British and Irish Early Modern History

Despite the infamous divorce of Henry VIII in 1529, subsequent moral, political, and religious attitudes ensured that until 1857, England was the only Protestant country with virtually no facilities for full divorce on the grounds of adultery, desertion, or cruelty. Using a mass of transcribed legal testimonies, taken from hitherto unexplored court records, this book uncovers the means by which laity and lawyers reformed the divorce laws, and offers insights into our ancestors' changing views about what makes a marriage. Using personal accounts in which witnesses speak freely about their moral attitudes towards love, sex, adultery, and marriage, it reveals the full and complex story of how English men and women have contrived to use, twist, or defy the law in order to deal with marital breakdown.

Eighteenth-century Edinburgh was the cradle of the Scottish Enlightenment. The lives and ideas of its prominent figures have received extensive treatment, but little attention has been paid to the society that produced them. In this study of Edinburgh over a century of social change, the author offers an analysis of the ways in which urban life was transformed. Chapters on social relationships, the use of space, the place of the poor in Scotland's capital, religious values and attitudes to urban living, riot and popular protest, and developments in political economy build up to a powerful argument about social change. The book also explains how broader changes in social attitudes and values took root in a century that witnessed dramatic political, economic, and intellectual developments.

This book is about the significance of witchcraft in English public life (c.1650–c.1750), and deals with contemporary opinion regarding its theological, philosophical, and legal dimensions. The book discusses civil war politics, the writings of Thomas Hobbes, the debate about witchcraft at the time of the Glorious Revolution, and the disputes surrounding the repeal of Jacobean witchcraft legislation in 1736. It also examines the work of less familiar writers and propagandists such as Richard Boulton, Francis Hutchinson, and James Erskine of Grange, and balances this account of the gradual demise of witchcraft theory in Britain with a comparative case study of the debate in France. Finally, by asserting that witchcraft remained a serious topic of debate well into the eighteenth century, and that its descent into polite ridicule had as much to do with politics as with the birth of reason, the book offers a lively critique of current interpretations of English popular culture and political change.

This book provides a survey of life as it was experienced by most Englishwomen during the 16th and 17th centuries. The book examines virtually all aspects of women's lives: female life-stages from birth to death; the separate culture of women, including female friendship and feminist consciousness; the diverse roles of women in the religious and political movements of the day; and the effect of prevailing perceptions of gender differences. Comparisons are made between the makeshift economy of poor women and the occupational identities, and preoccupations, of the middling and elite classes. This book reconstructs the mental and material world of Tudor and Stuart women.

It is now well known that there was a separate age of youth in 16th-and 17th-century society (and before), but in much of the writing on this subject, youth has emerged as a passive construct of the adult society, lacking formative experiences. This book seeks to redress this imbalance by presenting a more ‘positive’ image of young people, showing that they had a creative presence, an identity, and a historical significance which has never been fully explored. The book looks beyond the prescriptive codes of moralists and governors to survey the attitudes and activities of young people, examining their reaction to authority and to society's concept of the ‘ideal place’ for them in the social order. It sheds new light on issues as diverse as juvenile delinquency, masculinity, the celebration of Shrovetide, sexual behaviour and courtship, clothing, catechizing, office-holding, vocabularies of insult, prostitution, and church seating plans. The book's research reveals much about the nature of youth culture, religious commitment, and master/servant relations, and leads to the identification of a separate milieu of ‘masterless’ young people. Contemporary moralists called youth ‘the choosing time’, a time of great risks and great potential; and the best time to incalculate political conformity and sound religion. Yet the concept of choice was double-edged, it recognized that young people had other options besides these expectations. This ambiguity is a central theme of this book which demonstrates that although there was a critical politics of age during this period, young people had their own initiatives and strategies and grew up in all sorts of ways.