| Discussion topics | Documents | Reading |

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Discussion Topics and Essay Titles

Social Relations

• What role did kinship play in the lives of early modern Europeans?
• Why did social status matter in early modern Europe?
• How did early modern people display their status
• What individuals or groups were maginalised in the period and why?

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Documents

**NOTE: Some eresources are accessible only on-campus or via off-campus proxies or the athens service**

Texts	[Interpret]	Images	[Interpret]
Social Relations John Ball's sermon at Blackheath (Peasant's Revolt 1381) Will of James Pekham, Kent (1532) Elizabethan Sumptuary Laws Social Conditions in 17th century France		Social Relations Gillis van Tilborg (d.1678), 'A noble family dining'. Representations of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester Brueghel, 'Peasant Wedding' (1616) Peasants confront a nobleman (woodcut, c. 1500)

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Secondary Literature

Selected Key Texts

Social Status and Social Relations

• R. Asch, Nobilities in Transition 1550-1700: Courtiers and Rebels in Britain and Europe (2003)
• P Burke, ‘The Language of Orders in Early Modern Europe’, in M.L. Bush (ed.), Social Orders and Social Classes in Europe Since 1500: Studies in Social Stratification (London, 1992), pp.1-13.
• S. Clark, State and Status: The Rise of the State and Aristocratic Power in Western Europe (1995)
• A. Fletcher and J. Stevenson, eds, Order and Disorder in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 92-115 (ebook)
• Hindle, 'Rural Society', in B. Kumin ed., European World (2009)
• V.G. Kiernan, The Duel in European History: Honour and the Reign of Aristocracy (Oxford, 1988)

Further Reading

a) General Reading

• J. Dewald, The European Nobility 1400-1800 (1996)
• H. Kamen, Early Modern European Society (2000)
• M. Wiesner-Hanks, Early Modern Europe, chapters 2/8 on ‘Individuals in Society’
• Withington, P., Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2010)
• K. Wrightson, English Society 1580-1680, (2002)

b) Social Status and Social Relations

• P. Burke,‘The Art of Insult in Early Modern Italy’, Culture and History 2 (1987), 68-79 (available as print journal in the library)
  
• M.L. Bush, Rich Noble, Poor Noble (1988)
• N.Z. Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (1975) (ebook)
• S.R. Epstein (ed.), Town and Country in Europe 1300-1800 (2001) (ebook)
• O. Grell and A. Cunningham, Health care and poor relief in Protestant Europe, 1500-1700 (1997)
  
• Anthony Fletcher, ‘Honour, Reputation and Local Officeholding in Elizabethan and Stuart England’, in A. Fletcher and J. Stevenson, eds, Order and Disorder in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 92-115 (ebook)
  
• F. Heal & C. Holmes, The Gentry in England and Wales, 1500-1700 (1994)
• C. Jago, ‘The “Crisis of the Aristocracy” in seventeenth-century Castile’, Past and Present 84 (1979)
• J. Lukowski, The European Nobility in the 18th Century (2003)
• K. MacHardy, 'Noble Identity in Early Modern Habsburg Austria', Past and Present 163 (1999)
• S. Kettering, Patrons, Brokers and Clients in 17thC France (1986) (ebook)
  
• M. Rady, ‘The nobility and east-Central Europe during the medieval and early modern periods’, Slavonic and East European Review 74 (1996)
• T. Ruiz, Spanish Society 1400-1600 (2001)
• H.M. Scott (ed.), The European Nobilities in the seventeenth and eighteenth Centuries (2 vols, 1994)
• T. Scott (ed.), The Peasantries of Europe (1998)
• P. Withington, 'Company and Sociability in Early Modern England', Social History 32 (2007)

c) The Poor

T. Fehler, Poor Relief and Protestantism: The Evolution of Social Welfare in Sixteenth-Century Emden (1999)
S. Hindle, On the Parish: The Micro-Politics of Poor Relief in Rural England 1550-1750 (2004)
S. Hindle, 'Power, Poor Relief, and Social Relations in Holland Fen, c. 1600-1800,' in The Historical Journal, vol. 41, no. 1 (1998)
R. Hsia, Social Discipline in the Reformation: Central Europe 1550-1750 (1989)
O. Hufton, The Poor of Eighteenth-Century France (1974)
L. Martz, Poverty and Welfare in Habsburg Spain: The Example of Toledo (1983) (ebook)
B. Pullan, Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice: The Social Institutions of a Catholic State (1971) (ebook)
B. Pullan, 'Support and redeem: charity and poor relief in Italian cities from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century', Continuity and Change 3, special issue 2 (1988), 177-208.
O. P. Grell et al. (eds), Health care and Poor Relief in Counter-Reformation Europe (1999)
O. P. Grell and A. Cunningham, Health Care and Poor Relief in Protestant Europe, 1500-1700 (1997) (ebook)
P. Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London, 1998)

d) Other Groups (esp. sexual deviants, vagrants and lepers)

