Marjo Kaartinen has brought the world of monks, friars, and nuns freshly alive in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. Their monastic vows - obedience, poverty, chastity, and stability - still made a difference to them and to the laypeople around them, even when they failed to live up to them. Much of Kaartinen's story is told through the words of the religious themselves, from self-defence to self-criticism, and this makes the reading all the better. Religious Life and English Culture in the Reformation helps us understand why some forms of Catholic sensibility lasted so long and...

Focusing on the transition from the modern to the early modern periods, this volume explores the role of gender in shaping the development of the European town. It examines how gender is both embedded in the built environment and reflected in the way that the built environment is experienced and used, in patterns of residence and movement, in the provision and consumption of services and consumer goods, in the nature of street culture and the diversity of the social arena, and in the shifting boundaries between the public and the private, the social and the political.