From childbirth and baptism through to courtship, weddings, and funerals, every stage in the life-cycle of Tudor and Stuart England was accompanied by ritual. Even under the protestantism of the reformed Church, the spiritual and social dramas of birth, marriage, and death were graced with elaborate ceremony. Powerful and controversial protocols were in operation, shaped and altered by the influences of the Reformation, the Revolution, and the Restoration. Each of the major rituals was potentially an arena for argument, ambiguity, and dissent. Ideally, as classic rites of passage, these ceremonies worked to bring people together. But they also set up traps into which people could stumble, and tests which not everybody could pass. In practice, ritual performance revealed frictions and fractures that everyday local discourse attempted to hide or to heal. Using fascinating first-hand evidence, David Cressy shows how the making and remaking of ritual formed part of a continuing debate, sometimes strained and occasionally acrimonious, which exposed the raw nerves of society in the midst of great historical events. In doing so, he vividly brings to life the common experiences of living and dying in Tudor and Stuart England.

Religion and life cycles in early modern England assembles scholars working in the fields of history, English literature and art history to further our understanding of the intersection between religion and the life course in the period c. 1550–1800. Featuring chapters on Catholic, Protestant and Jewish communities, it encourages cross-confessional comparison between life stages and rites of passage that were of religious significance to all faiths in early modern England. The book considers biological processes such as birth and death, aspects of the social life cycle including schooling, coming of age and marriage and understandings of religious transition points such as spiritual awakenings and conversion. Through this inclusive and interdisciplinary approach, it seeks to show that the life cycle was not something fixed or predetermined and that early modern individuals experienced multiple, overlapping life cycles.

While historians have made the history of family life a key area of scholarly study, the diversity of methods, sources, areas of interest and conclusions this has produced, have made it one of the most difficult for readers to approach.Family & Kinship in England 1450-1800 guides the reader through the changing relationships that made up the nature of family life. It gives a clear introduction to many of the intriguing areas of interest that this field of history has opened up, including childhood, youth, marriage, sexuality and death. The book provides: An understanding of how the family has developed from the late medieval period to the beginnings of industrialisation. A synthesis of the varied work of other historians, which helps to understand the often disjointed or contradictory research into this area. A glossary of technical terms used by historians to describe the family in the past. Contemporary documents and illustrations, allowing readers to familiarise themselves with the business of understanding people in the past. Written in an engaging and accessible manner, Family & Kinship in England 1450-1800 stimulates interest in a fascinating topic and allows readers to pursue their own interests in the history of family life in the past.

Accounting for Oneself is a major new study of the social order in early modern England, as viewed and articulated from the bottom up. Engaging with how people from across the social spectrum placed themselves within the social order, it pieces together the language of self-description deployed by over 13,500 witnesses in English courts when answering questions designed to assess their creditworthiness. Spanning the period between 1550 and 1728, and with a broad geographical coverage, this study explores how men and women accounted for their 'worth' and described what they did for a living at differing points in the life-cycle. A corrective to top-down, male-centric accounts of the social order penned by elite observers, the perspective from below testifies to an intricate hierarchy based on sophisticated forms of social reckoning that were articulated throughout the social scale. A culture of appraisal was central to the competitive processes whereby people judged their own and others' social positions. For the majority it was not land that was the yardstick of status but moveable property-the goods and chattels in people's possession ranging from livestock to linens, tools to trading goods, tables to tubs, clothes to cushions. Such items were repositories of wealth and the security for the credit on which the bulk of early modern exchange depended. Accounting for Oneself also sheds new light on women's relationship to property, on gendered divisions of labour, and on early modern understandings of work which were linked as much to having as to getting a living. The view from below was not unchanging, but bears witness to the profound impact of widening social inequality that opened up a chasm between the middle ranks and the labouring poor between the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries. As a result, not only was the social hierarchy distorted beyond recognition, from the later-seventeenth century there was also a gradual yet fundamental reworking of the criteria informing the calculus of esteem.

The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Culture in Early Modern England is a comprehensive, interdisciplinary examination of current research on popular culture in the early modern era. For the first time a detailed yet wide-ranging consideration of the breadth and scope of early modern popular culture in England is collected in one volume, highlighting the interplay of 'low' and 'high' modes of cultural production (while also questioning the validity of such terminology). The authors examine how popular culture impacted upon people's everyday lives during the period, helping to define how individuals and groups experienced the world. Issues as disparate as popular reading cultures, games, food and drink, time, textiles, religious belief and superstition, and the function of festivals and rituals are discussed. This research companion will be an essential resource for scholars and students of early modern history and culture.

