Bücher der Reihe Past and Present Publications

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.

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.

How was law made in England in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? Through detailed studies of what the courts actually did, Peter King argues that parliament and the Westminster courts played a less important role in the process of law making than is usually assumed. Justice was often remade from the margins by magistrates, judges and others at the local level. His book also focuses on four specific themes - gender, youth, violent crime and the attack on customary rights. In doing so it highlights a variety of important changes - the relatively lenient treatment meted out to women by the late eighteenth century, the early development of the juvenile reformatory in England before 1825, i.e. before similar changes on the continent or in America, and the growing intolerance of the courts towards everyday violence. This study is invaluable reading to anyone interested in British political and legal history.

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'.

This pioneering book examines different aspects of the inheritance customs in rural Western Europe in the pre-industrial age: for families and whole societies, the roles of lawyers in reducing them to a common system, and the recurring debate on the merits of various inheritance customs in shaping particular kinds of society.

In this study, the technological limitations of maritime traffic in the Mediterranean are considered in conjunction with the peculiar geographical conditions within which it operated, and which led to the establishment of major sea lanes on trunk routes along which traffic could move safely, efficiently, and economically.

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.

First published in 2004, this collection of papers includes some of the most innovative history written about Greece and Rome and offers a convenient and enthralling guide to the most exciting current issues and topics in Greek and Roman history.

First published in 2004, this collection of papers includes some of the most innovative history written about Greece and Rome and offers a convenient and enthralling guide to the most exciting current issues and topics in Greek and Roman history.

When this volume first appeared in German it inspired a whole generation of young scholars by evoking the lost worlds of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century people. The volume contains a new Foreword by Natalie Zemon Davis and a new introductory essay setting out the key influences of Schindler's work.

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.

Taken as a whole the essays in this volume illustrate the outstanding contribution made to French Revolutionary scholarship by British and American authors. Professor Johnson has selected essays which cover a wide spectrum of time, place and social class but are vitally concerned to describe and explain the social reality of revolution in its various phases.

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 dominant and deceptively simple theme of this book is the relationship between the moral environment of the courtroom and that of the society in which the court is situated. Like previous Past and Present edited volumes, the volume ranges widely across time and space, from ancient Greece to twentieth-century Africa.

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 original study takes a fresh approach to the social and cultural history of late medieval London by examining the ruling elite's moral policing of the real and imagined 'milieu of the night' of vagabonds, pimps, prostitutes, and immoral priests.

A selection from Winstanley's many published pamphlets on the behalf of the 'Diggers', led by Winstanley between 1649-50.

The so called 'Kingdom of Prester John' was a Christian power thought to exist in Central Asia at the time of the twelfth-century crusades. At a deeper level, for the steppe peoples it constitutes a distant dynamic which led to the world-shattering rise of Mongol power under Chinggis (Genghis) Khan.

This volume of essays in honour of Professor R. H. Hilton is presented by some of his numerous friends and pupils. It attempts to reflect his wide-ranging interests while highlighting certain themes and preserving some distinct degree of unity.

The rising of 1381 was 'one of the most portentous events in the whole of our history', to quote the famous medievalist William Stubbs. It has been the subject of many works, specialized and popular, especially since the 600th anniversary in 1981. This present volume eschews general narrative history.

This book honours the varied and creative career of Joan Thirsk, Fellow of the British Academy and former Reader in Economic History in the University of Oxford. Written largely by Dr Thirsk's former research students, with a diversity of themes, this volume is a fine tribute to Joan Thirsk's work in English social, economic, agrarian and local history in the early modern period.

The articles in this book, reprinted from the journal Past and Present, are all, in different ways, concerned with the ownership of landed property in medieval England and with those who worked the land.

This important new collection of essays offers a wide readership both an up-to-date account of the present state of scholarship on early modern European witchcraft and an indication of the direction of new research. The contributions include examples from Germany, France, and the Spanish expansion into the New World, as well as a strong core of English material.

This important new collection of essays offers a wide readership both an up-to-date account of the present state of scholarship on early modern European witchcraft and an indication of the direction of new research. The contributions include examples from Germany, France, and the Spanish expansion into the New World, as well as a strong core of English material.

This collection of essays by British, American and French scholars uses the records of the law in Western Europe from the fall of Rome to the nineteenth century in an attempt to outline a social history of the West considered as a history of human relations.

This book is a contribution to both national and local history. Coventry is taken as a richly documented case-study of the crisis which marked the end of the medieval period for many substantial towns.

In this comparative study of the role of English and French towns in feudal society in the middle ages Professor Hilton provides a new perspective on medieval society and argues that medieval towns were not, as is often thought, harbingers of capitalism. He emphasises how urban societies fitted into, rather than challenged, feudalism.

Heads of states mark their rites of passage with splendid ceremonial. The essays in this book n all specially written for it n address the central problem in the understanding of royal rituals, namely the relation between power and anthropologists. The traditional societies examined range from ancient Babylon to nineteenth-century Madagascar.

This is the first comprehensive study of how a great imperial ceremony actually developed and how it influenced both the eastern and western heirs to the Roman legacy. It documents the Roman triumph's resurgence and its afterlife from the Tetrarchy to the end of the Macedonian dynasty in Byzantium and to Charlemagne's successors in the early medieval West.

Intended to celebrate the 70th birthday of the distinguished historian, Lawrence Stone, these essays owe much to his influence. There are also four appreciations by friends and colleagues from Oxford and Princeton and a little-known autobiographical piece by Lawrence Stone himself.