Reviewed by: Servants in Rural Europe, 1400–1900 de. by Jane Whittle Olivia Formby Whittle, Jane, ed., Servants in Rural Europe, 1400–1900 (People, Markets, Goods: Economies and Societies in History, 11), Woodbridge, The Boydell Press, 2017; paperback; pp. 286; 19 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. £19.99; ISBN 9781783272396. In this edited collection, a wide variety of individuals from the late medieval to the modern eras are studied together under the broad category of rural service. Jane Whittle presents us with eleven essays exploring the complicated demographic, economic, and legal nuances of service, defined as live-in waged labour, in rural northern and western Europe, with one last chapter on southern Europe for comparative perspective. This volume seeks to rebalance the historiography of European labour and labourers which has to date focused heavily on domestic service and urban settings. It succeeds in this worthy aim, with thorough archival research and compelling case studies illustrating the experiences of children, women, and men who were servants in rural Europe, and the shifting nature of their labour over space and time. Whittle provides an expert introduction, placing servants firmly within their historiographical context as essential to our understanding of the family, and particularly the European marriage pattern, the agrarian economy, and the development of law. These themes are embedded throughout, as well as themes of gender, agency, mobility, and power. In the first chapter, Lies Vervaet examines a coastal farm near Bruges from the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries, finding points of continuity over time in the highly seasonal, mobile, and gendered nature of rural service. Then, Thijs Lambrecht remains in sixteenth-century Flanders to offer a more regional study, similarly finding the favouring of skilled, male labour on larger farms. By looking beyond the payment of wages to question their expenditure, Lambrecht offers a fascinating glimpse into the lived experiences of servants who worked to maintain connections with home. In the third chapter, Whittle narrows in on rural England from 1500 to 1660, to show that prior to the long eighteenth century, service was not determined by hiring fairs and annual contracts, but by more individual arrangements and often lengthier employment periods. Charmian Mansell continues in early modern England and develops this idea of flexibility, using church court records to demonstrate how communities balanced concepts of idleness and economy when choosing whether to prosecute youths, particularly young women, found living outside of compulsory service. Chapter 5 moves to rural Sweden (c. 1670–1730), where Cristina Prytz makes innovative use of biographical notes from parish registers to suggest that service could be a lifelong career that earned a deserving Christian reputation at death. Hanne Østhus is then the first author in this volume to really acknowledge the 'porous boundaries of the term "servant"' (p. 129). Investigating local and regional distinctions in service in early modern rural Norway, Østhus touches on the labour of foster children and conscripted soldiers. In the seventh chapter, Christine Fertig examines servants in eighteenth-century rural Germany to affirm a more conventional picture of unmarried youths entering service for a short period [End Page 231] as a way of gaining some financial, social, and geographical mobility, at least for young men. Following this, Jeremy Hayhoe takes a long view of servants in rural eastern France (c. 1700–1872), revealing a slight shift over time in the age and marriage status of servants in this region. In the ninth chapter, Carolina Uppenberg returns to Sweden during the Agrarian Revolution (c. 1750–1850) to rightly offer a more critical interpretation of service as a patriarchal institution, in which servants were socially and legally subordinate and vulnerable. In Chapter 10, Sarah Holland affirms the evolution and survival of service in rural Yorkshire over the nineteenth century. Interestingly, Holland contends that middle-class ideas of Christian morality played out in campaigns to end public hiring fairs, deemed demoralizing for servants, though they actually provided opportunity to barter for higher wages. In contrast, Richard Paping then finds a gradual decline in service in the Dutch countryside over the long nineteenth century, as alternative options arose for youths, including remaining at home. In the final chapter, Raffaella Sarti examines an array of quantitative data...