The Changing English Countryside, 1400-1700
The Changing English Countryside, 1400-1700

Author: Leonard Cantor

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-06

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 1351730193

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The period covered by this book, first published in 1987, was an important one for the rural landscape in England. The author describes and analyses the evolution of the countryside during the years which witnessed the gradual disappearance of the medieval landscape and the introduction of new farming methods and industrial techniques, thus laying the foundation for the radical changes that were to transform the English countryside in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The main features of the countryside are dealt with fully and examples are given of their remains which can still be identified in the landscape today.

Rural England
Rural England

Author: Joan Thirsk

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 366

ISBN-13: 9780198606192

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From prehistory to the present day, our landscape has been transformed by successive periods of human activity, triggered by the rise and fall of populations and their need to be fed, housed, and employed. These changes have built up layers of evidence which offer historians exciting insightsinto land use through the centuries and how rural communities of the past lived their lives. In this ground-breaking study - published in hardback as The English Rural Landscape and now available in paperback - Joan Thirsk and her team of distinguished contributors, many of whom live in the places they describe, invite us to explore the historical richness of the English landscape. Eachchapter synthesizes the latest thinking and provides fresh perspectives on its subject. It is the first book since W. G. Hoskins' definitive study The Making of the English Landscape, published nearly 50 years ago, to do so. The first ten chapters describe the characteristic features of the main landscape types, including fenland, downland, woodland, marshland, and moorland. However geographically scattered areas of a particular landscape type are, they have often been moulded by successive generations in ways that haveproduced strong physical similarities. The second part of the book is made up of five cameo features, each exploring an individual place in detail: the people and the distinctive histories that shaped them. These include the Land Settlement experimental village of Fen Drayton, set up during the Great Depression in the 1930s, and surveysof the very different settlements of Hook Norton in North Oxfordshire and Staintondale in North Yorkshire. Rural England: A History of the Landscape shows us how much of the rural past is still visible if we choose to dig for it. It illustrates how we might go about exploring it for ourselves. It is the definitive work on the history of the English landscape for all would-be landscape and local historydetectives, professional and amateur alike.

The Oxford Illustrated History of Tudor & Stuart Britain
The Oxford Illustrated History of Tudor & Stuart Britain

Author: John Stephen Morrill

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 556

ISBN-13: 9780192893277

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Two centuries of dramatic change are covered by this exciting and richly illustrated work. Eighteen leading scholars explore the political, social, religious, and cultural history of the period when monarchs based in south-east England imperfectly attempted to extend their authority over thewhole of the British Isles. These centuries witnessed the Reformation, the civil wars, and two revolutions, in which two monarchs, two wives of a king, and two archbishops of Canterbury were tried and executed, and hundreds of men and women tortured and burned in the name of religion. Yet in the same period, an explosion ofliteracy and the printed word, transformations in landscapes and townscapes, new forms of wealth, new structures of power, and new forms of political participation freed minds and broadened horizons. These centuries marked the beginning of Britain's imperial power and its emergence as perhaps themost liberal and mature of European states. The integrated illustrations and maps form an essential part of the book, complementing all aspects of the text. It also contains a Chronology, Glossary, Family Trees of the monarchy, Further Reading, and an extensive Index.

Encyclopedia of Tudor England [3 volumes]
Encyclopedia of Tudor England [3 volumes]

Author: John A. Wagner

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2011-12-09

Total Pages: 1467

ISBN-13: 1598842994

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Authority and accessibility combine to bring the history and the drama of Tudor England to life. Almost 900 engaging entries cover the life and times of Henry VIII, Mary I, Elizabeth I, William Shakespeare, and much, much more. Written for high school students, college undergraduates, and public library patrons—indeed, for anyone interested in this important and colorful period—the three-volume Encyclopedia of Tudor England illuminates the era's most important people, events, ideas, movements, institutions, and publications. Concise, yet in-depth entries offer comprehensive coverage and an engaging mix of accessibility and authority. Chronologically, the encyclopedia spans the period from the accession of Henry VII in 1485 to the death of Elizabeth I in 1603. It also examines pre-Tudor people and topics that shaped the Tudor period, as well as individuals and events whose influence extended into the Jacobean period after 1603. Geographically, the encyclopedia covers England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, and also Russia, Asia, America, and important states in continental Europe. Topics include: the English Reformation; the development of Parliament; the expansion of foreign trade; the beginnings of American exploration; the evolution of the nuclear family; and the flowering of English theater and poetry, culminating in the works of William Shakespeare.

Gender and the Garden in Early Modern English Literature
Gender and the Garden in Early Modern English Literature

Author: Jennifer Munroe

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-03-02

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 1351934759

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Radical reconfigurations in gardening practice in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England altered the social function of the garden, offering men and women new opportunities for social mobility. While recent work has addressed how middle class men used the garden to attain this mobility, the gendering of the garden during the period has gone largely unexamined. This new study focuses on the developing gendered tension in gardening that stemmed from a shift from the garden as a means of feeding a family, to the garden as an aesthetic object imbued with status. The first part of the book focuses on how practical gardening books proposed methods for planting as they simultaneously represented gardens increasingly hierarchized by gender. The second part of the book looks at how men and women appropriated aesthetic uses of actual gardening in their poetry, and reveals a parallel gendered tension there. Munroe analyzes garden representations in the writings of such manuals writers as Gervase Markham, Thomas Hill, and William Lawson, and such poets as Edmund Spenser, Aemilia Lanyer and Lady Mary Wroth. Investigating gardens, gender and writing, Jennifer Munroe considers not only published literary representations of gardens, but also actual garden landscapes and unpublished evidence of everyday gardening practice. She de-prioritizes the text as a primary means of cultural production, showing instead the relationship between what men and women might imagine possible and represent in their writing, and everyday spatial practices and the spaces men and women occupied and made. In so doing, she also broadens our outlook on whom we can identify and value as producers of early modern social space.

