Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Britain and Ireland

by Edited by Michael J. Braddick , John Walter

• ISBN13: 9780521651639
• ISBN10: 0521651638
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-08-20
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Addressing the dynamics of power in early modern societies, this book challenges the existing tendency to see past societies in terms of binary oppositions - such as male/female, rich/poor, rulers/ruled - in which the disadvantaged have influence only in moments of direct confrontation. Drawing on recent social theory, the essays offer a series of micro-sociologies of power in early modern society, ranging from the politics of age, gender and class to the politics of state-building in the post-Reformation confessional state. They explore the weapons with which subordinated groups in their everyday lives could moderate the exercise of power over them. Recovering the agency of the disadvantaged, the book also explores the limits to the power that the disadvantaged could claim in the past. Its findings also have relevance for thinking about inequality in present-day societies.

Table of Contents

Notes on contributors	vii
Acknowledgements	ix
List of abbreviations and conventions	x
Introduction. Grids of power: order, hierarchy and subordination in early modern society	1	(42)
Michael J. Braddick
John Walter
Ordering the body: illegitimacy and female authority in seventeenth-century England	43	(20)
Laura Gowing
Child sexual abuse in early modern England	63	(22)
Martin Ingram
Sex, social relations and the law in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century London	85	(17)
Faramerz Dabhoiwala
Exhortation and entitlement: negotiating inequality in English rural communities, 1550-1650	102	(21)
Steve Hindle
Public transcripts, popular agency and the politics of subsistence in early modern England	123	(26)
John Walter
`Bragging and daring words': honour, property and the symbolism of the hunt in Stowe, 1590-1642	149	(17)
Dan Beaver
Administrative performance: the representation of political authority in early modern England	166	(22)
Michael J. Braddick
Negotiating order in early seventeenth-century Ireland	188	(18)
Raymond Gillespie
Order, orthodoxy and resistance: the ambiguous legacy of English puritanism or just how moderate was Stephen Denison?	206	(21)
Peter Lake
Making orthodoxy in late Restoration England: the trials of Edmund Hickeringill, 1662-1710	227	(22)
Justin Champion
Lee McNulty
Notes	249	(57)
Index	306