Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Britain and Ireland

by Michael J. Braddick, John Walter

Overview

Addressing the dynamics of power in early modern societies, this book challenges the existing tendency to see past societies in terms of binary oppositions—such as male/female, rich/poor, rulers/ruled. Drawing on recent social theory, the essays offer a series of micro-sociologies of power in early modern society, ranging from the politics of age, gender and class to the politics of state-building in the post-Reformation confessional state. Its findings also have relevance for thinking about inequality in present-day societies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521651639
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	08/20/2001
Pages:	328
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.75(d)

About the Author

Michael J. Braddick (b.1962) has taught at the University of Sheffield since 1990, having held previous positions at the University of Alabama and Birmingham-Southern College, Alabama. His major study State Formation in Early Modern England c.1550–1700 (2000) was published by Cambridge University Press.

John Walter is Professor of History at the University of Essex. His book Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution: The Colchester Plunderers (1999) was published by Cambridge University Press and won the Royal Historical Society's Whitfield Prize. Previously Professor Walter was editor of Famine, Disease and the Social Order in Early Modern Society (also Cambridge University Press, 1989, paperback 1991).

Table of Contents

Introduction: grids of power: order, hierarchy and subordination in early modern society Michael J. Braddick and John Walter; 1. Ordering the body: illegitimacy and female authority in seventeenth-century England Laura Gowing; 2. Child sexual abuse in early modern England Martin Ingram; 3. Sex, social relations and the law in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century London Faramerz Dabhoiwala; 4. Exhortation and entitlement: negotiating equality in English rural communities, 1550–1650 Steve Hindle; 5. Public transcripts, popular agency and the politics of subsistence in early modern England John Walter; 6. 'Bragging and daring words': honour, property, and the symbolism of the hunt in Stowe, 1590–1642 Dan Beaver; 7. Administrative performance: the representation of political authority in early modern England Michael J. Braddick; 8. Negotiating order in early seventeenth-century Ireland Raymond Gillespie; 9. Order, orthodoxy and resistance: the ambiguous legacy of English puritanism, or, Just how moderate was Stephen Denison? Peter Lake; 10. Making orthodoxy in late Restoration England: the trials of Edmund Hickeringill, 1662–1710 Justin Champion and Lee McNulty.

Editorial Reviews

"this collection makes great strides with its examination of these issues and marks an important contribution to our understanding of early modern politics in their broadest sense." H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online

"Walter and Braddick are to be commended for their contribution to the field and for elaborating on the uses of social theory." Sixteenth Century Journal

From the Publisher