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

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Michael J. Braddick, John Walter
Cambridge University Press, Aug 20, 2001 - History - 316 pages
"This book addresses the dynamics of power in early modern societies and 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." --From dust jacket.
 

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Contents

Grids of power order hierarchy and subordination in early modern society
1
Ordering the body illegitimacy and female authority in seventeenthcentury England Cowing
43
Child sexual abuse in early modern England
63
Sex social relations and the law in seventeenth and eighteenthcentury London
85
Exhortation and entitlement negotiating inequality in English rural communities 15501650
102
Public transcripts popular agency and the politics of subsistence in early modern England
123
Bragging and daring words honour property and the symbolism of the hunt in Stowe 15901642
149
Administrative performance the representation of political authority in early modern England
166
Negotiating order in early seventeenthcentury Ireland
188
Order orthodoxy and resistance the ambiguous legacy of English puritanism or just how moderate was Stephen Denison?
206
Making orthodoxy in late Restoration England the trials of Edmund Hickeringill 16621710
227
Notes
249
Index
306
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About the author (2001)

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).

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