The Memory of the People

Andy Wood is Professor of Social History at the University of Durham. He writes about the poorer and middling people of Tudor, Stuart and Georgian England, and has published on a wide range of issues, including popular politics, class relations, rebellion, the mid-Tudor crisis, the English Revolution, local communities, literacy, oral culture, memory and customary law. His last book was The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2007), which the American Historical Review described as 'social history at its best … passionate and committed while at the same time judicious and balanced … an extraordinary book, imaginative in its conceptualization and wide ranging in its implications'. Professor Wood is also the author of The Politics of Social Conflict: The Peak Country, 1520–1770 (Cambridge, 1999) and Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (2002). He has held Research Fellowships with the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust and the Institute of Advanced Studies at Durham University. The Memory of the People: Custom and Popular Senses of the Past in Early Modern England is based on twenty years' research and thought.

• 1. Reformation, custom and the end of medieval England; 2. Custom and popular memory; 3. Rights, resources and social alignments; 4. Topographies of remembrance; 5. Textual and verbal ways of remembering; 6. The politics of popular memory.

'This is a book to read slowly and to savour. It is exceptionally rich: in fresh and illuminating material; in historical imagination and insight; in conceptual sophistication and in interpretative implications. It combines breadth of vision with vivid specificity, and is written with fluency and power, from its arresting opening to its trenchant conclusion. It is a truly major work.' Keith Wrightson, Townsend Professor of History, Yale University