P.L. Allen, The Wages of Sin: Sex and Disease, Past and Present (Chicago, 2000), esp. chaps. 2-4

A.L. Beier, Masterless Men: the Vagrancy Problem in England, 1560-1640 (1985)

", 'Vagrants and the Social Order in Elizabethan England,' Past and Present, 64 (Aug., 1974)

C. Bingham, ‘Seventeenth-Century Attitudes Toward Deviant Sex’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 1, no. 3 (1971), 447-68.J.K. Brackett, ‘The Florentine Onesta and the Control of Prostitution, 1403-1680’, SCJ, 24 (1993)

E.S. Cohen, ‘Seen and Known: Prostitutes in the Cityscape of Late-Sixteenth-Century Rome’, Renaissance Studies, 12, no. 3 (Sept., 1998)

B.M. Donovan, ‘Changing Perceptions of Social Deviance: Gypsies in Early Modern Portugal and Brazil’, Journal of Social History, 26 (1992)

F. Egmond, Underworlds: Organized Crime in the Netherlands, 1650-1800 (1993)

Griffiths, ‘The Structure of Prostitution in Elizabethan London’, Continuity and Change, 8, no. 1 (1993), 39-63

Milner, Stephen J., ed., At the Margins: minority groups in premodern Italy (Minneapolis, 2005), esp. ch 4.

W.G. Naphy, Sex Crimes: Renaissance to Enlightenment (2002)

K. O'Donnell and M. O'Rourke (eds), Queer Masculinities, 1550-1800: Siting Same Sex Desire in the Early Modern World (2006) (e-book)

M.E. Perry, ‘Deviant Insiders: Legalized Prostitutes and a Consciousness of Women in Early Modern Seville’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 27, no. 1 (1985), 138-158

P.A. Russell, ‘Syphilis: God’s Scourge or Nature’s Vengeance?’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 80 (1989), 286-306 [available as print journal in the Library]

K. Stuart, Defiled Trades and Social Outcasts: Honour and Ritual Pollution in Early Modern Germany (1999)

L. Woodbridge, Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature (2001)

e) Non-Christian minorities, esp. Jews and Muslims

M. Bodian, ‘“Men of the Nation”: The Shaping of Converso Identity in Early Modern Europe’, Past and Present, 143 (1994)

B. Braude & B. Lewis, Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society (New York, 1982)

J. Casey, Early Modern Spain: a Social History (1999), esp. chapter 10 (ebook)

A. Chejne, Islam and the West: the Moriscos, a Cultural and Social History (1983)

N. Fiering & P. Bernardini (eds), The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450-1800 (2001)

M. Goldish (ed.), Jewish Questions: Responsa on Sephardic Life in the Early Modern Period (Princeton, 2008) [Primary Sources Collection] (ebook) L.P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614 (2006) (ebook)

A. Hess,‘The Moriscos: an Ottoman fifth column’, American Historical Review 74 (1968-9)

J.I. Israel, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 1550-1750 (1985)

M. Jonsonn, ‘The Expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain in 1609-1614: the Destruction of an Islamic Periphery’, Journal of Global History 2 (2007)

H.C. Lea, The Moriscos of Spain: Their Conversion and Expulsion (1968) (ebook)

A. Levy, The Jews of the Ottoman Empire (Princeton, 1994)B. Lewis, Cultures in Conflict: Christians, Muslims and Jews in the Age of Discovery (1995) (ebook)

M.E. Perry, The Handless Maiden: Moriscos and the Politics of Religion in Early Modern Spain (Princeton, 2005) (ebooK)

B. Pullan, The Jews of Europe and the Inquisition of Venice, 1550-1670 (London, 1997)C. Roth, A History of the Marranos (1974)

M. Teter, Jews and Heretics in Catholic Poland: A Beleaguered Church in the Post-Reformation Era (2006) (eb

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• People in Place: families, households and housing in early modern London, 1550-1720 - introduces the methods and findings of a research project focused on family and household in London in the 16th and 17th centuries

• Early Modern English Social History - documents introducing key themes in the social, economic and cultural history of England between c.1500 and 1700
• My-Parish - online portal for researchers interested in parishes and their histories.