Voices of Shakespeare's England
Voices of Shakespeare's England

Author: John A. Wagner

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2010-02-09

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 0313357412

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Voices of Shakespeare's England offers students and public library patrons over 50 primary documents that illuminate the character, personalities, and events of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. Voices of Shakespeare's England: Contemporary Accounts of Elizabethan Daily Life helps readers explore the era that produced, among other things, the world's greatest playwright. It brings together excerpts from over 50 primary documents written in William Shakespeare's lifetime, including letters, literature, speeches and polemics, official reports, and descriptive narratives. Voices of Shakespeare's England includes the works of Shakespeare himself, as well as other poets and playwrights, but it also expands beyond the literary world to cover politics, religion, economics, social change, and the royal court. By allowing Shakespeare's contemporaries to speak in their own voices, it offers an illuminating look at the breadth of Elizabethan society, including major historic events in England as well as Scotland, Ireland, the European continent, and even the new world of America.

The Black Death in Egypt and England
The Black Death in Egypt and England

Author: Stuart J. Borsch

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2009-09-15

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0292783175

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Throughout the fourteenth century AD/eighth century H, waves of plague swept out of Central Asia and decimated populations from China to Iceland. So devastating was the Black Death across the Old World that some historians have compared its effects to those of a nuclear holocaust. As countries began to recover from the plague during the following century, sharp contrasts arose between the East, where societies slumped into long-term economic and social decline, and the West, where technological and social innovation set the stage for Europe's dominance into the twentieth century. Why were there such opposite outcomes from the same catastrophic event? In contrast to previous studies that have looked to differences between Islam and Christianity for the solution to the puzzle, this pioneering work proposes that a country's system of landholding primarily determined how successfully it recovered from the calamity of the Black Death. Stuart Borsch compares the specific cases of Egypt and England, countries whose economies were based in agriculture and whose pre-plague levels of total and agrarian gross domestic product were roughly equivalent. Undertaking a thorough analysis of medieval economic data, he cogently explains why Egypt's centralized and urban landholding system was unable to adapt to massive depopulation, while England's localized and rural landholding system had fully recovered by the year 1500.

A Slice of Life
A Slice of Life

Author: Edwin Brezette DeWindt

Publisher: Medieval Institute Publications

Published: 1996-12-01

Total Pages: 110

ISBN-13: 1580445187

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Since the audience for this text is assumed to be primarily students of medieval history, nothing from a specifically literary text has been included. Further, since archaeology deals in artifacts and other physical remains, it is impractical to supply material from that discipline. Therefore, only material from record sources is provided . . . These are the only written materials that permit some measure of personalized contact with specific men and women from the past, so this gives them a special importance. - from the Introduction

Documents of Shakespeare's England
Documents of Shakespeare's England

Author: John A. Wagner

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2019-10-01

Total Pages: 351

ISBN-13:

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This engaging collection of over 60 primary document selections sheds light on the personalities, issues, events, and ideas that defined and shaped life in England during the years of Shakespeare's life and career. Documents of Shakespeare's England contains more than 60 primary document selections that will help readers understand all aspects of life in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. The book is divided into 12 topical sections, such as Politics and Parliament, London Life, and Queen and Court, which offer five document selections each. Each document is preceded by a detailed introduction that puts the selection into historical context and explains why it is important. A general introduction and chronology help readers understand Shakespeare's England in broad terms and see connections, causes, and consequences. Bibliographies of current and useful print and electronic information resources accompany each document, and a general bibliography lists seminal works on Shakespeare's England. This is an engaging and accurate introduction to the England of William Shakespeare told in the words of those who experienced it.

Burning Bush
Burning Bush

Author: Stephen J. Pyne

Publisher: Macmillan + ORM

Published: 2014-10-07

Total Pages: 787

ISBN-13: 1466882913

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From the time of the continent's formation tens of millions of years ago as the Godwana twin of Antarctica, Australia has been dominated by fire much as its sister has been by ice. Now Stephen Pyne, one of our foremost environmental historians, proposes a major reinterpretation of the Australian experience by using fire and Australia to explain one another. He narrates the story of how fire came to Australia and interacted with the Australian biota and its human inhabitants, while at the same time he relates the planetary saga of fire as it has been played out on this special island continent. Much as the Aborigines exploited fire to remake their environment into something more usable, so Stephen Pyne exploits fire to transform the landscape of history into something more accessible, to use its transmuting power to extract new meaning out of familiar events. Pyne traces the impact of fire, from its initial influence on the evolving vegetation of the new continent, through its use by the Aborigines and the subsequent European settlers, to the holocaust of February 1983 known as Ash Wednesday, and he shows us that the dynamic nature of fire has made it a most powerful environmental determinant in Australia, shaping both its social and natural histories. In his critically acclaimed study of Antarctica, The Ice, Pyne explored the myriad dimensions of the cold continent; now Burning Bush offers us an equally absorbing examination of a continent informed by fire.