Böcker i Past and Present Publications-serien

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.

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.

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 a major, groundbreaking study by a leading scholar in the field of continental witchcraft studies. The book includes a thorough overview of all known prosecutions for witchcraft in the period 1300-1800, and investigates in depth its social and political background.

This volume originates from a Past and Present conference on 'The Roots of Sociobiology' held in 1978 and incorporates the results of recent research on problems in the social relations of the biological sciences. The authors describe different historical aspects of the interrelationship of technical experience and social policy in the fields of health, education and social welfare.

Around 300 A.D. European patterns of marriage and kinship were turned on their head. What had previously been the norm - marriage to close kin - became the new taboo. The same applied to adoption, the obligation of a man to marry his brother's widow and a number of other central practices. With these changes Christian Europe broke radically from its own past and established practices which diverged markedly from those of the Middle East, North Africa and Asia. In this highly original and far-reaching work Jack Goody argues that from the fourth century there developed in the northern Mediterranean a distinctive but not undifferentiated kinship system, whose growth can be attributed to the role of the Church in acquiring property formerly held by domestic groups. He suggests that the early Church, faced with the need to provide for people who had left their kin to devote themselves to the life of the Church, regulated the rules of marriage so that wealth could be channelled away from the family and into the Church. Thus the Church became an 'interitor', acquiring vast tracts of property through the alienation of familial rights. At the same time, the structure of domestic life was changed dramatically, the Church placing more emphasis on individual wishes, on conjugality, and on spiritual rather than natural kinship. Tracing the consequences of this change through to the present day, Jack Goody challenges some fundamental assumptions about the making of western society, and provides an alternative focus for future study of the European family, kinship structures and marriage patterns. The questions he raises will provoke much interest and discussion amongst anthropologists, sociologists and historians.

This book examines developments in medieval society, and the knighthood in particular, through an in-depth study of the social structure of Warwickshire. It makes an important contribution to our understanding of the origins of the English gentry.