Going Local: The Social History of Stuart and Hanoverian England - Crime in Seventeenth-Century England: A County Study. By J. A. Sharpe. London: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Pp. vii + 289. $49.50. - Servants in Husbandry in Early Modern England. By Ann Kussmaul. London: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Pp. xii + 229. $32.50. - Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England, 1660–1900. By K. D. M. Snell. London: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Pp. 472. $49.50.

1985 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 273-281
Author(s):  
Norma Landau
Author(s):  
Oded Rabinovitch

Through the story of the Perraults, a family of literary and scientific authors active in seventeenth-century Paris, the book argues that kinship networks played a crucial yet unexamined role in shaping the cultural and intellectual ferment of seventeenth-century France, while showing how culture in its turn shaped kinship and the social history of the family. The book examines the world of letters as means of social mobility and revises our understanding of prominent early modern institutions, such as the Academy of Sciences, Versailles, and the salons, as well as authorship and court capitalism. Put together, this project serves as a catalyst for rethinking early modern cultural and intellectual institutions more broadly. In this view, institutions no longer appear as rigid entities that embody or define intellectual or literary styles, such as “Cartesianism,” “empiricism” or “the purity of the French language.” Rather, they emerge as nodes that connect actors, intellectual projects, family strategies and practices of writing, thereby reframing their relation to the state.


2017 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 477-504 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hardip Singh Syan

In the late seventeenth century Mughal India, Guru Gobind Singh and his Sikh army became politically and militarily opposed to the policies of Emperor Aurangzeb in the Punjab country. The Sikhs were not unique in this regard as across Aurangzeb’s Empire credible insurgencies began undermining Mughal authority. While an earlier historiography of this era reasoned that such revolts were caused by Aurangzeb’s abandonment of secularism for Islamic fundamentalism, contemporary research has provided a more nuanced analysis by exploring the history and ideas of the rebels. In this article, I explore how the Sikh community engaged in a dialogue on Kshatriyahood which was both specific to the Punjab country and similar to dialogues found across Mughal India. In addition, my article explores the social history of caste in medieval and early modern Punjab and the contested identities of Kshatriyahood and Brahminhood.


1997 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-185 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher R. Friedrichs

For a quarter of a century we have lived not in but with the “German home town.” For it was in 1971 that Mack Walker published his remarkable book,German Home Towns: Community, State and General Estate, 1648–1871. I well recall my own excitement when I first read this book, just as I was completing a dissertation on the social history of a German town in the seventeenth century. Not only wasGerman Home Townsoriginal and provocative, but it seemed by its very nature to validate the importance of studying early modern German cities. My own enthusiasm for this book has been echoedby that of numerous other historians, especially historians outside Germany itself. This is evident, for example, in James Sheehan's major survey of German history from 1770 to 1866, which repeatedly turns to Mack Walker—“the home towns' eloquent historian”—for the telling phrase or pregnant concept that best encapsulates some aspect of urban life or mentality. Walker's book is routinely cited in bibliographies as one of the most important works in the field.


Author(s):  
John Gallagher

The introduction argues for the importance of language-learning and multilingualism in the history of early modern England. English-speakers who ventured beyond Dover could not rely on English and had to become language-learners, while even at home English urban life was often multilingual. It brings together early modern concepts of linguistic ability with approaches from sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, and the social history of language in order to show how we can think about linguistic competence in a historical perspective. It demonstrates the importance of ‘questions of language’ to the social, cultural, religious, and political histories of early modern England, and to the question of England’s place in a rapidly expanding world. After an overview of the book’s structure, aims, and parameters, it closes by asking how taking a polyglot perspective might shift our understandings of early modern English history.


2001 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 533
Author(s):  
Christopher S. Celenza ◽  
Brendan Dooley

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