Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society

Michael J. Braddick (b.1962) has taught at the University of Sheffield since 1990, having held previous positions at the University of Alabama and Birmingham-Southern College, Alabama. His major study State Formation in Early Modern England c.1550–1700 (2000) was published by Cambridge University Press. John Walter is Professor of History at the University of Essex. His book Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution: The Colchester Plunderers (1999) was published by Cambridge University Press and won the Royal Historical Society's Whitfield Prize. Previously Professor Walter was editor of Famine, Disease and the Social Order in Early Modern Society (also Cambridge University Press, 1989, paperback 1991).

• Introduction: grids of power: order, hierarchy and subordination in early modern society Michael J. Braddick and John Walter; 1. Ordering the body: illegitimacy and female authority in seventeenth-century England Laura Gowing; 2. Child sexual abuse in early modern England Martin Ingram; 3. Sex, social relations and the law in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century London Faramerz Dabhoiwala; 4. Exhortation and entitlement: negotiating equality in English rural communities, 1550–1650 Steve Hindle; 5. Public transcripts, popular agency and the politics of subsistence in early modern England John Walter; 6. 'Bragging and daring words': honour, property, and the symbolism of the hunt in Stowe, 1590–1642 Dan Beaver; 7. Administrative performance: the representation of political authority in early modern England Michael J. Braddick; 8. Negotiating order in early seventeenth-century Ireland Raymond Gillespie; 9. Order, orthodoxy and resistance: the ambiguous legacy of English puritanism, or, Just how moderate was Stephen Denison? Peter Lake; 10. Making orthodoxy in late Restoration England: the trials of Edmund Hickeringill, 1662–1710 Justin Champion and Lee McNulty.

'The editors' achievement is that they have assimilated all the best recent work on their theme and set out a prospectus for fruitful analysis of power relations in early modern England that leaves behind the well-worn dynamic of elite and popular cultures in favour of a highly sophisticated new model. They bring out the sheer complexity of social and political relations in England and Ireland, and provide a convincing framework for further research.' Anthony Fletcher, Institute of Historical Research, University of London