Author : Jonathan Barry
Publisher : Red Globe Press
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 42,53 MB
Release : 1994-10-26
Category : History
ISBN : 033354062X
This volume of essays seeks to offer a radical re-evaluation of most of our preconceptions about the early-modern English social order. This book attempts to define the term "middle classes" and treat them as active participants of history, rather than as a simple by-product.
Author : Margaret R. Hunt
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 343 pages
File Size : 10,59 MB
Release : 1996
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780520202603
"A very full, nuanced, up-to-date, and lucidly expressed account. . . . The discussion is impressively wide-ranging (spanning cultural, economic, intellectual, social, and women's history), and makes valuable contributions to a number of current debates."--Johann Sommerville "A very full, nuanced, up-to-date, and lucidly expressed account. . . . The discussion is impressively wide-ranging (spanning cultural, economic, intellectual, social, and women's history), and makes valuable contributions to a number of current debates."--Johann Sommerville
Author : Keith Wrightson
Publisher :
Page : 421 pages
File Size : 43,91 MB
Release : 2017
Category : England
ISBN : 9781108206150
The rise of social history has had a transforming influence on the history of early modern England. It has broadened the historical agenda to include many previously little-studied, or wholly neglected, dimensions of the English past. It has also provided a fuller context for understanding more established themes in the political, religious, economic and intellectual histories of the period. This volume serves two main purposes. Firstly, it summarises, in an accessible way, the principal findings of forty years of research on English society in this period, providing a comprehensive overview of social and cultural change in an era vital to the development of English social identities. Second, the chapters, by leading experts, also stimulate fresh thinking by not only taking stock of current knowledge but also extending it, identifying problems, proposing fresh interpretations and pointing to unexplored possibilities. It will be essential reading for students, teachers and general readers.
Author : H. R. French
Publisher : OUP Oxford
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 42,79 MB
Release : 2007-07-05
Category : History
ISBN : 0191537888
Exploring the origins of 'middle-class' status in the English provinces during a formative period of social and economic change, this book provides the first comparative study of the nature of social identity in early modern provincial England. It questions definitions of a 'middling' group, united by shared patterns of consumption and display, and examines the bases for such identity in three detailed case studies of the 'middle sort' in East Anglia, Lancashire, and Dorset. Dr. French identifies how the 'middling' described their status, and examines this through their social position in parish life and government, and through their material possessions. Instead of a coherent, unified 'middle sort of people' this book reveals division between self-proclaimed parish rulers (the 'chief inhabitants') and a wider body of modestly prosperous householders, who nevertheless shared social perspectives bounded within their localities. By the eighteenth century, many of these 'chief inhabitants' were trying to break out of their parish pecking orders - not by associating with a wider 'middle class', but by modifying ideas of gentility to suit their circumstances (and pockets). French concludes as a result, that while the presence of a distinct 'middling' stratum is apparent, the social identity of the people remained fragmented - restricted by parochial society on the one hand, and overshadowed by the prospect of gentility on the other. He offers new interpretation and insights into the composition and scale of the society in early modern England.
Author : Margaret R. Hunt
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 343 pages
File Size : 40,42 MB
Release : 2023-12-22
Category : History
ISBN : 0520916948
To be one of "the middling sort" in urban England in the late seventeenth or eighteenth century was to live a life tied, one way or another, to the world of commerce. In a lively study that combines narrative and alternately poignant and hilarious anecdotes with convincing analysis, Margaret R. Hunt offers a view of middling society during the hundred years that separated the Glorious Revolution from the factory age. Thanks to her exploration of many family papers and court records, Hunt is able to examine what people thought, felt, and valued. She finds that early capitalism and early modern family life were far more insecure than their "classical" models supposed. Commercial needs and social needs coincided to a large extent. The family is central to Hunt's story, and she shows how financial struggles brought conflict, ambiguity, and tension to the home. She investigates the way gender intertwined with class and family hierarchy and the way many businesses survived as precarious successes, secured through the sacrifices made by female as well as male family members. The Middling Sort offers a dynamic portrait of a society struggling to minimize the considerable social and psychic dislocation that accompanied England's launch of a full-scale market economy.
Author : Tawny Paul
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 301 pages
File Size : 15,31 MB
Release : 2019-10-17
Category : History
ISBN : 1108496946
Examines debt insecurity in eighteenth-century Britain, a period of famously rapid economic growth when many people nevertheless experienced financial failure.
Author : Adrian Randall
Publisher : Liverpool University Press
Page : 216 pages
File Size : 47,74 MB
Release : 1996-01-01
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9780853237006
This volume is concerned with markets, market culture and popular protest in eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland. The chapters focus upon both urban and rural communities: towns and cities, villages and corporations, colliers and tradesmen all feature in these studies since the market was ubiquitous and universal. How it was managed, however, varied from place to place and from time to time and the process of management provides us with a major insight into the social, political and economic relationships of eighteenth-century Britain. Some readers will see in these chapters evidence of the heterogeneity of these relations, but others will recognize that, for all the apparent differences, on basic issues of provisioning there was a remarkable uniformity. Following an introductory chapter, contributions focus on protest in relation to customary corn measures, opposition to turnpikes, resistance to the Cider Tax, scarcity and market management in Bristol, the moral economy of "the English middling sort", Oxford food riots and the Irish famine 1799–1801.
Author : Valerie Wayne
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 243 pages
File Size : 10,38 MB
Release : 2020-05-14
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1350110027
This collection reveals the valuable work that women achieved in publishing, printing, writing and reading early modern English books, from those who worked in the book trade to those who composed, selected, collected and annotated books. Women gathered rags for paper production, invested in books and oversaw the presses that printed them. Their writing and reading had an impact on their contemporaries and the developing literary canon. A focus on women's work enables these essays to recognize the various forms of labour -- textual and social as well as material and commercial -- that women of different social classes engaged in. Those considered include the very poor, the middling sort who were active in the book trade, and the elite women authors and readers who participated in literary communities. Taken together, these essays convey the impressive work that women accomplished and their frequent collaborations with others in the making, marking, and marketing of early modern English books.
Author : Tara Hamling
Publisher : Association of Human Rights Institutes series
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 40,11 MB
Release : 2017
Category : England
ISBN : 9780300195019
This fascinating book offers the first sustained investigation of the complex relationship between the middling sort and their domestic space in the tumultuous, rapidly changing culture of early modern England. Presented in an innovative and engaging narrative form that follows the pattern of a typical day from early morning through the middle of the night, A Day at Home in Early Modern England examines the profound influence that the domestic material environment had on structuring and expressing modes of thought and behaviour of relatively ordinary people. With a multidisciplinary approach that takes both extant objects and documentary sources into consideration, Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson recreate the layered complexity of lived household experience and explore how a family's investment in rooms, decoration, possessions, and provisions served to define not only their status, but the social, commercial, and religious concerns that characterised their daily existence. Published in association with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
Author : Karen Harvey
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 231 pages
File Size : 23,79 MB
Release : 2012-04-19
Category : History
ISBN : 0199533849
Reconstructs the distinctive relationship between the house and masculinity in the eighteenth century; adds a missing piece to the history of the home, uncovering the hopes and fears men had for their homes and families. Reveals how the public identity of men has always depended, to a considerable extent, upon the roles they performed within doors.
