Keith Wrightson - A Social History of England, 1500-1750

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DOI: 10.1017/9781107300835

Cambridge University Press 2017

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First published 2017

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Keith Wrightson

Andy Wood

As editor I wish to express my thanks to all the contributors to this volume for their willingness to participate in the project. They were asked to undertake the difficult and demanding task of handling large themes within the constraints of relatively tight word limits, and to do so in a manner that would not only survey the findings and arguments of existing scholarship but also provoke fresh thinking and suggest ways forward in research. Reading and discussing the resulting draft chapters have been the most stimulating and rewarding part of editing this book. I am grateful also for their commitment in speedily writing final drafts, and their efficiency in turning around queries and proofs in the final stages of preparation and production. It has been a privilege to work with them.

The map in ) is reproduced from C. Phythian-Adams, Societies, Cultures and Kinship, 1580-1850: Cultural Provinces and English Local History (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1996), xvii ( C. Phythian-Adams 1996). It is used here by kind permission of Bloomsbury Publishing plc.

This book is dedicated to the memory of Christopher W. Brooks, an outstanding historian of this period and a friend to many of us.

American Historical Review

British Library

Continuity and Change

Durham University Library

Economic History Review

Early English Books Online

English Historical Review

The Historical Journal

History Workshop Journal

International Review of Social History

Journal of British Studies

Journal of Family History

Journal of Modern History

Norfolk Record Office

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

Past & Present

Record Office

Social History

The National Archives, Kew

Transactions of the Royal Historical Society

In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English, the verb to frame meant to construct, join together, shape, form, or devise and invent. Framing was the action, method or process of constructing, making or fashioning something. Sometimes they are defined in terms of broader processes that are cumulatively transformative: the rise of capitalism or individualism, for example, or the decline of magic or of the peasantry. But whatever the case, historical periods reflect perceptions of the shape of the past that originate in particular attempts to give it form and meaning, gradually become conventional, and persist while they retain the power to persuade us that they help make sense of it.