Current concerns about the survival of marine life and the fishing industry have contributed to a rising interest in their past development. While much of the scholarship is focused on the recent past, this collection of essays presents new interpretations in the pre-industrial history of the fisheries by highlighting the consequences of the northern fisheries through an interdisciplinary approach, including the environment, economy, politics, and society in the medieval and early modern periods. A wide variety of topics related to the fisheries, such as settlement and spatial organisation, processing methods, trade, profitability and taxation, consumption, communication and cooperation, ranging from the Viking Age until industrialisation are dealt with in a long term perspective, offering new insights in the intriguing relationship between marine life and humanity. Contributors are Ines Amorim, James H. Barrett, Christiaan van Bochove, Petra van Dam, Chloe Deligne, Carsten Jahnke, Alison M. Locker, Thomas H. McGovern, Sophia Perdikaris, Marnix Pieters, Peter Pope, Bo Poulsen, Callum M. Roberts, Louis Sicking, Dries Tys, Adri van Vliet, Annette de Wit, Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz.

Looking at the experiences of women in early modern Portugal in the context of crime and forgiveness, this study demonstrates the extent to which judicial and quasi-judicial records can be used to examine the implications of crime in women's lives, whether as victims or culprits. The foundational basis for this study is two sets of manuscript sources that highlight two distinct yet connected experiences of women as participants in the criminal process. One consists of a collection of archival documents from the first half of the seventeenth century, a corpus called 'querelas,' in which formal accusations of criminal acts were registered. This is a rich source of information not only about the types of crimes reported, but also the process that plaintiffs had to follow to deal with their cases. The second primary source consists of a sampling of documents known as the 'perdAGBPo de parte.' The term refers to the victim's pardon, unique to the Iberian Peninsula, which allowed individuals implicated in serious conflicts to have a voice in the judicial process. By looking at a sample of these pardons, found in notary collections from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Abreu-Ferreira is able to show the extent to which women exercised their agency in a legal process that was otherwise male-dominated.