Women and the Land examines English women's legal rights to land and the reality and consequences of their land ownership over four centuries. Women and the Land examines the pre-history of gendered property relations in England, focusing on the four-hundred-year period between roughly 1500 and 1900. More specifically, the book is about how gender shaped opportunities for and experiences of owning property, particularly for women. The focus is especially on land, residential buildings and commercial property, but livestock, common and personal property also feature. This project is drivenby an explicitly feminist agenda: the contributors directly challenge the idea that the existence of patriarchal property relations - including the doctrine of coverture and gendered inheritance practices - meant that property wasconcentrated in exclusively male hands. Here a very different story is told: of significant levels of female landownership and how women's desire to own property and manage its profits led to emotional attachments to land and a willingness and determination to fight for the right to legal title. Altogether, the chapters in this volume offer new histories of land and property which hold women's lives as their centre. Presenting the very latest qualitativeand quantitative research on women's landownership, the book will be of interest to those working in social, economic and cultural history, historical and cultural geography, women's studies, gender studies and landscape studies. AMANDA CAPERN is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern Women's History at the University of Hull. BRIONY MCDONAGH is Senior Lecturer in Historical and Cultural Geography at the University of Hull. JENNIFER ASTON is Senior Lecturer in Modern British History at Northumbria University. CONTRIBUTORS: Jennifer Aston, Stephen Bending, Amanda L. Capern, Janet Casson, Amy Erickson, Amanda Flather, Joan Heggie, Jessica L. Malay, Briony McDonagh, Judith Spicksley, Jon Stobart, Hannah Worthen

This volume addresses the relationship between people and their homes in Christian areas of Western Europe in the Renaissance, traced from the late fourteenth century to around 1650. The two centuries after 1450 were characterised by a cluster of interrelated forces that led to significant changes in the material, social, cultural, economic and political landscape. The essays in the volume vary in their geographical focus of study and disciplinary approach but taken together they try to uncover the impact of these changes on how people used, thought and felt about their homes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They try to understand what home meant - or if home even existed as a concept- for the people and the places they discuss. They also consider ways in which gender, status, age and geography contributed to different meanings of home, both as an idea and as a place to live.

A nuanced re-evaluation of the ways in which gender affected the use of physical space in early modern England. Space was not simply a passive backdrop to a social system that had structural origins elsewhere; it was vitally important for marking out and maintaining the hierarchy that sustained social and gender order in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Gender had a considerable influence on its use and organization; status and gender were displayed physically and spatially every moment of the day, from a person's place at table to the bed on which he orshe slept, in places of work and recreation, in dress, gesture and modes of address. Space was also the basis for the formation of gender identities which were constantly contested and restructured, as this book shows. Examining in turn domestic, social and sacred spaces and the spatial division of labour in gender construction, the author demonstrates how these could shift, and with them the position and power of women. She shows that the ideologicalassumption that all women are subject to all men is flawed, and exposes the limitations of interpretations which rely on the model and binary opposition of public/private, male/female, to describe gender relations and their changes across the period, thus offering a much more complex and picture than has hitherto been perceived. The book will be essential reading not just for historians of the family and of women, but for all those studying early modern social history. AMANDA FLATHER is a lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Essex.

A Cultural History of the Home provides a comprehensive survey of the domestic space from ancient times to the present. Spanning 2800 years, the six volumes explore how different cultures and societies have established, developed and used the home. It reveals a great deal about how people have lived day-to-day in a range of regions and epochs by providing a historical focus on the location in which they will have spent much of their time: the domestic space. 1. A Cultural History of the Home in Antiquity (800 BCE - 800 CE) 2. A Cultural History of the Home in the Medieval Age (800 - 1450) 3. A Cultural History of the Home in the Renaissance (1450 - 1648) 4. A Cultural History of the Home in the Age of Enlightenment (1648 - 1815) 5. A Cultural History of the Home in the Age of Empire (1815 - 1920) 6. A Cultural History of the Home in the Modern Age (1920 - present) Each volume discusses the same themes in its chapters: 1. The Meaning of the Home 2. Family and Household 3. The House 4. Furniture and Furnishings 5. Home and Work 6. Gender and Home 7. Hospitality and Home 8. Religion and Home This structure offers readers a broad overview of a period within each volume or the opportunity to follow a theme through history by reading the relevant chapter across volumes. Generously illustrated, the full six-volume set combines to present the most detailed survey available on the home in history.

