Fertility rates vary considerably across and within societies, and over time. Over the last three decades, social demographers have made remarkable progress in documenting these axes of variation, but theoretical models to explain family change and variation have lagged behind. At the same time, our sister disciplines-from cultural anthropology to social psychology to cognitive science and beyond-have made dramatic strides in understanding how social action works, and how bodies, brains, cultural contexts, and structural conditions are coordinated in that process. "Understanding Family Change and Variation: Toward a Theory of Conjunctural Action" argues that social demography must be reintegrated into the core of theory and research about the processes and mechanisms of social action, and proposes a framework through which that reintegration can occur. This framework posits that material and schematic structures profoundly shape the occurrence, frequency, and context of the vital events that constitute the object of social demography. Fertility and family behaviors are best understood as a function not just of individual traits, but of the structured contexts in which behavior occurs. This approach upends many assumptions in social demography, encouraging demographers to embrace the endogeneity of social life and to move beyond fruitless debates of structure versus culture, of agency versus structure, or of biology versus society.

Fertility rates vary considerably across and within societies, and over time. Over the last three decades, social demographers have made remarkable progress in documenting these axes of variation, but theoretical models to explain family change and variation have lagged behind. At the same time, our sister disciplines-from cultural anthropology to social psychology to cognitive science and beyond-have made dramatic strides in understanding how social action works, and how bodies, brains, cultural contexts, and structural conditions are coordinated in that process. "Understanding Family Change and Variation: Toward a Theory of Conjunctural Action" argues that social demography must be reintegrated into the core of theory and research about the processes and mechanisms of social action, and proposes a framework through which that reintegration can occur. This framework posits that material and schematic structures profoundly shape the occurrence, frequency, and context of the vital events that constitute the object of social demography. Fertility and family behaviors are best understood as a function not just of individual traits, but of the structured contexts in which behavior occurs. This approach upends many assumptions in social demography, encouraging demographers to embrace the endogeneity of social life and to move beyond fruitless debates of structure versus culture, of agency versus structure, or of biology versus society.

The heart of this book is its fully annotated, critical editions of the surviving work of Richard Edwards, one of the most influential poets and dramatists writing in England before Shakespeare. Ros King's extensive introduction, identifying the holes in the documentary evidence that might accommodate this important but now little known writer, rewrites the history of pre-Shakespearean drama, illustrates new approaches to sixteenth-century prosody and to the modernisation of dramatic poetry, and re-evaluates the public role of theatre and poetry during a particularly turbulent period in English history. The book includes Edwards' play, Damon and Pythias, his poems (some never before printed and some newly ascribed), together with a number of original musical settings. There is also a detailed description of the staging of his spectacular lost play, Palamon and Arcyte, performed before Queen Elizabeth I at Oxford, with eye-witness accounts of her reactions. While it will be essential reading for specialist scholars, it will also be of much wider interest. The introduction is highly accessible which makes it an appropriate text-book for students in a field where few textbooks are available. It will appeal to the current appetite among the reading public for biography, while the play, poems and songs are themselves very appealing.