A Social History of England, 1500–1750, ed. Keith Wrightson

Abstract

Good textbooks on the social history of ‘early modern’ England are a rare thing. James Sharpe’s Early Modern England: A Social History 1550–1750 (originally published in 1987) and Keith Wrightson’s English Society 1580–1680 (1982; rev. ante, cccxcii [1984], 610–11) have long dominated university reading lists. These books reflected the scope of the field at the time, still looking back to Peter Laslett’s pioneering work in the 1960s and ’70s, making use of what was then quite radical new archival research in county record offices, and still somewhat reliant on the canon of ‘classic’ early modern diaries and memoirs: not Pepys and Evelyn so much as Richard Gough, Ralph Josselin and Adam Eyre. The field has come some way since those initial textbooks, as scholarship (much of it by Wrightson’s own students) sought to expand, clarify and nuance the initial findings of that generation. This collection reflects those efforts, and it will be of immeasurable value to students and teachers of the period, collating as it does much of the most important recent scholarship on a variety of critical topics into manageable chapters. Each contribution has its own argument and its own nuances. Wrightson, as editor, is at pains to point out that there is no party line, though it must be said that the overarching themes of marketisation, growing rural inequality and the rise of the ‘middling sort’ are nicely in harmony with his own view of the period. For this remains a ‘Wrightsonian’ book: a large number of the authors were his students and others were his colleagues at Cambridge, and this is surely reflected in the approach. Communities, social structures and the impact of the massive growth in the economic and cultural power of the ‘middling sort’ are running themes.