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  3. Past and Present Publications

Past and Present Publications comprise books similar in character to the articles in the journal Past and Present. Whether the volumes in the series are collections of essays - some previously published, others new studies - or monographs, they encompass a wide variety of scholarly and original works primarily concerned with social, economic and cultural changes, and their causes and consequences. They will appeal to both specialists and non-specialists and communicate the results of historical and allied research in readable and lively form.

  • General Editors: Lyndal Roper, University of Oxford, Christopher Wickham, University of Oxford

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25 results in Past and Present Publications

Page 1 of 2

The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe
  • Jack Goody
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    07 July 1983
  • Around 300 A.D. European patterns of marriage and kinship were turned on their head. What had previously been the norm - marriage to close kin - became the new taboo. The same applied to adoption, the obligation of a man to marry his brother's widow and a number of other central practices. With these changes Christian Europe broke radically from its own past and established practices which diverged markedly from those of the Middle East, North Africa and Asia. In this highly original and far-reaching work Jack Goody argues that from the fourth century there developed in the northern Mediterranean a distinctive but not undifferentiated kinship system, whose growth can be attributed to the role of the Church in acquiring property formerly held by domestic groups. He suggests that the early Church, faced with the need to provide for people who had left their kin to devote themselves to the life of the Church, regulated the rules of marriage so that wealth could be channelled away from the family and into the Church. Thus the Church became an 'interitor', acquiring vast tracts of property through the alienation of familial rights. At the same time, the structure of domestic life was changed dramatically, the Church placing more emphasis on individual wishes, on conjugality, and on spiritual rather than natural kinship. Tracing the consequences of this change through to the present day, Jack Goody challenges some fundamental assumptions about the making of western society, and provides an alternative focus for future study of the European family, kinship structures and marriage patterns. The questions he raises will provoke much interest and discussion amongst anthropologists, sociologists and historians.

Epidemics and Ideas
  • Essays on the Historical Perception of Pestilence
  • Edited by Terence Ranger, Paul Slack
  • Published online:
    05 August 2011
    Print publication:
    09 April 1992
  • From plague to AIDS, epidemics have been the most spectacular diseases to afflict human societies. This volume examines the way in which these great crises have influenced ideas, how they have helped to shape theological, political and social thought, and how they have been interpreted and understood in the intellectual context of their time.

Society, Politics and Culture
  • Studies in Early Modern England
  • Mervyn Evans James
  • Published online:
    01 June 2011
    Print publication:
    21 August 1986
  • In a number of related case-studies, this book traces the social political, and cultural factors making for conformity and obedience, and those promoting dissidence and revolt in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. The essays explore the significance of the concept of honour in forming the mentality of the ruling elites, the role of region, humanism, and law in promoting social and political solidarity, and the influences at work in the changing styles of political action as illustrated by the careers of four magnates.

Geography, Technology, and War
  • Studies in the Maritime History of the Mediterranean, 649–1571
  • John H. Pryor
  • Published online:
    01 June 2011
    Print publication:
    21 April 1988
  • When maritime transport and communication depended on muscle and wind-power, the Mediterranean Sea functioned as a symbiotic force between the civilisations which surrounded it, at once the major dividing barrier and the major connecting element. In this study, the technological limitations of maritime traffic are considered in conjunction with the peculiar geographical conditions within which it operated, and which led to the establishment of major sea lanes on trunk routes along which traffic could move safely, efficiently, and economically. These trunk routes remained virtually unchanged from antiquity to the sixteenth century, and eventually constituted economic and strategic maritime frontiers between civilisations. At the same time, the technological limitations of the oared galley meant that coasts and islands along the trunk routes had also to be held, a necessity which favoured geographically the Christian West over the world of Byzantium and Islam.

English and French Towns in Feudal Society
  • A Comparative Study
  • Rodney Howard Hilton
  • Published online:
    03 May 2011
    Print publication:
    31 January 1992
  • This is a comparative study of the role of English and French towns in feudal society in the middle ages. In bringing together much material which dissolves old categories and simplifications in the study of medieval towns, Professor Hilton provides an important new perspective on medieval society and on the nature of feudalism. He argues that medieval towns were not, as is often thought, the harbingers of capitalism, and emphasises the way in which urban social structures fitted into, rather than challenged, feudalism.

