Susan D. Amussen is Professor of History at the University of California, Merced, USA. She is the author of Caribbean Exchanges: Slavery and the Transformation of English Society, 1640-1700 (2007) and An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (1988). She is also the editor of Attending to Early Modern Women (1998; with Adele Seeff) and Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England (1995; with Mark A. Kishlansky).The late David E. Underdown was George Burton Adams Professor of History at Yale University, USA. He is the author of A Freeborn People: Politics and the Nation in Seventeenth-Century England (1996), Fire from Heaven: Life in an English Town in the Seventeenth Century (1992), Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603-1660 (1985) and Prides Purge: Politics in the Puritan Revolution (1971).

• List of IllustrationsPreface and AcknowledgementsList of AbbreviationsIntroduction1. Unruly Women 2. Failed Patriarchs 3. Performing Inversion: Theatre, Politics, and Society 4. Performing Inversion in Civic Pageantry and Charivari 5. Witches, Magicians, and the Upside-Down World ConclusionBibliographyIndex

An invaluable synthesis of scholarly material for undergraduates studying early modern gender, literature and social history ... The writing is accessible and elegant ... The authors’ conceptual framework of ‘inversion’ and emphasis on the importance of reciprocity in gender relations are stimulating contributions to the historiography.