Ben Jonson was the greatest of Shakespeare's contemporaries. In the century following his death he was seen by many as the finest of all English writers, living or dead. His fame rested not only on the numerous plays he had written for the theatre, but on his achievements over three decades as principal masque-writer to the early Stuart court, where he had worked in creative, and often stormy, collaboration with Inigo Jones. One of the most accomplished poets of the age, he had become - in fact if not in title - the first Poet Laureate in England. Jonson's life was full of drama. Serving in the Low Countries as a young man, he overcame a Spanish adversary in single combat in full view of both the armies. His early satirical play, The Isle of Dogs, landed him in prison, and brought all theatrical activity in London to a temporary — and very nearly to a permanent — standstill. He was 'almost at the gallows' for killing a fellow actor after a quarrel, and converted to Catholicism while awaiting execution. He supped with the Gunpowder conspirators on the eve of their planned coup at Westminster. After satirizing the Scots in Eastward Ho! he was imprisoned again; and throughout his career was repeatedly interrogated about plays and poems thought to contain seditious or slanderous material. In his middle years, twenty stone in weight, he walked to Scotland and back, seemingly partly to fulfil a wager, and partly to see the land of his forebears. He travelled in Europe as tutor to the mischievous son of Sir Walter Ralegh, who 'caused him to be drunken and dead drunk' and wheeled provocatively through the streets of Paris. During his later years he presided over a sociable club in the Apollo Room in Fleet Street, mixed with the most learned scholars of his day, and viewed with keen interest the political, religious, and scientific controversies of the day. Ian Donaldson's new biography draws on freshly discovered writings by and about Ben Jonson, and locates his work within the social and intellectual contexts of his time. Jonson emerges from this study as a more complex and volatile character than his own self-declarations (and much modern scholarship) would allow, and as a writer whose work strikingly foresees - and at times pre-emptively satirizes - the modern age.

Oxford Shakespeare Topics (General Editors Peter Holland and Stanley Wells) provide students, teachers, and interested readers with short books on important aspects of Shakespeare criticism and scholarship, including some general anthologies relating to Shakespeare. Richard III, Romeo, Prince Harry, Malvolio, Hamlet, Lear, Antony, Coriolanus, Prospero: Shakespeare's roster of male protagonists is astonishingly various. Shakespeare and Masculinity juxtaposes these memorable characters with the medical beliefs, ethical ideals, and social realities that shaped masculine identity for Shakespeare, as for his fellow actors and their audiences. At the same time it explores the process of male self-definition against various sorts of 'others' - women, foreigners, social inferiors, sodomites. Reflecting the truth that the plays' principal existence is in the live theatre, the book finishes with a transhistorical, multicultural survey of how masculinity has been performed in productions of Shakespeare's plays - in France, Germany, Hungary, Iraq, Japan, and elsewhere - and with a challenge to imagine masculinity in fuller and more satisfying ways.

This study explores maternity in the 'disciplines' of early modern England. Placing the reproductive female body centre-stage in Shakespeare's theatre, Laoutaris ranges beyond the domestic sphere in order to recuperate the wider intellectual, epistemological, and archaeological significance of maternity to the Renaissance imagination. Focusing on 'anatomy' in Hamlet, 'natural history' in The Tempest, 'demonology' in Macbeth, and 'heraldry' in Antony and Cleopatra, this book reveals the ways in which the maternal body was figured in, and in turn contributed towards the re-conceptualisation of, bodies of knowledge. Laoutaris argues that Shakespeare resists a monolithic concept of motherhood, presenting instead a range of contested 'maternities' which challenge the distinctive 'ways of knowing' these early disciplines worked to impose on the order of created nature.

This book represents the first systematic study of the role of the Devil in English witchcraft pamphlets for the entire period of state-sanctioned witchcraft prosecutions (1563-1735). It provides a rereading of English witchcraft, one which moves away from an older historiography which underplays the role of the Devil in English witchcraft and instead highlights the crucial role that the Devil, often in the form of a familiar spirit, took in English witchcraft belief. One of the key ways in which this book explores the role of the Devil is through emotions. Stories of witches were made up of a complex web of emotionally implicated accusers, victims, witnesses, and supposed perpetrators. They reveal a range of emotional experiences that do not just stem from malefic witchcraft but also, and primarily, from a witch’s links with the Devil. This book, then, has two main objectives. First, to suggest that English witchcraft pamphlets challenge our understanding of English witchcraft as a predominantly non-diabolical crime, and second, to highlight how witchcraft narratives emphasized emotions as the primary motivation for witchcraft acts and accusations.

This book sheds light on the shaping of the English Bible and its impact on early modern English society and culture.