the gentry played a central role in medieval England, this study is the first sustained exploration of its origins and development between the mid-thirteenth and the mid-fourteenth century. Arguing against views which see the gentry as formed or created earlier, the text investigates as well the relationship between lesser landowners and the Angevin state; the transformation of knighthood; and the role of lesser landowners in society and politics.

This book makes an original contribution to the history of the English Revolution and to the meaning of crowd behavior. It recreates one of the most famous episodes, in which crowds from Essex and Suffolk attacked and plundered the houses of the gentry, and sought to "ethnically cleanse" their communities of Catholics. The deeper perspective offered by history shows that this action was not "blind violence": the book deciphers the logic that informed the crowd's behavior, and finds evidence of both the importance--and reach--of puritanism and popular parliamentarianism.

This book discusses the 'marginal' people of late medieval Paris, the large and shifting group of men and women who existed on the margins of conventional organized society.

This book honours the varied and creative career of Joan Thirsk, Fellow of the British Academy and former Reader in Economic History in the University of Oxford. The chapters have been written largely by Dr Thirsk's former research students, and the diversity of themes covered reflects her own diversity of academic interest. The subjects range from landlords and land management to the position of women in early modern England and the origins of the Sheffield cutlery and allied trades. Supplemented with a full bibliography and personal and academic appreciations, this volume will serve as a...

Leader of the Diggers, or True Levellers, whose colony was forced to disband in 1650, Gerrard Winstanley stands out from a century remarkable for its development in political thought as one of the most fecund and original of political writers. An acute and penetrating social critic with a passionate sense of justice, he worked out a collectivist theory which strikingly anticipates nineteenth- and twentieth-century socialism. He was the first modern European thinker to write in the vernacular advocating a communist society, and to call upon ordinary people to realize it. Winstanley published a...

This book suggests fresh meanings and implications in Middleton's own writings, and helps towards rethinking the place of drama in the changing life of early Stuart England.

Attention has increasingly turned in recent years from the economic and agricultural framework of the life of the English villager in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to his or her social and mental world. Margaret Spufford's interest in literacy, and particularly in the ability to read, which laid the villager open to all sorts of external influences other than those coming from the pulpit and the manor house, has led her in this book to examine both the spread of reading ability, and one of the principal forms of cheap print available in the late seventeenth century at a price within...

This exciting study demonstrates the central role of "the people," the empire, and the citizen in eighteenth-century English popular politics. Pioneering in its focus on provincial towns, its attention to the imperial contexts of urban politics and its use of a rich and diverse array of sources--from newspapers, prints and plays to pottery and tea-cloths--it shows how the wide-ranging political culture of English towns attuned ordinary men and women to the issues of state power and thus enabled them to stake their own claims in national and imperial affairs.

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 Klima...