Government and Political Life in England and France, c.1300–c.1500


Book Description

A detailed comparative study of how kings governed late-medieval France and England, analysing the multiple mechanisms of royal power.




British Sociability in the Long Eighteenth Century


Book Description

This innovative collection explores how a distinctively British model of sociability developed in the period from the Restoration of Charles II to the early nineteenth century through a complex process of appropriation, emulation and resistance to what was happening in France and other parts of Europe. The study of sociability in the long eighteenth century has long been dominated by the example of France. In this innovative collection, we see how a distinctively British model of sociability developed in the period from the Restoration of Charles II to the early nineteenth century through a complex process of appropriation, emulation and resistance to what was happening in France and other parts of Europe. The contributors use a wide range of sources - from city plans to letter-writing manuals, from the writings of Edmund Burke to poems and essays about the social practices of the tea table, and a variety of methodological approaches to explore philosophical, political and social aspects of the emergence of British sociability in this period. They create a rounded picture of sociability as it happened in public, private and domestic settings - in Masonic lodges and radical clubs, in painting academies and private houses - and compare specific examples and settings with equivalents in France, bringing out for instance the distinctively homo-social and predominantly masculine form of British sociability, the role of sociabilitywithin a wider national identity still finding its way after the upheaval of civil war and revolution in the seventeenth century, and the almost unique capacity of the British model of sociability to benefit from its own apparent tensions and contradictions.




A Genealogy of Manners


Book Description

Remarkable for its scope and erudition, Jorge Arditi's new study offers a fascinating history of mores from the High Middle Ages to the Enlightenment. Drawing on the pioneering ideas of Norbert Elias, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Bourdieu, Arditi examines the relationship between power and social practices and traces how power changes over time. Analyzing courtesy manuals and etiquette books from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century, Arditi shows how the dominant classes of a society were able to create a system of social relations and put it into operation. The result was an infrastructure in which these classes could successfully exert power. He explores how the ecclesiastical authorities of the Middle Ages, the monarchies from the fifteenth through the seventeenth century, and the aristocracies during the early stages of modernity all forged their own codes of manners within the confines of another, dominant order. Arditi goes on to describe how each of these different groups, through the sustained deployment of their own forms of relating with one another, gradually moved into a position of dominance.




The Centrality of Religion in Social Life


Book Description

James A. Beckford's work is internationally acclaimed not only in the sociology of religion, but also in other fields of the social sciences. Beckford has long been arguing that the barriers that have grown up between the different sub-disciplines should be broken down, with those specialising in religion becoming more cognisant of new theoretical developments, and sociologists in general becoming more aware of the significance of developments in the religious scene. This book is a collection of essays written in Beckford's honour, drawing on a number of religious themes that have been central to Beckford's interests, whilst also offering a significant contribution to our understanding of the wider society. A central theme is modernity (and its relation to the post-modern), and how religion affects and is affected by the dynamics of contemporary society, with the primary focus of many of the chapters being a concern with how society copes with the minority religions that have become visible with the globalising tendencies of contemporary society. The contributors, who come from America, Asia and various parts of Europe, are all internationally renowned scholars. Beckford's most important publications are listed in an Appendix and the volume opens with a short account of his contribution to sociology by Eileen Barker (the editor) and James T. Richardson.




Remaking English Society


Book Description

Written by leading authorities, the volume can be considered a standard work on seventeenth-century English social history. A tribute to the work of Keith Wrightson, Remaking English Society re-examines the relationship between enduring structures and social change in early modern England. Collectively, the essays in the volume reconstruct the fissures and connections that developed both within and between social groups during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Focusing on the experience of rapid economic and demographic growth and on related processesof cultural diversification, the contributors address fundamental questions about the character of English society during a period of decisive change. Prefaced by a substantial introduction which traces the evolution of early modern social history over the last fifty years, these essays (each of them written by a leading authority) not only offer state-of-the-art assessments of the historiography but also represent the latest research on a variety of topics that have been at the heart of the development of 'the new social history' and its cultural turn: gender relations and sexuality; governance and litigation; class and deference; labouring relations, neighbourliness and reciprocity; and social status and consumption. STEVE HINDLE is W. M. Keck Foundation Director of Research at the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. ALEXANDRA SHEPARD is Reader in History, University of Glasgow. JOHN WALTER is Professor of History, University of Essex. Contributors: Helen Berry, Adam Fox, H. R. French, Malcolm Gaskill, Paul Griffiths, Steve Hindle, Craig Muldrew, Lindsay O'Neill, Alexandra Shepard, Tim Stretton, Naomi Tadmor, John Walter, Phil Withington, Andy Wood




The Monthly Review


Book Description




A History of the French in London


Book Description

This book examines, for the first time, the history of the social, cultural, political and economic presence of the French in London, and explores the multiple ways in which this presence has contributed to the life of the city. The capital has often provided a place of refuge, from the Huguenots in the 17th century, through the period of the French Revolution, to various exile communities during the 19th century, and on to the Free French in the Second World War.It also considers the generation of French citizens who settled in post-war London, and goes on to provide insights into the contemporary French presence by assessing the motives and lives of French people seeking new opportunities in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. It analyses the impact that the French have had historically, and continue to have, on London life in the arts, gastronomy, business, industry and education, manifest in diverse places and institutions from the religious to the political via the educational, to the commercial and creative industries.




The Middle Sort of People in Provincial England, 1600-1750


Book Description

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.




Immigrant England, 1300–1550


Book Description

This book provides a vivid and accessible history of first-generation immigrants to England in the later Middle Ages. Accounting for upwards of two percent of the population and coming from all parts of Europe and beyond, immigrants spread out over the kingdom, settling in the countryside as well as in towns, taking work as agricultural labourers, skilled craftspeople and professionals. Often encouraged and welcomed, sometimes vilified and victimised, immigrants were always on the social and political agenda. Immigrant England is the first book to address a phenomenon and issue of vital concern to English people at the time, to their descendants living in the United Kingdom today and to all those interested in the historical dimensions of immigration policy, attitudes to ethnicity and race and concepts of Englishness and Britishness.




The Hundred Years War


Book Description

A comparative study of how the societies of late medieval England and France reacted to the long period of conflict between them from political, military, social and economic perspectives.