Much scholarship has been done on Welsh and English cities after the Black Death but until now no serious attempt has been made to understand what they were like in the seventy-five or so years preceding the pandemic. In "Urban Assimilation in Post-Conquest Wales," Matthew Frank Stevens fills this research gap, drawing on a case study of the Denbighshire town of Ruthin to discuss the significance of ethnicity, gender, and social status in the network of small Anglo-Welsh urban centers that emerged in North Wales following the English conquest of 1282.

There has been a tendency in scholarship on premodern women and the law to see married women as hidden from view, obscured by their husbands in legal records. This volume provides a corrective view, arguing that the extent to which the legal principle of coverture applied has been over-emphasized. In particular, it points up differences between the English common law position, which gave husbands guardianship over their wives and their wives' property, and the position elsewhere in northwest Europe, where wives' property became part of a community of property. Detailed studies of legal...