Recent work in social history has given great emphasis both to the variety of forms of hierarchy in early modern society and to the ways in which the experience of hierarchy and subordination was negotiated. At the same time historians, influenced perhaps by the linguistic turn, have become more sensitive to the fact that order was culturally constructed and that life chances were affected not just by material issues but also by the ways in which the social world was imagined and described. We are now confronted by a picture of the early modern world in which there existed a variety of hierarchies – class, status (variously determined), gender and age –justified with reference to a variety of languages which were all, to some degree, unstable and contested. Recognition of the poly-phony that this has created has important consequences for a broader understanding of how the social order was represented and constructed. The underlying picture of how power operated and was experienced in the early modern period is, accordingly, more complex. The chapters in this volume offer an alternative reading of the political relationships between dominant and subordinate groups in the construction of social order. By examining this process across a variety of arenas, the essays challenge the appropriateness of a series of binary models (of which the elite/popular dyad is only the most familiar) for capturing the multiplicity of exchanges by which domination was achieved and subordination negotiated.