Books in the Past and Present Publications series

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

This book suggests fresh meanings and implications in Middleton's own writings, and helps towards rethinking the place of drama in the changing life of early Stuart England.

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

In this first global comparative study, Francisco Bethencourt examines the Inquisition's activities in Spain, Italy, Portugal and overseas Iberian colonies. He forcefully challenges revisionist accounts to underline the fundamental role of the Inquisition in the Counter-Reformation and in shaping the Catholic Church, Southern European societies and the colonial Iberian world.

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.

Byzantine literature is often regarded as little more than an agglomeration of stereotyped forms and generic conventions which allows no scope for individual thought or expression. Accordingly, histories of Byzantine literature tend to focus on the history of genres. The essays in this book challenge the traditional view.

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.

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.

An interdisciplinary study of Mary as a religious symbol in post-Reformation Germany. The author uses a rich array of illustrative material to demonstrate that Mary did not disappear from Protestant devotional life, and that in Catholic areas devotion to the Virgin did not always displace more traditional forms of Marian piety.

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.

A detailed reconstruction of peasant society in early modern Germany, focusing on the lands of the Benedictine monastery of Ottobeuren. Based on a mass of archival data, the book argues that the German rural economy performed much better than has previously been believed.

This 2002 book provides a major survey of representations of adultery in later seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England. Bringing together a wide variety of literary and legal sources it charts and explains crucial shifts in perceptions of marital infidelity and the development of a more rational understanding of adultery.

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.

In the central Middle Ages most royal dynasties included saints in their family. Building upon a series of case studies from Hungary and central Europe, Gabor Klaniczay proposes a synthesis of the multiple forms and transformations of royal and dynastic sainthood.

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 book charts the course of working- and middle-class radical politics in England from the fall of Chartism in 1848 to the fall of Gladstone's Liberal government in 1874. The author argues that these years saw the gradual radicalisation of middle-class liberals, rather than the demoralisation of working-class culture.

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.

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.

This book makes an original contribution to the history of the English Revolution and to the meaning of crowd behaviour, recreating one of the most famous episodes in which crowds from Essex and Suffolk sought to 'ethnically cleanse' their communities by plundering the houses of the predominantly Catholic landed class.

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.

This book examines the ways in which the Swiss came to define their national identity. It explores why the nation became a theme of public concern, how different social actors created and re-created Swiss nationhood, and why they embraced some definitions rather than others.

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.

This 1997 book describes the spread of new agricultural practice in the half millennium after 1350, and reconstructs a neglected part of Europe's agricultural past. A vast range of evidence is cited from Italy, France, England and elsewhere to produce an economic, social and cultural history of the 'agricultural revolution' in Europe.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.