Bücher der Reihe Past and Present Publications

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.

Newly available in paperback, this acclaimed piece of cultural history is a study of dress in France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is easily the most thorough and wide-ranging study of clothing and its social meaning that has been written to date.

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.

From plague to AIDS, epidemics have been the most spectacular diseases to afflict human societies. This volume examines the way in which these great crises have influenced ideas, how they have helped to shape theological, political, and social thought, and how they have been interpreted and understood in the intellectual context of their time.

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 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.

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.

The essays in this collection focus on the nature of popular protest and agrarian unrest and the development of nationalism in modern Ireland. Themes include cultural identity as expressed in Gaelic Irish literature, the dynamics of the potato economy, electoral politics and landlord power, the impact of modernization on Ulster's development.

A study of three centuries of County Mayo's history, during which it was slowly and hesitatingly transformed from being a remote, isolated, impoverished and largely hostile region of the country to being at the centre of the rapidly unfolding drama of Irish politics, and integrated into Ireland's post-Famine agrarian capitalist economy.

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 Brenner Debate, which reprints from Past and Present various article in 1976, is a scholarly presentation of a variety of points of view discussing the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Western Europe. This will interest historians and scholars in allied fields as well as ordinary readers.

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.