Population developments in the western European countryside not only show strong fluctuations during the later Middle Ages, but they also exhibit sharp regional differences. By investigating and comparing developments in three parts of the Low Countries this study tries to shed more light on the causes underlying these regional diversities. In this connection, particular attention will be paid to differences in the social distribution of landownership. Examination of the data at regional level indicates that property structures were indeed an important factor in late-medieval population trends. Later sections of the article investigate the various factors which shaped the interrelationships between population growth, density and property structures, thus contributing to a clearer comprehension of the different demographic histories of the three regions and a better understanding of regional diversities in late-medieval population developments in general.

The confinement of married women by their husbands in their homes or in private madhouses was an issue which caused much concern in eighteenth-century England, but which has been little explored by historians. This article uses the records of the court of King's Bench, a source which has been previously neglected by historians of marriage, to explore the circumstances of this form of marital abuse. It shows that within eighteenth-century English law there was much uncertainty about the ‘right’ of husbands to confine their wives, and that this allowed some men to test the limits of their authority. It argues that although some women were able to adopt legal and extra-legal strategies in response to confinement, changing notions of ideal femininity shaped the ways in which women were able to respond to marital abuse, and left genteel women peculiarly vulnerable to accusations of madness and to subsequent confinement in a madhouse.

The article examines the impact of the ‘rise of statistical thinking’ and statistical measurement on elite perceptions of the condition of the Russian Empire's post-emancipation peasant economy. Using archival and published sources, it argues that the increased use of statistical measurement did much to concretize in numerical (‘objective’) terms the idea of rural crisis. In particular, the combination of traditional paternalistic concerns about the sufficiency of peasant resources and the use of cadastre measurement yielded an image of the peasant household economy in which the value (the income-producing capabilities) of post-emancipation peasant allotments nearly always fell short of subsistence requirements and tax/payment obligations. Thus, because of how observers measured peasant well-being, it appeared as if peasants had been over-changed for their post-emancipation land allotments and were doomed to exist in a permanent state of crisis.

None of the recent studies stimulated by debates on the causes of the ‘demographic transition’ since the mid-nineteenth century has yet explained the anomaly that, while all other indices of mortality declined, rates of infant mortality were static or even rising in the last decades of the century. This case study of Preston shows that an explosive growth in the population of horses in expanding towns was probably responsible for sustaining, or even enhancing, levels of infant mortality due to enteric diseases spread by flies which bred in horse manure.

This article explores marital fertility on the Aegean island of Paros based on family-reconstitution data from one main town and one village on the island, namely Naoussa and Kostos. By probing the reproductive behaviour of couples who married between 1894 and 1953 it was found that fertility was still ‘natural’ on the island at the beginning of the twentieth century, while a substantial fertility decline made itself visible only in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The way the population switched from natural to controlled fertility is also explored, as well as the contribution of different socio-economic groups to fertility transition. In the end, an effort is made to place the examined population in a wider European and national context.