Land and Popular Politics in Ireland
  • County Mayo from the Plantation to the Land War
  • Donald E. Jordan
  • Published online:
    03 May 2011
    Print publication:
    14 April 1994
  • This book analyses County Mayo in Ireland from the Elizabethan pacification of the county to the first stage of the Land War in the late nineteenth century. During those three centuries the county was transformed from being a remote, isolated, impoverished and hostile region of the country to being at the centre of Irish politics and integrated into an agrarian capitalist economy. The book is divided into two sections. The first contains an analysis of the county prior to the Great Famine, and provides the foundation for a core/periphery analysis of Mayo's economic development and its impact upon popular politics in the county. The second, employing a core/periphery analysis of the post-Famine economic and political transformation of the county, demonstrates that the structural changes that gave rise to the Land War occurred more rapidly in central Mayo than along its western coastline or eastern boundaries. This uneven development helps account for both the initial strength and rapid disintegration of the land movement in the county.

From Slavery to Feudalism in South-Western Europe
  • Pierre Bonnassie
  • Translated by Jean Birrell
  • Published online:
    04 August 2010
    Print publication:
    04 April 1991
  • This book is first and foremost an extended examination and discussion of the enslavement of men and women by others of their society and in particular of the means and causes of the gradual end of slavery in early medieval Europe between 500 and 1200. Drawing upon a very wide range of primary and archival sources, Professor Bonnassie places fresh findings about subjection, servitude and lordship in relation to the prevailing understanding of social history which has developed since the work of Marc Bloch. The author explains how slavery long persisted in southern France and Spain, as part of a public order that also sheltered free peasants, giving way in the tenth and eleventh centuries to a new regime of harsh lordships that mark the beginnings of feudalism. He shows that feudalism in south-western Europe was no less significant than in northern European lands.

Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe
  • Studies in Culture and Belief
  • Edited by Jonathan Barry, Marianne Hester, Gareth Roberts
  • Published online:
    06 July 2010
    Print publication:
    13 July 1996
  • This important collection brings together both established figures and new researchers to offer fresh perspectives on the ever-controversial subject of the history of witchcraft. Using Keith Thomas's Religion and the Decline of Magic as a starting point, the contributors explore the changes of the last twenty-five years in the understanding of early modern witchcraft, and suggest new approaches, especially concerning the cultural dimensions of the subject. Witchcraft cases must be understood as power struggles, over gender and ideology as well as social relationships, with a crucial role played by alternative representations. Witchcraft was always a contested idea, never fully established in early modern culture but much harder to dislodge than has usually been assumed. The essays are European in scope, with examples from Germany, France, and the Spanish expansion into the New World, as well as a strong core of English material.

Studies on Byzantine Literature of the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries
  • Alexander Kazhdan, Simon Franklin
  • Published online:
    07 May 2010
    Print publication:
    23 February 1984
  • Byzantine literature is often regarded as little more than an agglomeration of stereotyped forms and generic conventions which allows no scope for individual thought or expression. Accordingly, histories of Byzantine literature tend to focus on the history of genres. The essays in this book challenge the traditional view. They attempt to show the coherence and individuality not of the genre but of author. By careful analysis of all the works of a given author, regardless of genre, these studies aim to reach behind the facade of convention, to discover not only biographical facts but also the writer's own likes and dislikes, his social views, his political sympathies and antipathies, his ethical and aesthetic standards. Most of the authors under consideration lived in the twelfth century. Several of them experienced or wrote about the same set of events; often they were acquainted with one another, or else had mutual friends. Thus each essay is both complete in itself and complementary to the others in the book; the individuality of each writer is most fully revealed in the comparison with his contemporaries and conversely the separate portraits may be combined to form a broader picture of Byzantine literary society of the time.

Commoners
  • Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700–1820
  • J. M. Neeson
  • Published online:
    01 February 2010
    Print publication:
    22 July 1993
  • This is one of the most important and original contributions to English rural history to be published in the past generation. Winner of the Whitfield Prize of the Royal Historical Society in 1994, Commoners challenges the view that England had no peasantry or that it had disappeared before industrialization: rather it shows that common rights and petty landholding shaped social relations in English villages, and that their loss at enclosure sharpened social antagonisms and imprinted on popular culture a pervasive sense of loss.

