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This book revisits Britain's much-studied 'age of reform', before and after the Great Reform Act of 1832, showing that 'reformers' hoped to reform not only parliament, government, the law and the Church but also, for example, medicine and the theatre. A substantial introduction provides an overview of the period.

This volume presents a range of startling case-studies from German society between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment which make us consider the meanings of gender and identity in the past and which relates, above all, to the lived experiences of men and women, whose lives and choices mattered.

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.

This is an in-depth, richly documented study of the sex and marriage business in ecclesiastical courts of Elizabethan and early Stuart England. This study is based on records of the courts in Wiltshire, Cambridgeshire, Leicestershire and West Sussex in the period 1570-1640.

Dr Spufford's book examines the profits made by these publishers, the scale of their operations, and the way the 'small books' were distributed throughout the country. It also examines their content, and compares the English chapbooks with their French counterparts.

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 book analyses the business, geography and politics of shopkeeping in Milan between 1886 and 1922. The author addresses questions relating to petite bourgeois identity, and explains why shopkeepers sided with the political right. This is the first full-scale study of any aspect of the lives of the petite bourgeoisie in the pre-Fascist period.

This book, first published in 1995, demonstrates the central role of 'people', the empire, and the citizen in eighteenth-century English popular politics. 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.

A study of three centuries of County Mayo's history, during which it was slowly and hesitatingly transformed from being a remote, isolated, impoverished and largely hostile region of the country to being at the centre of the rapidly unfolding drama of Irish politics, and integrated into Ireland's post-Famine agrarian capitalist economy.

This is a collection of revisionist essays on the economic and social history of seventeenth-century Castile by Spanish historians. Since the 1970s an explosion of historical scholarship in Spain, employing new techniques, approached and sources, has transformed our knowledge of the Castilian past.

The Brenner Debate, which reprints from Past and Present various article in 1976, is a scholarly presentation of a variety of points of view discussing the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Western Europe. This will interest historians and scholars in allied fields as well as ordinary readers.

The essays in this collection focus on the nature of popular protest and agrarian unrest and the development of nationalism in modern Ireland. Themes include cultural identity as expressed in Gaelic Irish literature, the dynamics of the potato economy, electoral politics and landlord power, the impact of modernization on Ulster's development.

An analysis of the history and literature of the land in early modern England, which examines a wide range of source material concerned to present a fresh view of the processes of change in rural England.

The gentry played a central role in medieval England, and this is a sustained attempt to explore its origins and to account for its contours and peculiarities between the mid-thirteenth and the mid-fourteenth century, arguing against views which see the gentry as formed or created earlier.

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'.

The figure of the Byzantine emperor, who sometimes was also designated a priest, has long fascinated the western imagination. This classic book studies in detail the imperial union of 'two powers', temporal and spiritual, against a broad background of relations between Church and state and religious and political spheres.

Lords and Peasants in a Changing Society is a history of the large church estate of Worcester from its foundation until the Reformation.

Newly available in paperback, this acclaimed piece of cultural history is a study of dress in France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is easily the most thorough and wide-ranging study of clothing and its social meaning that has been written to date.

This revisionist study challenges those readings of the French Revolution which see it as inherently violent and intolerant and explores the egalitarian policies pursued in the provinces. It reassesses the basic social and economic issues at stake in the Revolution.

This study of late medieval Sicily develops a critique of theories of dependence through trade, and a new interpretation of the late medieval economy. 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.

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.

A fresh look at the crowd in relation to the urbanising process and the civic culture it inspired.

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.

Technological innovation during the middle ages is a subject about which little has been written in detail. This book traces on particular innovation - the introduction of the horse as a replacement for oxen in English farming - and assesses it against the social and economic background of the time.

Praise and Paradox explores the relationship of language, literary structure, and social ideology in the popular Elizabethan literature that praised merchants, industrialists and craftsmen. This literature relied on paradoxical new stereotypes because its authors had no language or ideology that enabled them to separate bourgeois values from the old aristocratic ones.

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.

Guy Bois' study of late medieval Normandy is a work of many dimensions. It should be of particular interest to English readers because of the close historical associations of England with Normandy and because of the natural resemblances between these two countries, separated only by the English Channel.

This book portrays the rural and urban economies and the social structure of the West Midlands of England at a peak period of medieval growth, the end of the thirteenth century. The subject matter ranges from lords to peasants, from merchants to artisans, and from bishops to parish priests.

The history of crime is an exciting field, forming one aspect of a much wider increase in interest in social history as a whole. This book, based on a detailed study of court records in Essex between 1620 and 1680 combines a detailed study of fluctuations in crime and punishment in a seventeenth-century English county with an analysis of the social processes which lay behind prosecution.

Rebellion, riot and popular unrest have been the theme of a succession of stimulating and influential articles in Past and Present. This selection shows how the various forms of popular protest in England from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries have been reinterpreted by modern scholars.