This volume considers the reception in the early modern period of four popular medieval myths of nationhood – the legends of Brutus, Albina, Scota and Arthur – tracing their intertwined literary and historiographical afterlives. The book thus speaks to several connected areas and is timely on a number of fronts: its dialogue with current investigations into early modern historiography and the period’s relationship to its past, its engagement with pressing issues in identity and gender studies, and its analysis of the formation of British national origin stories at a time when modern Britain is seriously considering its own future as a nation.

This Handbook re-examines the concept of early modern history in a European and global context. The term 'early modern' has been familiar, especially in Anglophone scholarship, for four decades and is securely established in teaching, research, and scholarly publishing. More recently, however, the unity implied in the notion has fragmented, while the usefulness and even the validity of the term, and the historical periodisation which it incorporates, have been questioned. The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern European History, 1350-1750 provides an account of the development of the subject during the past half-century, but primarily offers an integrated and comprehensive survey of present knowledge, together with some suggestions as to how the field is developing. It aims both to interrogate the notion of 'early modernity' itself and to survey early modern Europe as an established field of study. The overriding aim will be to establish that 'early modern' is not simply a chronological label but possesses a substantive integrity. Volume I examines 'Peoples and Place', assessing structural factors such as climate, printing and the revolution in information, social and economic developments, and religion, including chapters on Orthodoxy, Judaism and Islam.

Family and Kinship in England 1450-1800 guides the reader through the changing relationships that made up the nature of family life from the late medieval period to the beginnings of industrialisation. It gives a clear introduction to many of the intriguing areas of interest that this field of history has opened up, including childhood, youth, marriage, sexuality and death. This book introduces the elements that made up family life at different stages of its development, from creation to dissolution, and traces the degree to which family life in England changed throughout the early modern period. It also provides a valuable synthesis of the debates and research on the history of the family, highlighting the different ways historians have investigated the topic in the past. This new edition has been fully updated to incorporate the latest research on urban communities, emotions and interactions between the family and the parish, town and state. Supported by a range of compelling primary source documents, a glossary of terms, a chronology and a who’s who of key characters, this is an essential resource for any student of the history of the family.

This investigation contributes to the existing scholarship on women and medicine in early modern Britain by examining the diagnosis and treatment of female patients by male professional medical practitioners from 1590 to 1740. In order to obtain a clearer understanding of female illness and medicine during this period, this study examines ailments that were specific and unique to female patients as well as illnesses and conditions that afflicted both female and male patients. Through a qualitative and quantitative analysis of practitioners' records and patients' writings - such as casebooks, diaries and letters - an emphasis is placed on medical practice. Despite the prevalence of females amongst many physicians' casebooks and the existence of sex-based differences in the consultations, diagnoses and treatments of patients, there is no evidence to indicate that either the health or the medical care of females was distinctly disadvantaged by the actions of male practitioners. Instead, the diagnoses and treatments of women were premised on a much deeper and more nuanced understanding of the female body than has previously been implied within the historiography. In turn, their awareness and appreciation of the unique features of female anatomy and physiology meant that male practitioners were sympathetic and accommodating to the needs of individual female patients during this pivotal period in British medicine.

Tudor and Stuart Britain charts the political, religious, economic and social history of Britain from the start of Henry VII’s reign in 1485 to the death of Queen Anne in 1714, providing students and lecturers with a detailed chronological narrative of significant events, such as the Reformation, the nature of Tudor government, the English Civil War, the Interregnum and the restoration of the monarchy. This fourth edition has been fully updated and each chapter now begins with an introductory overview of the topic being discussed, in which important and current historical debates are highlighted. Other new features of the book include a closer examination of the image and style of leadership that different monarchs projected during their reigns; greater coverage of Phillip II and Mary I as joint monarchs; new sections exploring witchcraft during the period and the urban sector in the Stuart age; and increased discussion of the English Civil War, of Oliver Cromwell and of Cromwellian rule during the 1650s. Also containing an entirely rewritten guide to further reading and enhanced by a wide selection of maps and illustrations, Tudor and Stuart Britain is an excellent resource for both students and teachers of this period.

