Accounting for Oneself: Worth, Status, and the Social Order in Early Modern England
Alexandra Shepard
Abstract
This book brings together an unprecedented volume of material to offer a fundamentally new account of the social order in early modern England. The book pieces together the language of self-description deployed by over 13,500 witnesses in English courts in response to questions designed to assess their creditworthiness. Spanning the period between 1550 and 1728, it is the first study of English society that fully incorporates women; that offers comprehensive coverage of the range of social groups from the gentry to the labouring poor and across the life cycle; and that represents regional vari ... More
This book brings together an unprecedented volume of material to offer a fundamentally new account of the social order in early modern England. The book pieces together the language of self-description deployed by over 13,500 witnesses in English courts in response to questions designed to assess their creditworthiness. Spanning the period between 1550 and 1728, it is the first study of English society that fully incorporates women; that offers comprehensive coverage of the range of social groups from the gentry to the labouring poor and across the life cycle; and that represents regional variation. The book sheds new light on the conceptualization of wealth and poverty by ordinary people in the early modern past; on the operation of credit in the early modern economy; on gendered divisions of labour and people’s working lives; and on the profound consequences of widening social inequality that redrew social relations and the calculus of esteem in England between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.
Keywords:
wealth,
poverty,
credit,
work,
social order,
gender,
life cycle,
self-description
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2015 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199600793 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2015 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199600793.001.0001 |
