This article explores historical and legal approaches to past society, asking what each has to offer the other. Using early modern midwives’ oaths as a case study, it examines the extent to which the law shapes everyday life and society, and vice versa allowing us to situate early modern midwives at the intersection of a number of important and competing seventeenth-century institutions including state, church, society, and profession. We argue that a historico-legal approach to the practices of seventeenth-century midwives demands a reconsideration of the historiography of medical ethics and of the professions more broadly. It situates midwives as holders of formal office, and agents of the emergent early modern state and encourages reflection on the nature of ethical practice, and professional regulation within their social, cultural, and political context.

Historians have long used the archives of major institutions to shed light on medieval society, but in more recent decades the focus has turned towards the proliferation of legal documentation possessed by those lower down the social order and the increasing penetration of legal processes into their everyday lives. Yet, in recapturing this world, there is a danger that we take for granted the immense documentary power of a large institutional repository. This article follows several legal conflicts across the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries involving the monks of Durham Priory to demonstrate the extent of this archival culture, showing how they turned to their vast array of documentary evidence for information about those who had incurred their wrath. Using their archives, they traced the descent of holdings, the offices held by key individuals, and previous payments in account rolls, all in a bid to demonstrate their rights, the ‘abuses’ of officials, and to counter legal opposition. Not content, the monks then compiled this evidence into an alternative narrative of events that questioned previous legal proceedings and ceremonies, constructing an institutional memory that saw contradictory documentation as ‘entirely most falsely forged’.

This article analyses a significant sample of theft cases tried in the appellate courts of the parlements of Paris and Toulouse from the mid-sixteenth century to the end of the seventeenth century. Despite some historians’ claims that theft was typically overlooked or settled informally, and that property crime only became a major social problem because of the rise of industrial capitalism in the eighteenth century, this article argues that French subjects did take theft seriously in this period, even if that meant subjecting it to ridicule in cultural productions such as Molière’s celebrated play The Miser.

This article firstly advances a methodological critique of Hans-Joachim Voth's influential study of labour input during the English industrial revolution, arguing that Voth's ingenious and potentially widely applicable method of inferring time-use from court testimony has flaws such that at least the absolute figures yielded are likely unreliable. Secondly, with the method's deficiencies in mind, this article applies a version of it to the Old Bailey court records in order to examine change in women's working time in London between the 1750s and 1830. Results include that women in London did not observe Saint Monday even in the 1750s, and that the time that women in London spent in paid work increased only slightly between the 1750s and 1830.