The social, political and cultural factors determining conformity and obedience as well as dissidence and revolt are traced in sixteenth and early seventeenth century England.
Guns had an enormous impact on the social, economic, cultural, and political lives of civilian men, women, and children of all social strata in early modern England. In this study, Lois Schwoerer identifies and analyzes England’s domestic gun culture from 1500 to 1740, uncovering how guns became available, what effects they had on society, and how different sectors of the population contributed to gun culture. The rise of guns made for recreational use followed the development of a robust gun industry intended by King Henry VIII to produce artillery and handguns for war. Located first in London, the gun industry brought the city new sounds, smells, street names, shops, sights, and communities of gun workers, many of whom were immigrants. Elite men used guns for hunting, target shooting, and protection. They collected beautifully decorated guns, gave them as gifts, and included them in portraits and coats-of-arms, regarding firearms as a mark of status, power, and sophistication. With statutes and proclamations, the government legally denied firearms to subjects with an annual income under £100—about 98 percent of the population—whose reactions ranged from grudging acceptance to willful disobedience. Schwoerer shows how this domestic gun culture influenced England’s Bill of Rights in 1689, a document often cited to support the claim that the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution conveys the right to have arms as an Anglo-American legacy. Schwoerer shows that the Bill of Rights did not grant a universal right to have arms, but rather a right restricted by religion, law, and economic standing, terms that reflected the nation's gun culture. Examining everything from gunmakers’ records to wills, and from period portraits to toy guns, Gun Culture in Early Modern England offers new data and fresh insights on the place of the gun in English society.
The common theme of this selection of articles by David Cressy, published over the last twenty-five years, is the linkage of elite and popular culture and the participation of ordinary people in the central events of their age. The collection also traces a development in historical style and method, from quantitative applications using statistics to qualitative telling of tales. Seven essays under the heading 'Opportunities' explore problems of education, literacy and cultural attainment within the gendered and hierarchically ordered society of Elizabeth and Stuart England. Eight more under the heading 'Passages' examine social and cultural interactions, kinship, migration, community celebrations, and rituals in the life-cycle. The collection brings together a coherent body of research that is much cited in current scholarship and continues to shape the agenda for the social and cultural history of early modern England.
A thorough sourcebook and accessible student text covering the interplay between religion, politics, society and popular culture in the Tudor and Stuart periods. `An excellent and imaginative collection.' - Diarmaid MacCulloch
Written by leading authorities, the volume can be considered a standard work on seventeenth-century English social history. A tribute to the work of Keith Wrightson, Remaking English Society re-examines the relationship between enduring structures and social change in early modern England. Collectively, the essays in the volume reconstruct the fissures and connections that developed both within and between social groups during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Focusing on the experience of rapid economic and demographic growth and on related processesof cultural diversification, the contributors address fundamental questions about the character of English society during a period of decisive change. Prefaced by a substantial introduction which traces the evolution of early modern social history over the last fifty years, these essays (each of them written by a leading authority) not only offer state-of-the-art assessments of the historiography but also represent the latest research on a variety of topics that have been at the heart of the development of 'the new social history' and its cultural turn: gender relations and sexuality; governance and litigation; class and deference; labouring relations, neighbourliness and reciprocity; and social status and consumption. STEVE HINDLE is W. M. Keck Foundation Director of Research at the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. ALEXANDRA SHEPARD is Reader in History, University of Glasgow. JOHN WALTER is Professor of History, University of Essex. Contributors: Helen Berry, Adam Fox, H. R. French, Malcolm Gaskill, Paul Griffiths, Steve Hindle, Craig Muldrew, Lindsay O'Neill, Alexandra Shepard, Tim Stretton, Naomi Tadmor, John Walter, Phil Withington, Andy Wood
In this volume seventeen distinguished historians of early modern Britain pay tribute to an outstanding scholar and teacher. Several present reviews of major areas of debate: of the significance of the regulations which determined the social and legal status of professional actors in Elizabethan England, of Protestant ideas about marriage, of the political significance of the Anglo-Scottish Union, of relations between the Churches of England, Scotland and Ireland under the early Stuarts, and of the riddle of the inner dynamic of the experience of emigration of New England. Case-studies in the social and religious history of the period include the relationship between ideas of cleanliness and godliness, the flowering of the notion of unitive Protestantism in two declarations on behalf of the National Church and provincial preaching at a moment of political crisis in the north of England. Three essays draw on literary evidence to explore attitudes to men of war, the use of the murder pamphlet as a Puritan conversion narrative and the service provided by scholarly readers for politically influential public figures. Two essays make impressive use of fieldwork to reveal how the churches of James I and VI's two kingdoms were furnished and how the gardens of Sir Nicholas and Sir Francis Bacon illuminate their minds and attitudes. The European dimension is represented by an essay on Nicolas Pithou's history of the Reformation in the city of Troyes. This very wide-ranging and fascinating collection of essays will appeal both to specialists in the period and to those interested in the social and cultural history of early modern Britain.
The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have traditionally been regarded by historians as a period of intense and formative historical change, so much so that they have often been described as ‘early modern' - an epoch separate from ‘the medieval' and ‘the modern'. Paying particular attention to England, this book reflects on the implications of this categorization for contemporary debates about the nature of modernity and society. The book traces the forgotten history of the phrase 'early modern' to its coinage as a category of historical analysis by the Victorians and considers when and why words like 'modern' and 'society' were first introduced into English in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In so doing it unpicks the connections between linguistic and social change and how the consequences of those processes still resonate today. A major contribution to our understanding of European history before 1700 and its resonance for social thought today, the book will interest anybody concerned with the historical antecedents of contemporary culture and the interconnections between the past and the present.
This book is an excellent work of scholarship. It seeks to redefine the early modern English economy by rejecting the concept of capitalism, and instead explores the cultural meaning of credit, resulting from the way in which it was economically structured. It is a major argument of the book that money was used only in a limited number of exchanges, and that credit in terms of household reputation, was a 'cultural currency' of trust used to transact most business. As the market expanded in the late-sixteenth century such trust became harder to maintain, leading to an explosion of debt litigation, which in turn resulted in social relations being partially redefined in terms of contractual equality.
The question of Shakespeare's Catholic contexts has occupied many scholars in recent years and this study brings together 16 original essays examining Shakespeare's work in the light of revisionist scholarship, from monastic life in 'Measure for Measure' to Puritanism in 'Hamlet'.