Winstanley 'The Law of Freedom' and other Writings
  • Edited by Christopher Hill
  • Published online:
    01 February 2010
    Print publication:
    26 May 1983
  • Leader of the Diggers, or True Levellers, whose colony was forced to disband in 1650, Gerrard Winstanley stands out from a century remarkable for its development in political thought as one of the most fecund and original of political writers. An acute and penetrating social critic with a passionate sense of justice, he worked out a collectivist theory which strikingly anticipates nineteenth- and twentieth-century socialism. He was the first modern European thinker to write in the vernacular advocating a communist society, and to call upon ordinary people to realize it. Winstanley published a number of pamphlets on the colony's behalf, among them a summary of his ideas, published in 1652 as The Law of Freedom in a Platform and dedicated to Oliver Cromwell. Christopher Hill's selection from Winstanley's many published pamphlets demonstrates the coherence and social relevance of Winstanley's philosophy, while it reveals his mastery of colloquial prose and his superb use of imagery.

An Island for Itself
  • Economic Development and Social Change in Late Medieval Sicily
  • Stephan R. Epstein
  • Published online:
    06 January 2010
    Print publication:
    19 March 1992
  • This study of late medieval Sicily develops a critique of theories of dependence through trade, and a new interpretation of the late medieval economy. It thus addresses current debates on the origins of modern Italian economic dualism, and on the transition from feudalism to capitalism in early modern Europe. Dr Epstein argues that economic development during this period was shaped largely by regional political and institutional structures which regulated access to markets. Following the Black Death, many institutional and social constraints on commercialization were relaxed throughout western Europe as a result of social conflict and demographic change. Peasants became more commercialized; economic growth occurred through regional integration and specialization. The Sicilian economy also expanded and became increasingly export-oriented. although only a small proportion of its output was shipped abroad before 1500. Late medieval Sicily is thus shown to have been neither underdeveloped nor dependent on foreign manufactures and trade.

Rethinking the Age of Reform
  • Britain 1780–1850
  • Edited by Arthur Burns, Joanna Innes
  • Published online:
    15 December 2009
    Print publication:
    13 November 2003
  • This book takes a look at the 'age of reform', from 1780 when reform became a common object of aspiration, to the 1830s - the era of the 'Reform Ministry' and of the Great Reform Act of 1832 - and beyond, when such aspirations were realized more frequently. It pays close attention to what contemporaries termed 'reform', identifying two strands, institutional and moral, which interacted in complex ways. Particular reforming initiatives singled out for attention include those targeting parliament, government, the law, the Church, medicine, slavery, regimens of self-care, opera, theatre, and art institutions, while later chapters situate British reform in its imperial and European contexts. An extended introduction provides a point of entry to the history and historiography of the period. The book will therefore stimulate fresh thinking about this formative period of British history.

The Origins of the English Gentry
  • Peter Coss
  • Published online:
    10 December 2009
    Print publication:
    03 July 2003
  • The gentry played a central role in medieval England, and this study is a sustained attempt to explore the origins of the gentry and to account for its contours and peculiarities between the mid-thirteenth and the mid-fourteenth century. The book deals with the deep roots of the gentry, but argues against views which see the gentry as formed or created earlier. It investigates the relationship between lesser landowners and the Angevin state, the transformation of knighthood, and the role of knights in the rebellion of mid thirteenth-century England. The role of lesser landowners in the society and politics of Edwardian England is then put under close scrutiny. It also emphasises changes in social terminology and the rise of social gradation, the emergence of the county as an important focus of identity, the gentry's control over the populace, and their openness to the upward mobility of professionals.

Biology, Medicine and Society 1840–1940
  • Edited by Charles Webster
  • Published online:
    02 December 2009
    Print publication:
    15 October 1981
  • During the period 1840–1940 biology and medicine were transformed, and took on major implications for social amelioration and population growth. New biological disciplines such as genetics and psychology consciously used scientific explanation to redefine the life of the individual. This volume originates from a Past and Present conference on 'The Roots of Sociobiology' held in 1978 and incorporates the results of recent research on problems in the social relations of the biological sciences. The authors describe different historical aspects of the interrelationship of technical experience and social policy in the fields of health, education and social welfare. Insight is provided into contemporary debates on physical and racial deterioration, the sources and distribution of intelligence, the application of evolutionary biology to social and political theory, and the analysis of human societies. The authors raise issues of topical interest, such as the emergence and influence of eugenics, the origin and impact of intelligence testing, the relationship between eugenics, genetics and evolutionary theory, and the causes of the twentieth-century reduction in infant and maternal mortality. The area of coverage is Britain, America and Germany. The introduction provides a review of recent research on the social relations of biology and medicine.

