The subject of drink received a great deal of attention from early modern Europeans. Preachers, physicians, authorities, artists and travellers all addressed it from a range of different perspectives. At the same time, inns, taverns and alehouses served as multifunctional centres in towns and villages throughout Europe. This combination resulted in a wealth of sources, both institutional and cultural, which are only now beginning to be explored. This anthology features new research on public houses in England, Russia and the German lands. In a series of general, thematic and regional studies, contributors engage with broader debates in early modern history, shedding light on such key issues as consumption, travel and communication, state building, confessional identity, fiscal practice, gender and household relations, and the use of public spaces. The result is a volume that should appeal to anybody with an interest in early modern cultural history.

Despite the importance of the subject to contemporaries, this is the first monograph to look at the institution of godparenthood in early modern English society. Utilising a wealth of hitherto largely neglected primary source data, this work explores godparenthood, using it as a framework to illuminate wider issues of spiritual kinship and theological change. It has become increasingly common for general studies of family and religious life in pre-industrial England to make reference to the spiritual kinship evident in the institution of godparenthood. However, although there have been a number of important studies of the impact of the institution in other periods, this is the first detailed monograph devoted to the subject in early modern England. This study is possible due to the survival, contrary to many expectations, of relatively large numbers of parish registers that recorded the identities of godparents in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By utilising this hitherto largely neglected data, in conjunction with evidence gleaned from over 20,000 Wills and numerous other biographical, legal and theological sources, Coster has been able to explore fully the institution of godparenthood and the role it played in society. This book takes the opportunity to study an institution which interacted with a range of social and cultural factors, and to assess the nature of these elements within early modern English society. It also allows the findings of such an investigation to be compared with the assumptions that have been made about the fortunes of the institution in the context of a changing European society. The recent historiography of religion in this period has focused attention on popular elements of religious practice, and stressed the conservatism of a society faced with dramatic theological and ritual change. In this context a study of godparenthood can make a contribution to understanding how religious change occurred and the ways in which popular religious practice was affected.

Art, Literature and Religion in Early Modern Sussex is an interdisciplinary study of a county at the forefront of religious, political and artistic developments in early-modern England. Ranging from the schism of Reformation to the outbreak of Civil War, the volume brings together scholars from the fields of art history, religious and intellectual history and English literature to offer new perspectives on early-modern Sussex. Essays discuss a wide variety of topics: the coherence of a county divided between East and West and Catholic and Protestant; the art and literary collections of Chichester cathedral; communities of Catholic gentry; Protestant martyrdom; aristocratic education; writing, preaching and exile; local funerary monuments; and the progresses of Elizabeth I. Contributors include Michael Questier; Nigel Llewellyn; Caroline Adams; Karen Coke; and Andrew Foster. The collection concludes with an Afterword by Duncan Salkeld (University of Chichester). This volume extends work done in the 1960s and 70s on early-modern Sussex, drawing on new work on county and religious identities, and setting it into a broad national context. The result is a book that not only tells us much about Sussex, but which also has a great deal to offer all scholars working in the field of local and regional history, and religious change in England as a whole.

Medieval historians have for some time recognized the significance of personal naming processes and patterns for the illumination of social relations such as kinship and spiritual kinship or godparenthood. Increasingly, they are employing the investigation of personal naming (anthroponymy) as part of their elucidation of cultural change-attempting, through changes in patterns of personal naming, to discern cultural transitions and transformations. Recent coordinated research on the European continent has produced major collaborative discussion of the cultural implications of naming in France, the Iberian peninsular, and 'Italy'. The fruits of new research into the 'Germanic' lands have also richly enhanced our understanding of cultural change there. So it is predicated that a new trans-European culture arose in the centuries about and after the year 1000. Omitted from this coordinated understanding of the arrival of a new European cultural tradition (as it came to persist) is the British archipelago. We are, however, far from devoid of scholarly examination of the culture of personal naming in the British Isles. An older generation of linguists produced a basic foundation, although it has not remained free of some criticism. Subsequently, several scholars have independently advanced the interpretive analysis (Clark, Fellows Jensen, Insley, and McClure). At one level, then, this book attempts a synthesis of that previous, highly valuable, but diffuse, research, to make it more widely known, understood and accessible. At another level, nonetheless, it engages with what has become a prevailing narrative of cultural change in England after the Norman Conquest: the rapid transformation of English naming (and culture) through the assimilation of a new, dominant, extraneous influence. By reinserting the detail and complexity, it is hoped to demonstrate that far from a single uniform (homologous) culture, there existed residual, even resistant, and 'regional', cultures. The account, it is hoped, presents a cohesive, new narrative of the cultural implications of personal naming in England, whilst also addressing important issues of gender, politics, and social organization.

A fresh and fascinating history of crime and violence in England through the office of the coroner In his fascinating debut, Matthew Lockwood explores the history of crime, homicide, and suicide in England over four centuries through the office of the coroner. While the office was established to investigate violent or suspicious deaths, Lockwood asserts that the demands of competing parties gradually shaped its systems and transformed England into a modern state earlier than is commonly acknowledged. Weaving together strands of social, legal, economic, and political history, this book will interest scholars across a range of fields.

Fee tails were a heritable interest in land which was both inalienable and could only pass at death by inheritance to descendants of the original grantee. Biancalana's study considers the origins of the entail, and the development of a reliable legal mechanism for their destruction, the common recovery.