This book re-evaluates and extends understandings about how work was conceived and what it could entail for women in the premodern period in Europe from c. 1100 to c. 1800. It does this by building on the impressive growth in literature on women's working experiences, and by adopting new interpretive approaches that expand received assumptions about what constituted 'work' for women. While attention to the diversity of women's contributions to the economy has done much to make the breadth of women's experiences of labour visible, this volume takes a more expansive conceptual approach to the notion of work and considers the social and cultural dimensions in which activities were construed and valued as work. This interdisciplinary collection thus advances concepts of work that encompass cultural activities in addition to more traditional economic understandings of work as employment or labour for production. The chapters reconceptualise and explore work for women by asking how the working lives of historical women were enacted and represented, and analyse the relationships that shaped women's experiences of work across the European premodern period.

This book re-evaluates and extends understandings about how work was conceived and what it could entail for women in the premodern period in Europe from c. 1100 to c. 1800. It does this by building on the impressive growth in literature on women's working experiences, and by adopting new interpretive approaches that expand received assumptions about what constituted 'work' for women. While attention to the diversity of women's contributions to the economy has done much to make the breadth of women's experiences of labour visible, this volume takes a more expansive conceptual approach to the notion of work and considers the social and cultural dimensions in which activities were construed and valued as work. This interdisciplinary collection thus advances concepts of work that encompass cultural activities in addition to more traditional economic understandings of work as employment or labour for production. The chapters reconceptualise and explore work for women by asking how the working lives of historical women were enacted and represented, and analyse the relationships that shaped women's experiences of work across the European premodern period.

This volume spans the fourteenth to nineteenth centuries, across Europe and its empires, and brings together historians, art historians, literary scholars and anthropologists to rethink medieval and early modern ritual. The study of rituals, when it is alert to the emotions which are woven into and through ritual activities, presents an opportunity to explore profoundly important questions about people's relationships with others, their relationships with the divine, with power dynamics and importantly, with their concept of their own identity. Each chapter in this volume showcases the different approaches, theories and methodologies that can be used to explore emotions in historical rituals, but they all share the goal of answering the question of how emotions act within ritual to inform balances of power in its many and varied forms. Chapter 5 of this book is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.

An investigation into a variety of texts providing guidance for teachers, parents, and children themselves. The question and procedures of integrating children into wider society during the medieval and early modern period are debated across a wide range of contemporary texts, in both print and manuscript form. This study takes as its focus the ways in which vernacular literature (including English courtesy poems, incunabula and sixteenth-century printed household books, grammar school statutes, and pedagogic books) provided a guide to socialising children. Theauthor examines how the transmission and reception of this literature, showing how patterns of thought changed during the period for parents, teachers, and young people alike; and places children and family reading networks into the context of debates on the history of childhood, and the history of the book. MERRIDEE L, BAILEY Is a social and cultural historian of late medieval and early modern England. She is an Associate Member of the Facultyof History, University of Oxford.

This volume spans the fourteenth to nineteenth centuries, across Europe and its empires, and brings together historians, art historians, literary scholars and anthropologists to rethink medieval and early modern ritual. The study of rituals, when it is alert to the emotions which are woven into and through ritual activities, presents an opportunity to explore profoundly important questions about people's relationships with others, their relationships with the divine, with power dynamics and importantly, with their concept of their own identity. Each chapter in this volume showcases the different approaches, theories and methodologies that can be used to explore emotions in historical rituals, but they all share the goal of answering the question of how emotions act within ritual to inform balances of power in its many and varied forms. Chapter 5 of this book is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.

An investigation into a variety of texts providing guidance for teachers, parents, and children themselves. The question and procedures of integrating children into wider society during the medieval and early modern period are debated across a wide range of contemporary texts, in both print and manuscript form. This study takes as its focus the ways in which vernacular literature (including English courtesy poems, incunabula and sixteenth-century printed household books, grammar school statutes, and pedagogic books) provided a guide to socialising children. Theauthor examines how the transmission and reception of this literature, showing how patterns of thought changed during the period for parents, teachers, and young people alike; and places children and family reading networks into the context of debates on the history of childhood, and the history of the book. Merridee L. Bailey is a social and cultural historian of late medieval and early modern England. She is an Associate Member of the Facultyof History, University of Oxford.