Monastic charitable provision in the later Middle Ages through to the Dissolution has often been described as inadequate in terms of both quantity and quality. It has been accused of ineffectiveness because of its allegedly indiscriminate nature. This article suggests that in fact the religious houses and hospitals of England were providing a greater amount of poor relief in a more assiduous manner than has previously been allowed. The core of evidence comes from the 1535 national tax assessment of the Church, the Valor Ecclesiasticus. This contains details of the charitable provision carried out by most monasteries and hospitals as recorded by Crown commissions. After allowances have been made for the bias in the survey, a statistical analysis is carried out which indicates that an upward reassessment should be made of the quantity of monastic charity. Qualitative evidence from both the Valor Ecclesiasticus and from other contemporary sources also suggests that the pre-Reformation Church was providing genuinely beneficial poor relief.

A jurisdictional dispute over the burial of suicides in Electoral Saxony in the years 1702–1706 brought into sharp contrast conflicting views of the body in popular belief and Lutheran pastoral theology, and in the secularizing project of the early Enlightenment. The dispute centred on the practical, local implications of territorialism, a theory of church subordination to the state developed in the 1690s by the Saxon jurist Christian Thomasius (1655–1728), the most influential German political philosopher of the early Enlightenment. Considered in its intellectual and institutional contexts, the Saxon dispute illustrates the importance of the body to an understanding of secularization, the early Enlightenment and the history of suicide.

This article examines developments in marriage patterns in the Spanish province of Navarre over the last 300 years. The data from Navarrese villages show that the age of both men and women on their first marriage was well past the onset of sexual maturity. However, major differences were noted between the marriage patterns in the different villages. It was also noteworthy that the increasing intensity in marriage patterns observed in other European countries from the late nineteenth century onwards is not reflected in the case of Spain. Spain, and particularly rural Navarre, saw an uninterrupted decline in I′m values from the late-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century. The possible influence of migratory movements on the I′m values in rural Navarre is analysed. Findings are also reported concerning the age difference between partners offer the last three centuries.

We compare Montreal's three largest cultural communities – French Canadian, Irish Catholic, and Anglo-Protestant – with respect to infant survival over the forty years 1860–1900. From three birth cohorts we present evidence for a powerful and persistent cultural dimension which outweighs distinctions of social status. The local cultural mix offers insights into mechanisms operating through a chain of cultural practices, property interests, ethnic politics, and spatial segregation.

This article suggests that analyses of child labour today should take as their point of comparison poorer nineteenth-century continental European countries, rather than the more commonly cited analogy of industrializing Britain. Two aspects of comparison between the nineteenth-century Finnish experience and today's developing economies are especially relevant. The first is the role of foreign investors in introducing industrial child labour in the early stages of industrialization. The second is labour migration, and particularly that of children. Industrial child labour in nineteenth-century Finland, and labour migration from Finland to St Petersburg, serve as empirical case studies. Finally, the author suggests that new apologies for industrial child labour in the past can be linked with the late-twentieth-century expansion of child labour.