Witchcraft, Witch-hunting, and Politics in Early Modern England constitutes a wide-ranging and original overview of the place of witchcraft and witch-hunting in the broader culture of early modern England. Based on a mass of new evidence extracted from a range of archives, both local and national, it seeks to relate the rise and decline of belief in witchcraft, alongside the legal prosecution of witches, to the wider political culture of the period. Building on the seminal work of scholars such as Stuart Clark, Ian Bostridge, and Jonathan Barry, Peter Elmer demonstrates how learned discussion of witchcraft, as well as the trials of those suspected of the crime, were shaped by religious and political imperatives in the period from the passage of the witchcraft statute of 1563 to the repeal of the various laws on witchcraft. In the process, Elmer sheds new light upon various issues relating to the role of witchcraft in English society, including the problematic relationship between puritanism and witchcraft as well as the process of decline.

This book offers an insight into the social relationships and topographies that fashioned both city life and landscape and serves as a useful counterpoise in a field that has largely focused on London. This is a book about seventeenth-century Norwich and its inhabitants. At its core are the interconnected themes of social topographies and the relationships between urban inhabitants and their environment. Cityscapes were, and are, shaped and given meaning during the practice of people's lived experiences. In return, those same urban places lend human interactions depth and quality. Social Relations and Urban Space uncovers manifold possible landscapes, including those belonging to the rich and to the poor, to men, to women, to 'strangers and foreigners', to political actors of both formal and informal means. Norwich's inhabitants witnessed the tumultuous seventeenth centuryat first hand, and their experiences were written into the landscape and immortalised in its exemplary surviving records. This book offers an insight into the social relationships and topographies that fashioned both city life and landscape and serves as a useful counterpoise in a field that has largely focused on London. FIONA WILLIAMSON is currently Senior Lecturer in History at the National University of Malaysia.

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First published in 1987, The Professions in Early Modern England highlights the significant role of professional and quasi-professional occupations in English society before the industrial revolution, contrary to what was once historiographical and sociological orthodoxy. The editorial introduction provides an overview of the history of the professions as a distinct field of scholarly investigation, suggesting that neither historians nor social theorists have adequately mapped or explained the rise of the professions to their present place in modern societies. The following chapters bring together original contributions by researchers who have made a close study of various occupational groups over the period c. 1500-1750. Besides the traditional learned professions and their practitioners in the church, medicine and the law, they survey occupations generally lacking institutional coherence: school teachers, estate stewards and those following the profession of arms. This book remains of interest to students of history, literature and sociology.

Notions of which behaviours comprised sin, and what actions might lead to salvation, sat at the heart of Christian belief and practice in early modern England, but both of these vitally important concepts were fundamentally reconfigured by the reformation. Remarkably little work has been undertaken exploring the ways in which these essential ideas were transformed by the religious changes of the sixteenth-century. In the field of reformation studies, revisionist scholarship has underlined the vitality of late-medieval English Christianity and the degree to which people remained committed to the practices of the Catholic Church up to the eve of the reformation, including those dealing with the mortification of sin and the promise of salvation. Such popular commitment to late-medieval lay piety has in turn raised questions about how the reformation itself was able to take root. Whilst post-revisionist scholars have explored a wide range of religious beliefs and practices - such as death, providence, angels, and music - there has been a surprising lack of engagement with the two central religious preoccupations of the vast majority of people. To address this omission, this collection focusses upon the history and theology of sin and salvation in reformation and post-reformation England. Exploring their complex social and cultural constructions, it underlines how sin and salvation were not only great religious constants, but also constantly evolving in order to survive in the rapidly transforming religious landscape of the reformation. Drawing upon a range of disciplinary perspectives - historical, theological, literary, and material/art-historical - to both reveal and explain the complexity of the concepts of sin and salvation, the volume further illuminates a subject central to the nature and success of the Reformation itself. Divided into four sections, Part I explores reformers’ attempts to define and re-define the theological concepts of sin and salvation, while Part II looks at some of the ways in which sin and salvation were contested: through confessional conflict, polemic, poetry and martyrology. Part III focuses on the practical attempts of English divines to reform sin with respect to key religious practices, while Part IV explores the significance of sin and salvation in the lived experience of both clergy and laity. Evenly balancing contributions by established academics in the field with cutting-edge contributions from junior researchers, this collection breaks new ground, in what one historian of the period has referred to as the ‘social history of theology’.