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Books > History > World history > 1500 to 1750
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Accounting for Oneself - Worth, Status, and the Social Order in Early Modern England (Paperback)
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Accounting for Oneself - Worth, Status, and the Social Order in Early Modern England (Paperback)
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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.
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