This volume addresses the relationship between people and their homes in Christian areas of Western Europe in the Renaissance, traced from the late fourteenth century to around 1650. The two centuries after 1450 were characterised by a cluster of interrelated forces that led to significant changes in the material, social, cultural, economic and political landscape. The essays in the volume vary in their geographical focus of study and disciplinary approach but taken together they try to uncover the impact of these changes on how people used, thought and felt about their homes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They try to understand what home meant – or if home even existed as a concept– for the people and the places they discuss. They also consider ways in which gender, status, age and geography contributed to different meanings of home, both as an idea and as a place to live.

A Cultural History of the Home provides a comprehensive survey of the domestic space from ancient times to the present. Spanning 2800 years, the six volumes explore how different cultures and societies have established, developed and used the home. It reveals a great deal about how people have lived day-to-day in a range of regions and epochs by providing a historical focus on the location in which they will have spent much of their time: the domestic space. 1. A Cultural History of the Home in Antiquity (800 BCE - 800 CE) 2. A Cultural History of the Home in the Medieval Age (800 - 1450) 3. A Cultural History of the Home in the Renaissance (1450 - 1648) 4. A Cultural History of the Home in the Age of Enlightenment (1648 - 1815) 5. A Cultural History of the Home in the Age of Empire (1815 - 1920) 6. A Cultural History of the Home in the Modern Age (1920 - present) Each volume discusses the same themes in its chapters: 1. The Meaning of the Home 2. Family and Household 3. The House 4. Furniture and Furnishings 5. Home and Work 6. Gender and Home 7. Hospitality and Home 8. Religion and Home This structure offers readers a broad overview of a period within each volume or the opportunity to follow a theme through history by reading the relevant chapter across volumes. Generously illustrated, the full six-volume set combines to present the most detailed survey available on the home in history.

An outstanding collection, bringing together some of the leading historians of this period with some of the field's rising stars, which examines key issues in popular politics, the negotiation of power, strategies of legitimation,and the languages of politics. One of the most notable currents in social, cultural and political historiography is the interrogation of the categories of 'elite' and 'popular' politics and their relationship to each other, as well as the exploration of why andhow different sorts of people engaged with politics and behaved politically. While such issues are timeless, they hold a special importance for a society experiencing rapid political and social change, like early modern England.No one has done more to define these agendas for early modern historians than John Walter. His work has been hugely influential, and at its heart has been the analysis of the political agency of ordinary people. The essays in thisvolume engage with the central issues of Walter's work, ranging across the politics of poverty, dearth and household, popular political consciousness and practice more broadly, and religion and politics during the English revolution. This outstanding collection, bringing together some of the leading historians of this period with some of the field's rising stars, will appeal to anyone interested in the social, cultural and political history of early modern England or issues of popular political consciousness and behaviour more generally. MICHAEL J. BRADDICK is professor of history at the University of Sheffield. PHIL WITHINGTON is professor of history at the Universityof Sheffield. CONTRIBUTORS: Michael J. Braddick, J. C. Davis, Amanda Flather, Steve Hindle, Mark Knights, John Morrill, Alexandra Shepard, Paul Slack, Richard M. Smith, Clodagh Tait, Keith Thomas, Phil Withington, Andy Wood, Keith Wrightson.

A nuanced re-evaluation of the ways in which gender affected the use of physical space in early modern England. Space was not simply a passive backdrop to a social system that had structural origins elsewhere; it was vitally important for marking out and maintaining the hierarchy that sustained social and gender order in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Gender had a considerable influence on its use and organization; status and gender were displayed physically and spatially every moment of the day, from a person's place at table to the bed on which he orshe slept, in places of work and recreation, in dress, gesture and modes of address. Space was also the basis for the formation of gender identities which were constantly contested and restructured, as this book shows.Examining in turn domestic, social and sacred spaces and the spatial division of labour in gender construction, the author demonstrates how these could shift, and with them the position and power of women. She shows that the ideological assumption that all women are subject to all men is flawed, and exposes the limitations of interpretations which rely on the model and binary opposition of public/private, male/female, to describe gender relations and theirchanges across the period, thus offering a much more complex and picture than has hitherto been perceived. The book will be essential reading not just for historians of the family and of women, but for all those studying early modern social history. AMANDA FLATHER is a lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Essex.