Examining the colonial history of western Massachusetts, this book provides fresh insights into important colonial social issues including African slavery, relations with Native Americans, the experiences of women, provisions for mental illness, old age and higher education, in addition to more traditional topics such as the nature of colonial governance, literacy and the book trade, Jonathan Edwards' ministries in Northampton and Stockbridge, and Governor Thomas Hutchinson's efforts to prevent a break with Britain.

Hadley, located on the Connecticut River at the far western frontier of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, was settled from the colony of Connecticut to the south, and early Hadley's social and economic relations with Connecticut remained very close. The move to Hadley was motivated by religion and was a carefully planned removal. It resulted from an important dispute within the church of Hartford, and Hadley's earliest settlers continued to observe their very strict form of Puritanism which had evolved as the "New England Way." The settlers of Hadley also believed in a high degree of colonial independence from the Crown. These beliefs, combined with a high degree of internal cohesion and motivation in the early settlement, enabled the community of Hadley, despite its isolation and small size, to play an unusually prominent and contentious role in three great crises which threatened the Bay Colony. The first Episode examines the refuge given by Hadley, at great risk and in defiance of the Crown, to the important English Regicides, Edward Whalley and William Goffe, between 1664 and 1676 when the surviving Regicide, Goffe, was removed to Hadley's allies in Hartford where he was sheltered before disappearing from the record. The second Episode describes Hadley's divisive support for Increase Mather and John Davenport in opposing the "Half-Way Covenant," a dispute which split the New England churches over baptismal practice and church polity. The third Episode deals with an internal dispute within Hadley over the direction of the local school which then was caught up into the larger dispute over the Dominion of New England government imposed by the Crown after the suspension of the Bay's Charter. Through the course of these troubles within the Bay Colony from the 1660s to the 1680s, the initial internal solidarity of the town fractured, and its original unity of purpose with the rest of Colony was eroded. This secular "declension" led to Hadley's political decline from prominence into the pleasant but unremarkable village it is today.

This essay focuses on two illustrations of the Labours of the Months', incorporated into a pair of early ninth century manuscripts containing astronomical and calendrical treatises. They are extremely significant as the first examples of this popular medieval topic. Hammer's work has two objectives: the first section examines the illustrations and their manuscripts from an art and intellectual history perspective, to place the pictures in the context of Carolingian cultural life, and also to determine whether the pictures are anything more then depictions of rural life. The second section aims to place the pictures in a more conventional historical context, suggesting why the manuscripts were produced in that period, who sponsored them, and their programmatic intent. This paper often goes beyond its primary subject to provide interesting insights into Carolingian politics.

Using historical, topographical and archaeological evidence, this book explores the earliest history of two fundamental institutions in 9th and 10th century Bavaria: the development of the urban 'borough' and the emergence of castle-based lordship within the comital organization of the countryside, which formed the twin bases for the estate-based feudal constitution of the high Middle Ages.