The Political Economy of Shopkeeping in Milan, 1886–1922
  • Jonathan Morris
  • Published online:
    24 November 2009
    Print publication:
    25 March 1993
  • From the mid–1880s a shopkeeper movement developed in Milan, centred around a shopkeeper newspaper, a federation of shopkeeper trade associations, and a shopkeeper bank. In 1904 shopkeeper representatives initiated a sequence of events that led to the fall of the first radical-socialist administration within the city. The author explains these events with reference to the business of shopkeeping itself. He analyses the trades, techniques, tax structure and topography of the Milanese retail sector, and traces the history of the contest between shops and cooperatives and the shopkeeper's changing relationship with his employees and with his clientele. The final chapter confronts the crucial question of why the Milanese shopkeepers were to be found on the political right in the years leading up to the Fascist takeover. This is the first book to deal with any aspect of the Italian petite bourgeoisie.

Puritanism and Theatre
  • Margot Heinemann
  • Published online:
    03 November 2009
    Print publication:
    20 March 1980
  • The closing of the theatres by Parliament in 1642 is perhaps the best-known fact in the history of English drama. As the Parliamentary Puritans were then in power, it is easy to assume that all opponents of the theatre were Puritans, and that all Puritans were hostile to the drama. The reality was more interesting and more complicated. Margot Heinemann looks at Thomas Middleton's work in relation to the society and social movements of his time, and traces the connections this work may have had with radical, Parliamentarian or Puritan groups or movements. In the light of the recent work of seventeenth-century historians we can no longer see these complex opposition movements as uniformly anti-theatre or anti-dramatist. The book suggests fresh meanings and implications in Middleton's own writings, and helps towards rethinking the place of drama in the changing life of early Stuart England.

Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance
  • South India through European Eyes, 1250–1625
  • Joan-Pau Rubiés
  • Published online:
    29 October 2009
    Print publication:
    21 December 2000
  • This book, first published in 2000, offers a wide-ranging and ambitious analysis of how European travellers in India developed their perceptions of ethnic, political and religious diversity over three hundred years. It analyses the growth of novel historical and philosophical concerns, from the early and rare examples of medieval travellers such as Marco Polo, through to the more sophisticated narratives of seventeenth-century observers - religious writers such as Jesuit missionaries, or independent antiquarians such as Pietro della Valle. The book's approach combines the detailed contextual analysis of individual narratives with an original long-term interpretation of the role of cross-cultural encounters in the European Renaissance. An extremely wide range of European sources is discussed, including the often neglected but extremely important Iberian and Italian sources. However, the book also discusses a number of non-European sources, Muslim and Hindu, thereby challenging simplistic interpretations of western 'orientalism'.

Praise and Paradox
  • Merchants and Craftsmen in Elizabethan Popular Literature
  • Laura Caroline Stevenson
  • Published online:
    29 October 2009
    Print publication:
    20 December 1984
  • Praise and Paradox explores the relationship of language, literary structure, and social ideology in the popular Elizabethan literature that praised merchants, industrialists and craftsmen. Part I defines a canon of 296 popular vernacular works, relates the increasing popularity of tales about tradesmen to the development of the English economy and the expansion of the Elizabethan audience, and discusses the social origins of the popular authors. Part II is concerned with the change of the merchant's literary image from that of a greedy usurer to that of a 'businessman in armour' who defended his monarch on the battlefield and entertained princes at lavish banquets. Part III discusses the change in the literary image of the craftsman, who ceased to be a clown or a rebel and became a 'gentle craftsman' who fought bravely on the battlefield when necessary but was happier in his humble shop, where he sang, danced, and courted pretty girls.

The Brenner Debate
  • Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-industrial Europe
  • Edited by T. H. Aston, C. H. E. Philpin
  • Published online:
    27 October 2009
    Print publication:
    03 October 1985
  • Few historical issues have occasioned such discussion since at least the time of Marx as the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Western Europe. The Brenner Debate, which reprints from Past and Present various article in 1976, is a scholarly presentation of a variety of points of view, covering a very wide range in time, place and type of approach. Weighty theoretical responses to Brenner's first formulation followed from the late Sir Michael Postan, John Hatcher, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Guy Bois; more particular contributions came from Patricia Croot, David Parker, Arnost Klìma and Heide Wunder on England, France, Bohemia and Germany; and reflective pieces from R. H. Hilton and the late J. P. Cooper. Completing the volume, and giving it an overall coherence, are Brenner's own comprehensive response to those who had taken part in the debate, and also R. H. Hilton's introduction that aims to bring together the major themes in the collection of essays. The debate has already aroused widespread interest among historians and scholars in allied fields as well as among ordinary readers, and may reasonably be regarded as one of the most important historical debates of prevailing years.

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