During the English Civil Wars and Revolution (1640-60), the affairs of Church and State came under a crucial new form of comment and critique, in the form of public petitions. Petitioning was a readily available mode of communication for women, and this study explores the ways in which petitioning in seventeenth-century England was adapted out of and differed from pre-Revolutionary modes, whilst also highlighting gendered conventions and innovations of petitioning in that period. Male petitioning in the seventeenth century did not have to negotiate the cultural assumptions about intellectual inferiority and legal incapacity that constrained women. Yet just because women did not claim separate (and modern) women's rights does not mean that they were passive, quiescent, or had no political agency. On the contrary, as this study shows, women in the Revolution could use petitioning as a powerful way to address those in power, precisely because it was done from an assumed position of weakness. The petition is not simply a text, authored by a single pen, but a series of social transactions, performed in multiple social and political settings, frequently involving people previously excluded from participation in political discussion or action. To the extent that women participated in collective petitioning, or turned their individual addresses into printed artefacts for public scrutiny, they also participated in the public sphere of political opinion and debate.

This book provides a history of the alehouse between the years 1550 and 1700, the period during which it first assumed its long celebrated role as the key site for public recreation in the villages and market towns of England. In the face of considerable animosity from Church and State, the patrons of alehouses, who were drawn from a wide cross section of village society, fought for and won a central place in their communities for an institution that they cherished as a vital facilitator of what they termed "good fellowship". For them, sharing a drink in the alehouse was fundamental to the formation of social bonds, to the expression of their identity, and to the definition of communities, allegiances and friendships. Bringing together social and cultural history approaches, this book draws on a wide range of source material - from legal records and diary evidence to printed drinking songs - to investigate battles over alehouse licensing and the regulation of drinking; the political views and allegiances that ordinary men and women expressed from the alebench; the meanings and values that drinking rituals and practices held for contemporaries; and the social networks and collective identities expressed through the choice of drinking companions. Focusing on an institution and a social practice at the heart of everyday life in early modern England, this book allows us to see some of the ways in which ordinary men and women responded to historical processes such as religious change and state formation, and just as importantly reveals how they shaped their own communities and collective identities. It will be essential reading for anyone interested in the social, cultural and political worlds of the ordinary men and women of seventeenth-century England. MARK HAILWOOD is Lecturer in Early Modern British History at St Hilda's College, University of Oxford.

Censorship profoundly affected early modern writing. Censorship and Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England offers a detailed picture of early modern censorship and investigates the pressures that censorship exerted on seventeenth-century authors, printers, and publishers. In the 1600s, Britain witnessed a civil war, the judicial execution of a king, the restoration of his son, and an unremitting struggle among crown, parliament, and people for sovereignty and the right to define “liberty and property.” This battle, sometimes subtle, sometimes bloody, entailed a struggle for the control of language and representation. Robertson offers a richly detailed study of this “censorship contest” and of the craft that writers employed to outflank the licensers. He argues that for most parties, victory, not diplomacy or consensus, was the ultimate goal. This book differs from most recent works in analyzing both the mechanics of early modern censorship and the poetics that the licensing system produced—the forms and pressures of self-censorship. Among the issues that Robertson addresses in this book are the workings of the licensing machinery, the designs of art and obliquity under a regime of censorship, and the involutions of authorship attendant on anonymity.

The ‘humble petition’ was ubiquitous in early modern society and featured prominently in crucial moments such as the outbreak of the civil wars and in everyday local negotiations about taxation, welfare and litigation. People at all levels of society – from noblemen to paupers – used petitions to make their voices heard and these are valuable sources for mapping the structures of authority and agency that framed early modern society. The Power of Petitioning in Early Modern Britain offers a holistic study of this crucial topic in early modern British history. The contributors survey a vast range of sources, showing the myriad ways people petitioned the authorities from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. They cross the jurisdictional, sub-disciplinary and chronological boundaries that have otherwise constrained the current scholarly literature on petitioning and popular political engagement. Teasing out broad conclusions from innumerable smaller interventions in public life, they not only address the aims, attitudes and strategies of those involved, but also assesses the significance of the processes they used. This volume makes it possible to rethink the power of petitioning and to re-evaluate broad trends regarding political culture, institutional change and state formation.

This book assesses the everyday use of petitions in administrative and judicial settings and contrasts these with more assertive forms of political petitioning addressed to assemblies or rulers. A petition used to be a humble means of asking a favour, but in the early modern period, petitioning became more assertive and participative. This book shows how this contrasted to ordinary petitioning, often to the consternation of authorities. By evaluating petitioning practices in Scotland, England and Denmark, the book traces the boundaries between ordinary and adversarial petitioning and shows how non-elites could become involved in politics through petitioning. Also observed are the responses of authorities to participative petitions, including the suppression or forgetting of unwelcome petitions and consequent struggles to establish petitioning as a right rather than a privilege. Together the chapters in this book indicate the significance of collective petitioning in articulating early modern public opinion and shaping contemporary ideas about opinion at large. The chapters in this book were originally published in the journal Parliaments, Estates & Representation.

A history of the printed pamphlet in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Britain.

This collection of essays compares and discusses women's participation and experiences in credit markets in early modern Europe, and highlights the characteristics, common mechanisms, similarities, discrepancies, and differences across various regions in Europe in different time periods, and at all levels of society. The essays focus on the role of women as creditors and debtors (a topic largely ignored in traditional historiography), but also and above all on the development of their roles across time. Were women able to enter the credit market, and if so, how and in what proportion? What was then the meaning of their involvement in this market? What did their involvement mean for the community and for their household? Was credit a vector of female emancipation and empowerment? What were the changes that occurred for them in the transition to capitalism? These essays offer a variety of perspectives on women's roles in the credit markets of early modern Europe in order to outline and answer these questions as well as analysing and exploring the nature of women, money, credit, and debt in a pre-industrial Europe.